… it got out of hand. The fella … the one that was in the White House after me never paid any attention to it, and it got out of hand. Why, they’ve got an organization over there in Virginia now that is practically the equal of the Pentagon in many ways. And I think I’ve told you, one Pentagon is one too many.
Now, as nearly as I can make out, those fellows in the CIA don’t just report on wars and the like, they go out and make their own, and there’s nobody to keep track of what they’re up to. They spend billions of dollars on stirring up trouble so they’ll have something to report on. They’ve become … it’s become a government all of its own and all secret. They don’t have to account to anybody.
That’s a very dangerous thing in a democratic society, and it’s got to be put a stop to. The people have got a right to know what those birds are up to. And if I was back in the White House, people would know. You see, the way a free government works, there’s got to be a housecleaning every now and again, and I don’t care what branch of the government is involved. Somebody has to keep an eye on things.
And when you can’t do any housecleaning because everything that goes on is a damn secret, why, then we’re on our way to something the Founding Fathers didn’t have in mind. Secrecy and a free, democratic government don’t mix. And if what happened at the Bay of Pigs doesn’t prove that, I don’t know what does. You have got to keep an eye on the military at all times, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s the birds in the Pentagon or the birds in the CIA.
Harry S. Truman, quoted by Jeff Deist, “Truman Was Right About the CIA”, Mises Wire, 2017-03-08.
September 23, 2019
QotD: Harry Truman’s second thoughts about the CIA
September 19, 2019
QotD: Parliament and democracy
In legal theory, the members of the Commons are representatives and they have the role that was enunciated in the famous letter to the electors of Bristol by Edmund Burke. “I owe you my discretion; I don’t merely owe you my vote.” That was nearly 250 years ago when there was no democracy and politics was run by a handful of families like the Marquess of Rockingham to whom he was the paid lackey (and by the way the electors of Bristol threw him out). There is a very vague relationship between Parliament and democracy. We have had Parliament for 800 years. We’ve had democracy for less than a century. And the great issue was: how do you reconcile the previous tradition of representative in a non-democratic Parliament with the position of delegate in a democratic Parliament. And the way it was dealt with — this is what all the fuss, all the things that we are talking about: Erskine May, A V Dicey, they all appear at a particular moment of time. They appear in the middle of the 1880s because it’s the 1884 reform act that introduces something like democracy.
But you see we’ve never worked out the relationship between the fact that we’ve got two sovereigns. There is the legal sovereign which is the Crown in Parliament and there is the real, political sovereign which is the sovereign people behind them. But what we did, and this is why Bercow’s behaviour is so disastrous; it’s why Theresa May’s behaviour has been so catastrophic: what we developed thanks to Erskine May and the Parliamentary Handbook and endorsed by Dicey, we developed a whole series of devices. They were conventions that turned MPs from more or less representatives into more or less delegates. And what are these things? They’re party affiliation. They are manifestos. They’re standing on a ticket and they’re being whipped when they’re in the house. That is the thing that binds them to the popular vote. No MP; Dominic Grieve was not elected in a personal capacity. He was elected because he stood as a Tory on a Tory manifesto which promised Brexit. That man did not dissent at the time. His claims to dignity, his claims to acting honourably, are totally false.
There are other rules in Erskine May about the procedures of Commons business which gives the government the basic control of the parliamentary timetable. Otherwise what happens is the house just dissolves into a talking shop. Becuase MPs have refused to vote for any deal: they’re strong in the negative but they’re hopelessly weak in the positive. They can’t agree on anything. We developed a series of conventions in the 1880s that turn MPs into something like the representatives of the people and what has systematically happened in this Parliament: we have broken those conventions.
Theresa May’s loss of the election and her absurd notion that you can keep people with completely contradictory opinions on a main platform of government policy in the same party broke down the whipping system. Bercow broke down the government’s control of legislation. And you’re left with this chaotic mess.
David Starkey talking to Brendan O’Neill on the Brendan O’Neill Show, 2019-09-15. (Transcription from The Great Realignment)
September 17, 2019
QotD: Rent-seeking
By the same token, the state’s personnel, seeing opportunities to sell favors, are just as likely to initiate the privilege-seeking process. In this sense, public choice scholars are right when they see the political arena as a series of exchanges. The big difference with the marketplace, however, is that in the political arena the largest group of people is forced to participate.
The bottom line on privilege-seeking, which should interest the left, is this: the people with the greatest access to power will not be those the left cares most about, but those who run Boeing and ExxonMobil and GE and Lockheed Martin. Wealth transfers will tend overwhelmingly to be upward.
Sheldon Richman, “TGIF: What the Left Should Like about Public Choice”, The Libertarian Institute, 2017-07-28.
September 10, 2019
We’ve noticed this too…
Sarah Hoyt on the increasing “green-ness” of her appliances — and the increasing uselessness of same:
“A-rated energy appliances” by Tom Raftery is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
For years we got expensive front loaders, and yet our clothes kept smelling, there were stains that would not come out, and these things seemed to last only 5 years, on the outside. And I knew it wasn’t our problem, as such, because at the same time we started noticing we couldn’t get our clothes clean, the detergent aisle of the supermarket sprouted an entire section of odor removing things, Febreeze got added to detergents, and, in general, people smelled odd …
Then the washer broke while we were also very, very broke (we were paying mortgage and rent in the run up to buying this. I saw an ad for, I THINK a $300 washer, and we went to look. What we found, instead, was a $200, not advertised washer. As we’re looking at it the saleswoman hurries over and tells us we don’t want it. This washer, she says, uses lots of water. For those who don’t know I suffer from an unusual form of eczema. While it’s triggered mostly by stress with a side of carbs, it can also, out of the blue, take offense at a slight trace of detergent left on the clothes. I’ve found that the eczema got markedly worse the less water the washer used. And it required me to run the washer three times, once with soap and two without to avoid major outbreaks. The idea of using lots and lots of water was great, so I was all excited. Which shocked the poor saleswoman halfway to death. I will point out, though, though that this washer washes well enough I can get away with only one extra rinse cycle and if I forget it it’s usually survivable. Also, our clothes don’t smell. Unfortunately, we’ve not found that [type] of washer any of the times we’ve walked through the appliance aisle, so I think that choice has been eliminated.
Certainly the choice of dishwashers that use “lots” (i.e. what they used 20 years ago) of water and electricity was never offered to us. And since we seemed to have really lousy luck with dishwashers, I found every time we replaced one over the last 20 years, they had less space for dishes (more insulation, to allow for less electricity) to the point that I needed to do 3 or even 4 loads for a family of four. I mean, I cook from scratch, but I really don’t use that much stuff. And it ran slower than before. Right now our dishwasher actually washes (a bonus) but it takes four hours to run a cycle. I rarely do more than one wash a day, though, because it’s just Dan and I, and we … well … the kids used a lot more glasses and little plates, and frankly meals get more complicated for four people.
All the same, there was a time there, for like 10 years, where we were running all this “green” approved stuff, and not only was I running the washer and drier more or less continuously, but to make things more “interesting” I was using MORE water and electricity, in the sense that I was running the appliances a ton more.
This of course is what I also found with the “low flush” toilets. We had them in our previous house, and we found that we spent an inordinate amount of time flushing the toilet. Also, since it took four or five flushes to do the job or one, the fact we were actually only using half the water per flush didn’t save any water. We spent instead twice to three times the amount of water the “high flush” toilets had spent.
All this, btw, to appease Paul Ehrlich — the prophet of wrong. As in, if he foresees something it will be wrong — and his ridiculous idea we’d run out of potable water in 1978. Apparently none of these people have noticed that 1978 has come and gone with no problems. And as for electricity, if they stop their idiocy about nuclear, it’s not even a consideration. (And no, Chernobyl isn’t a caution about nuclear energy. It’s a caution about stupid communist regimes. They can’t run anything — not even a nuclear plant — without destroying it.)
Lightbulbs are another favourite … several years back, our provincial government was pushing us all to get rid of our old incandescent bulbs and replace them with these great new energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs. The new CFLs cost roughly ten times as much as the old bulbs, but we were assured up and down that they’d last twenty times longer, so we’d not only save money on electricity, but also have to replace the bulbs so infrequently. Of course, the CFL bulbs were pathetically bad — not only were they expensive, the light they gave was (at best) marginal and they didn’t even last as long as typical incandescent bulbs.
So now, of course, we’re being encouraged to use LED bulbs. Sure, they’re more expensive than the old incandescent bulbs, but they save on electricity and last many times longer! Except, of course, they don’t. The old incandescent bulbs in my office started to fail one after another, so when I was down to only one working bulb, I gave in and bought four replacement LED bulbs … they were on sale for only 2-3 times as much as the old bulbs! That was in March. I’ve already had to replace two of the LED bulbs. This is starting to feel familiar…
On the bright side (pun unintentional), the LED bulbs don’t provide the entertainment of a toxic waste cleanup in your home the way the CFL bulbs did when they were broken.
September 8, 2019
Boris may have a viable escape hatch after all
It could not only untangle the current mess in Parliament but have the almost equally attractive feature of sending his opponents into paroxysms of rage:
“Palace of Westminster”by michaelhenley is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
The consensus is that the Government is trapped in an iron vice that will now be tightened till it cracks. The truth, however, is that this vice is less of iron than of hot air.
The Civil Contingencies Act 2004 is a constitutional outrage. It allows a government to declare an emergency, and then to rule by decree. It should never have been made. But it was made; and it can now be used as an instrument of liberation.
The Act defines “emergency” as just about anything the authorities may dislike. One possible definition is “an event or situation which threatens serious damage to human welfare in a place in the United Kingdom.” (s.1(1)) This sounds a promising excuse. It seems to cover what the Opposition claims would be the effect of a No-Deal Brexit.
Triggering the Act requires no more than “a senior Minister of the Crown” – that is, Boris Johnson – to announce an Emergency. This done, he can make, alter or suspend almost any law he likes. (s.22) He can do this for a period of thirty days. (s.26) All he has to do is preface his decree with a statement that he “is satisfied that the regulations contain only provision which is appropriate for the purpose of preventing, controlling or mitigating an aspect or effect of the emergency in respect of which the regulations are made.” (s.20(5)(b)(ii))
He cannot change the Act itself, or the Human Rights Act. He cannot set up concentration camps for his opponents, or put them before a firing squad. But the Fixed Term Parliament Act is fair game. He could suspend that. Then he could dissolve Parliament in the traditional way.
He must, “as soon as is reasonably practicable,” lay his decrees before Parliament. (s.27(1)(a)) No doubt, the Parliament we have would punish him with an Act of Attainder. But this Parliament would no sooner reassemble after the prorogation than it would be dissolved. The Speaker would barely have time to open his mouth. Assuming the general election went as hoped, the next Parliament would not be inclined to dispute the circumstances of its birth.
All the opposition parties would go screaming mad. But, as said, we are not talking about concentration camps and firing squads. The only use of the Emergency would be to give a voice to the people. Who could legitimately deny that? As for sharp practice in general, the opposition parties have spent this year turning the Constitution upside down. Who could complain if the Government now joined in the fun?
September 7, 2019
Mark Steyn – “So the Remainer leaves, putting a question mark over whether the Leaver can remain”
Despite the lovely scenery outside his cabin window … I guess that should be “porthole” … Mark Steyn still finds time to comment on the circus at Westminster:
“Palace of Westminster”by michaelhenley is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Greetings from the Mark Steyn Cruise, currently sailing the beautiful Inside Passage of Alaska. Across the continent and an ocean, Westminster continues to be roiled by Brexiteers and Remoaners locked, like the latter seasons of Dynasty, locked in ever more demented plot twists. Today Her Majesty’s Government suffered its first resignation since Boris Johnson took over as Prime Minister. The Minister for Universities and Science quit, and is leaving Parliament. His name is Jo Johnson. Any relation? Why, yes. He’s Boris’ brother. In the normal course of events, no normal person knows who the Minister for Universities is, or indeed that such a post exists, or, if aware of this grand office, what the chap who holds it does all day long: He ain’t a heavy, he’s his brother — that’s all. But the junior Johnson, a Remainer, has walked out on the senior Johnson, a Leaver, so it’s the biggest thing since Cain fired his Secretary of State for Sheep-Herding. Boris was his brother’s keeper, but he couldn’t keep him. So the Remainer leaves, putting a question mark over whether the Leaver can remain.
~All sides are throwing around media accusations of “constitutional outrage”, ever since Boris got the Queen to prorogue Parliament and was instantly ungraded from PM to Caudillo of the new dictatorship. I am more sympathetic to the charges against his opponents: Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, has been claiming for months to want a general election. Indeed, there is no reason not to have one. On Tuesday the Prime Minister formally lost his majority, when some Tory nobody I’d never heard of crossed the floor and became a Liberal. So Boris and his team cannot govern. Indeed, even their minority is shrinking by the hour, as he removes the whip, expels and deselects those who vote against him on Brexit.
And yet Corbyn voted down Boris’ motion for a general election — because the Opposition Leader is determined to force the Government to enact not its own but the Opposition’s policy, by making Boris go to Brussels, grovel, and beg for another extension of Britain’s zombie membership in the European Union. To put it in American terms, the legislative branch wants to maintain the executive branch in power purely as its dead-eyed sock puppet. That is certainly a constitutional abomination, and, cautious as she is in such matters, I have no doubt the Queen regards it as such.
~Why is Corbyn doing this? Isn’t an Opposition Leader supposed to bring down the Prime Minister so he can force an election and replace the bloke? Yes, but Corbyn would lose that election, and Boris would likely win. The guff about the will of Parliament and the people’s representatives obscures the reality — that this situation exists because of the ever wider chasm between the people and their representatives, between a citizenry that voted to leave the European Union and the fanatically Remainer Liberal Democrats, openly Remainer Celtic nationalists, covertly Remainer Labour Opposition, and semi-Remainer Tory backbench all determined to subvert the will of the people. You can dress that up in all kinds of parliamentary flimflam, but, when politicians who’ve been bleating about a “people’s vote” for over a year refuse to let the people vote, you know these tribunes of the masses have gone rogue and left the masses far behind.
September 5, 2019
The “Stop the Coup” movement and the chances for a British general election
Brendan O’Neill on the recent political upheavals in the Mother of Parliaments as Boris Johnson lost his parliamentary majority and the “Stop the Coup” activists celebrate by backing away from the election they claimed they wanted all along:
“Palace of Westminster”by michaelhenley is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
The ridiculousness of the “Stop the Coup” movement is now starkly exposed. For the past week a few thousand members of the obsessively anti-Brexit urban elites have taken to the streets to accuse Boris Johnson of behaving like a dictator by suspending parliament for a few more days than is normal. “It’s a coup d’état!”, they hysterically cry. And yet now our supposed dictator, the author of this foul, anti-democratic coup, is offering people a General Election, and how have the “Stop the Coup” saps responded? By saying they don’t want one.
What a momentous self-own. They have literally traipsed through the streets saying “Britain is a dictatorship” and “Boris has stolen our democracy”. Now, Boris hasn’t only disproven this claptrap (dictators don’t usually suggest holding an election). He has also helped to expose the fact that if anyone is agitated and even disgusted by the idea of democracy right now, it isn’t the imaginary jackbooted generals of Downing Street – it’s the pseudo-democratic Remainer elite.
All of them are running scared from the idea of a General Election. Labour has made clear that it will not be backing the call for an election, at least not until No Deal Brexit has been legally taken off the table. “We are not going to dance to Boris Johnson’s tune”, said Labour’s shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer this morning when asked if the party would back Boris’s General Election proposal in parliament later today. An election on Boris’s terms would be a “trap” for Labour, he said.
Jo Swinson, leader of the Lib Dems, is against an election too. And her justification is very revealing indeed. In the Commons she said “It is vital that this House acts with responsibility and does not tip our country into an election at a point when there is any risk that we will crash out of the European Union during that election campaign or immediately after.” With added emphasis she declared: “We must act responsibly.”
… but not democratically. After all, elected MPs know far better what’s good for the country than the majority of Britons who voted in favour of Brexit.
September 2, 2019
The economics of climate change policies
Tim Worstall explains the economic implications for the various demands that we consume less in order to fight climate change:
A major contention from economists is that if we decide to fight global heating in the wrong manner then we’ll make ourselves poorer than we need be. A major contention from the same economists is that if we don’t fight global heating at all then we’ll make ourselves poorer than we need be. That being the economic point about all of this, we must fight global heating in the correct manner.
The correct manner not being vast plans by bureaucracies. Instead, change market prices with the one intervention – a crowbar into the system just the once with a carbon tax – and then let the economy itself chew through the implications of that.
Do note that the argument is not “poorer than we are now”, it’s poorer in the future than we need to be in that future.
And then we’ve got the varied Green, New Deal, unsoaped hippies and socialist idiots whose demand is rather different. They are insisting that we must be poorer, now, than we are, now. These people really do have to be told to bugger off:
A sustainable environment means consuming less, not differently.
The only useful measure of how rich you are is “What are you able to consume?” Insisting that you consume less is therefore insisting upon being poorer.
It’s also entirely wrong that consuming differently won’t make a difference. Because again those economists. The thing we consume is value. That’s also the thing that we produce. That Gross Domestic Product, GDP, that is so bewailed as a societal target is nothing but the value added in the economy. GNP is the value which accrues to the people in the economy. NNI is the net value that goes as income to those in the economy. And so on through the different possible combinations of net and gross, national and domestic, production and income.
They’re all measures of value added. Not of resources consumed at all. So, if we face resource constraints all we need to do is change the value we’re producing by using fewer of those scarce resources to do so. Then we can carry on consuming ever greater quantities of value that we’ve gone and created. This must obviously be so – we do quite obviously face resource constraints currently. All economic resources are scarce, that’s what makes them economic resources in the first place, their scarcity. We don’t actually have an economics of atmospheric nitrogen because it’s not scarce. We do have an economics of soil nitrogen because it is scarce. The conversion of one to the other comes at a price – many prices in fact. The conversion itself, the algal blooms from having done so and so on. But the doing also adds value – which is then what humans consume, the value added.
So, the idea that consuming differently won’t make a difference is dribble. Plus, the idea that we must all be poorer in order to sustain that environment is drivel. Simple observation tells us that places with poor people have worse environments than places with rich.
August 30, 2019
EFF sues Homeland Security over illegal GPS vehicle trackers
Kieren McCarthy on a recent lawsuit by the Electronic Frontiers Foundation:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has sued the US Department of Homeland Security to find out more about a program where, it is claimed, officers secretly stick GPS trackers on vehicles they are suspicious of as they come through the border.
The EFF has made repeated freedom of information act (FoIA) requests about the program’s policies but has been stonewalled, with Homeland Security’s responses claiming any information would contain “sensitive information” that could lead to “circumvention of the law.”
The foundation’s main concern is that Homeland Security is carrying out its secret tracking without a warrant, or even anything beyond a single officer’s suspicion. And it points to a recent US Supreme Court decision where it ruled that warrantless GPS tracking was unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.
Details of the program came to light last year when customs officers revealed in court filings that they had used GPS trackers without a warrant at the border. Since then the EFF has tried to find out what the policies and procedures are for deciding when a vehicle can be tagged. The relevant authorities have not been keen to go into any detail.
There’s another legal precedent too: a California court ruled that government officials’ use of GPS devices to track two suspected drug dealers without getting a warrant violated the Supreme Court decision, made in 2012, and was government misconduct.
August 29, 2019
“‘Neo-liberalism’ is actually little more than … ‘market socialism'”
Peter Boettke responds to a New York Times opinion piece by Binyamin Appelbaum, blaming economists for the state of the western world:
A Mises Institute graphic of some of the key economists in the Austrian tradition (Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
Mises Institute via Wikimedia Commons.
But the problem is deeper than economists, it is ANYBODY put in this position of power and prestige, and to do so is fundamentally anti-democratic as was argued by Frank Knight in various writings, and then by Vincent Ostrom in The Intellectual Crisis of American Public Administration, and more recently in David Levy and Sandra Peart’s Escape from Democracy. We cannot fix this problem by replacing one set of “experts” with another set. We have to stop thinking of the relationship between economics and public administration along these lines altogether.
I try to lay out the argument in my SEA address on “Economics and Public Administration“, which also served as an attempt to summarize two decades of research that several of us have undertaken in this spirit. The critical argument in that text for this issue is that I argue that economics is a derived demand, if we conceive of the task of public administration one way, that will shape not only shape the supply and demand of economists, but dictate what it means to produce an economist — and thus, what is means to be an economist.
The problem with narratives like Appelbaum’s isn’t that he is suspicious of the pretensions of economists, it is that he is blaming the wrong culprit for the mess we’re in. Here it is important that everyone of these critics read Gregory Mankiw’s very important piece, published BEFORE the financial crisis, on the macroeconomist as scientists (read Chicago New Classical and Monetarists) and the macroeconomists as engineers (read MIT/Harvard Keynesian and New Keynesians). The Chicago folks — and the Austrian, Virginia, UCLA, etc. folks — did not go to DC, did not write laws, didn’t attempt to orchestrate economic miracles abroad, or stimulate growth at home. They taught, they lectured, the researched and wrote papers in journals and published books, and a subset of them wrote opinion editorials and did interviews in various forms of popular media. In short, they were teachers and students of society. They did not get paid to be experts for the government in general. They were not advisors. But others were — from Keynes to Larry Summers — the line is long. Just look at the number of central bankers that were PhD students under Stan Fischer at MIT. Can you trace that same lineage to Milton Friedman? How about to F. A. Hayek? Mises? Right, I didn’t think so.
“Neo-liberalism” is actually little more than an effort to bring neoclassical models of efficiency into the operation of governmental agencies — that in another era was called “market socialism” — just look at Abba Lerner’s The Economics of Control. He actually thought he had found the right way to combine socialist aspirations with the teachings of economics so he could ensure microeconomic efficiency and macroeconomic stability and provide economists with the tools to successfully steer the economic ship. That basic idea from mid-20th century to today has never disappeared in those halls of power — what has appeared is a waffling between liberal (in the American sense) Keynesianism, and conservative Keynesianism, but Keynesianism exists throughout. The Samuelsonian Neo-classical synthesis achieved the status he hoped for it … and provides the meaning behind his statement in the teachers manual “I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws … if I can write its economics textbooks.” Samuelson knew that if he could wrest control of the tacit presuppositions of public policy functionaries, then there thoughts and actions would be guided by what he taught about market failure, macroeconomic instability, and government as a corrective to our economic woes. It’s an amazing achievement what he did. For at least a generation, perhaps two, he controlled both the introduction to economics market, and the advanced training of PhD students in economics market.
Thinkers rose up in opposition to this hegemony from the older generation such as Knight, Mises and Hayek, but also among his contemporaries such as Alchian, Coase and Friedman, and of course a younger generation such as Becker and Lucas, but also Demsetz, Kirzner, etc. But, look at those names … they did not go to Washington DC to work for domestic policy agencies or the international agencies in economic policy. They were content in their jobs as economic scholars/teachers. They were humble students of society, and some among them rose to the status of social critics and intellectuals. But again none were master manipulators of the organs of power to try to shape the economy into the image of their ideal.
August 26, 2019
Australian fertilizer run-off and the (remains of the) Great Barrier Reef
The Great Barrier Reef used to be one of the natural wonders of the world, but as we were told about ten years ago, unless Australians gave up fossil fuels (or was it electricity?), the reef had bare months to survive. As we’re years past that inflexible deadline, we have to assume that the reef is now dead, dead, dead. Yet there are apparently still state or federal regulations in place to protect the (former) reef that Australian farmers are struggling against:
Great Barrier Reef by James_W_Thompson
“IMG_5035-1” by James_W_Thompson is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Our man in Tolga (north Queensland) has written to the local press on the absurd green tape tying up farmers.
QUOTE
The ever-tightening regulatory stranglehold on farmers by governments “for the health of the Reef” (The Express, 21/8) is based on what Professor Peter Ridd has called “faulty science”.Fertilisers are expensive and they aren’t used wastefully. They’re plant food; if the crops don’t consume them then the neighbouring vegetation, on land or in waterways, will – long before they get to the Reef.
If fertilisers were running off farms there’d be big green plumes leading downhill from them, easily visible on Google Earth. There aren’t. Likewise with herbicides and pesticides, there’d be big plumes of dead flora or fauna visible to drones. Again; there aren’t. It may have happened in the past, but these aren’t current problems.
Terrestrial silt run-off is a different matter to fertilisers and herbicides/pesticides. It has been pluming out from rivers since time began. The coastal reefs have always experienced it.
Just 15,000 years ago during the last ice-age the seas were 120 metres lower, the Reef’s current site was a coastal plain, and the Reef clung to the edge of the continental shelf. Everything that came out of the rivers washed over the whole Reef. And, yes, there was a lot of silt during the ice-age. CO2 was much lower due to the cooler seas (Henry’s Law), so plants were sparser. It was colder and drier so there was less rain to water what plants there were.
Aboriginal tribes were doing it tough, so they used firestick farming to get what small game there was. That left a lot of bare earth which blew as dust into valleys and was washed out to sea when the rains did come.
But it’s different now. Much of the main Reef area is 40 to 70 kilometres out to sea, and as Professor Ridd said, the prevailing south-easterly wind and currents keep terrestrial run-off much closer to shore. Professor Ridd also notes that more clean ocean water flows through the Reef each day than flows from our rivers each year.
Nonetheless, the mud-meme is being heavily promoted at present; “Earlier this year, a muddy plume of polluted water hit our Reef. It was so big you could see it from space.” Search the internet for “Muddy plume extends to Great Barrier Reef images from space” and there’s several alarmist websites (including “our” ABC) showing just one obviously-modified image.
August 25, 2019
QotD: Bipartisan authoritarianism
Some Democrats want to double down on their party’s shameful Drug War history. Massachusetts Rep. Stephan Hay [D-Fitchfield] has introduced House Bill 1266, which treats the existence of “a hidden compartment” in a vehicle as “prima facie evidence that the conveyance was used intended for use in and for the business of unlawfully manufacturing, dispensing, or distributing controlled substances.”
This means that if a cop stops you and finds no drugs or other contraband, but decides that part of your car is a “hidden compartment,” that cop can subject your car to civil asset forfeiture — that is, they can steal it, and force you to sue them to get it back.
The role of the Democratic Party is often to take the Republicans’ stupidest, red-meat-for-the-base policies, sloppily designed and doomed to collapse under their own weight, and operationalize them, putting them on the kind of sound bureaucratic footing that they need to have real staying power. Exhibit A is the drug war, but see also Obama’s perfection of GWB’s mess of a mass-surveillance apparatus, turning it into an immortal and pluripotent weapon that Donald Trump now gets to wield.
Cory Doctorow, “Proposed Massachusetts law would let cops steal your car if it had a ‘hidden compartment'”, Boing Boing, 2017-07-16.
August 21, 2019
British-EU negotiations under Boris Johnson
In a speech to Slovak journalists, Sean Gabb outlines what he expects the British government to be doing about Brexit now that May has been put out to pasture and Boris Johnson is in charge:
Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his first Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, 25 July 2019.
Official photograph via Wikimedia Commons.
Here, I come to a digression on the nature of how Britain is governed. My country is not particularly democratic. At the same time, there is no cabal of evil persons directing all events and appointments from behind the scenes. This is generally not how ruling classes operate. A more realistic model can be taken from Ian Kershaw’s analysis of the National Socialist revolution in Germany. This proceeded with limited central direction. Before 1939, the leaders were concerned mostly with foreign policy, after that with fighting a big war. Instead, the revolution was decentralised. Reliable men were put in key positions and told to “work towards the Fuhrer” – that is, to act in any situation as they might imagine Hitler himself would act. The result was often administrative chaos. The benefit was that the leadership could concentrate on what it saw as the essentials, and more local knowledge could be used in the overall revolution than would otherwise have been possible.
This is largely how things work in Britain. Our own Transformation is not driven by detailed orders from the Shadowy-Ones-on-High, but by creating a bias within every useful institution to those who are broadly in favour of the Transformation. The benefit is a constrained diversity of approaches that can be presented as a genuine diversity of opinion. The disadvantage is that executive power lies in this country where it has since 1701 – that is, in the hands of the Ministers of the Crown, who are accountable to the House of Commons. If the Prime Minister turns out to be a fool, and the other ministers are too cowardly to stab him in the back, there is no easy way to remove him.
I come at last to the Brexit strategy of the new Government. These people are not right-wing extremists who can eventually be forced to give in. Just like Theresa May, they see Brexit as a problem that needs to be solved. If they could wave a magic wand, they would roll back the calendar to 2016 and make sure that Remain won the Referendum. Or they would roll it back a little farther and make sure the Referendum was not called that year, or at all. But they cannot. Instead, they have to deal with the effects of leaving a political fool in charge for three years of the Brexit process.
Theresa May had one job after 2016. This was to produce the minimal departure I have mentioned. Instead, she negotiated a Withdrawal Agreement that caused a storm of outrage among the English. The details of what this Withdrawal Agreement contained are, again, unimportant. What does matter is that the Withdrawal Agreement was published in English on the European Commission website, and millions of us read its 585 pages. We may not have been that interested in the details of our membership. But the details of our “withdrawal” were unacceptable. She tried three times to force it through the House of Commons. Each time, a majority of some very trashy people were terrified to be seen supporting it. Anyone else less stupid would have tried something else. Instead, Theresa May treated us with open contempt. Whether or not we really cared about it, we had been asked if we wanted to remain in the European Union. Having voted “No!” we expected some show of respect for our clear instructions. We did not welcome a Brexit-in-Name-only.
At first, the damage was confined to the possibility of a Labour Government. Then, with the rise of the Brexit Party, the system as a whole moved towards a crisis of legitimacy. The European elections of the month before last were seen as the second Referendum the Remainers had demanded. It was won by the Leavers. The Conservative were crushed. Labour was humiliated. It seemed that a general election would, for the first time, produce a bloc in the House of Commons of Members opposed not only to the peripheral issue of the European Union, but also to the Transformation.
So Theresa May had to go, and she was replaced by Boris Johnson. His own inclination, I have no doubt, is to get a few cosmetic changes to the existing Withdrawal Agreement, and then tell us he is a diplomatic genius. His problem is that this will no longer do. Theresa May has left too much poison in those waters. Brexit must now be more meaningful than was at first projected. Last week, there was an election in Wales to fill a vacancy in the House of Commons – a bye-election. This should have been won by the Conservatives. Instead, the Brexit Party took enough Conservative votes to give the seat to one of the opposition parties – not the Labour Party, which did badly. The political arithmetic is that anything less than a No-Deal Brexit or a diplomatic triumph will mean a collapse of the Conservative vote at the next general election. And this will not mean a Labour Government, but political chaos and a crisis of legitimacy.
In a post at the Continental Telegraph, Alex Noble shows the quite different political trajectories of Change UK (or whatever they’re calling themselves this week) and the Brexit Party:
[Simon Jenkins in the Guardian claims that] the majority of Britain want to stay in the EU.
Is he right?
Well, the recent defectors from the main parties clearly believed he was – Chuka Umunna, Anna Soubry et al abandoned their positions to form the CUKs and provide the disenfranchised British masses with the staunch Remainer party they had all been failing to demand for so long.
They came out of the blocks fast, called in favours with journalists to get favourable press coverage, and burst upon the political consciousness of Great Britain like a glitter-filled Zeppelin of cross-party europhilia.
And then … oh the humanity.
Whereas Brexit geezer Nigel Farage sauntered out of the blocks under withering crossfire from the establishment and its pet churnalists, and immediately went hypersonic – from 0% to 20% before the establishment pollsters could unlimber their clipboards and stutter their leading questions.
Up and down the country, the British voter was encouraged to overlook the Brexit Party by an establishment still traumatised by the referendum, with pollsters snidely relegating the party to the column entitled “Other” during their obfuscatory enquiries.
And the British voter seized them by the lapels and yanked them into a ferocious Brexit headbutt.
The desperate EU stooges in the Tory party, realising their puppet Treason May was fatally wounded, threw her under the bus and began their Stop Boris campaign, but all the manufactured scandalettes failed to prevent the Johnson Juggernaut from roiling over them and into Downing Street.
For now, the Brexit Party have stalled on 20% – they hold their position now like a lioness crouched in the long grass, waiting for Boris Johnson to reveal the slightest Remainer tendencies. And if he does, the catastrophic injuries he and his party will suffer will make Theresa May’s mauling look like the amuse bouche at the Marquis de Sade’s final soundproofed basement party.
August 20, 2019
Jonathan Kay listened to the whole SNC-Lavalin report so you don’t have to…
Update: Apparently the Thread Reader App only picked up the first couple of entries (it worked fine when I queued it up for publication yesterday). Here’s the text version:
I just listened to the entire ethics commissioner’s report on the SNC-Lavalin scandal while driving back from Maine. I loaded up the text in my VoiceAloud app, hit play, and the audio kept me going for 3 hours, all the way into central New York State, along the I-90….
As with any narrative, you begin to identify with certain characters. In my case, it was @Puglaas. I found it especially maddening the way everyone around her kept babbling about finding a “solution,” which was their settled euphemism for bullying her into helping SNC…
The level of condescension exhibited by everyone in and around the PMO toward @Puglaas was breathtaking. These Liberal dudes always kept pretending that they just wanted to make sure she had enough “information,” as if she were a law student, not the AG of a G7 nation …
At the same time, it was breathtaking the way SNC Lavalin was essentially able to turn the entire PMO, and major ministries, into its personal lobbying operation. Texts, emails, calls, in-person visits… it was like SNC-Lavalin had Trudeau’s PMO on retainer, like a law firm ….
I hadn’t realized SNC was able to mobilize, or attempted to mobilize, not one, not two, but THREE former SC of Canada justices on its behalf. This is the sort of blurring between corporate & govt operations that u expect in banana republics (or in the Irvings’ New Brunswick)…
The fact trudeau & those around him still pretend this is about “jobs” is…I don’t even know the word for it. The ethics comm essentially called it a lie. This was about partisan politics. How can JT say he “accepts” the report without coming to terms with this core finding?
When this scandal & election is done, we need an inquiry that gets to the bottom of the larger issue here: how a single quebec corp, one heavily impugned by its own action, was able to essential create legislation to help itself, got trudeau to ram it thru on a budget omnibus…
And then spent weeks pulling every lever in ottawa to try to override our constitutional system of govt so they could get off the hook for alleged crimes, culminating in the actual reconstitution of cabinet. SNC turned our govt into a joke. And trudeau still sez it’s about “jobs”
If yr attitude is that u dont want to educate yourself about this scandal, bcuz the only thing that matters is hating @AndrewScheer (an attitude some ppl have candidly expressed) pls reconsider. Even if u vote Liberal, the scandal exposed problems in our system that need fixing
Conservative governments have no doubt been equally solicitous to big well-connected firms. Leftists *especially*, the same ones dismissing this scandal bcuz it interferes with their elxn narrative, should be horrified that corporations are treating @Bill_Morneau & PMO as puppets
The fact that all of these Libs can bleat “jobz jobz jobz” with a straight face isnt just a symptom of the amoral cynicism of politics (tho it is that). It reflect the fact that we canadians expect that big corps will get coddled like this. We need to end it
If youre @AndrewScheer or @theJagmeetSingh, it’s fine to rake the Libs over the coals for lying to us. But all politicians lie. Tell us how you’d fix the system structurally to ensure that the PMO isn’t acting as a pro bono hanger-on to a major corporation
And if you’re a progressive activist of a certain age, go back & look at all the things @NaomiAKlein @Sheila_Copps Judie Rebick etc warned us about during the free trade battles…corporations dictating terms to elected govts. Well, guess what ? That’s what’s on display here…
In fact, one of the most tragicomic subplots here is the Libs running around in full panic bcuz SNC was about to have a board meeting the next day… Yes, that’s right: Trudeau’s PMO prioritized important legal decisions on the basis of some company’s board meeting.
Because Jobz.What’s more, the full-court press on @Puglaas in the shadow of these meetings was itself based on another lie: Libs knew SNC HQ couldnt abandon quebec (till 2024) bcuz of representations made to Caisse in regard to purchase of a UK sub. Bullshit layered on bullshit
#BecauseJobzI keep coming back to @Puglaas, & how she must have felt. How many cdns have been in a job where yr boss & his minions tried to pressure u to find an unethical “solution,” to help the boss keep his own job? then when u did what was right, u get turfed 4 not being a “team player”
This isnt just about Trudeau. One galling episode described is a meeting in which @Bill_Morneau pontificates to @Puglaas about how she doesnt have enuf “information” about econ effects of possible SNC crim conviction. @Puglaas asks Morneau if he’s done a study on it. Answer: no.
We talk a lot about toxic workplaces for women. hard not to see how the dudes who Trudeau assigned to push @Puglaas around on this file aren’t guilty of this. Their strategy was to make her feel ignorant bcuz she did the right thing. The PMO gaslit their own justice minister
There are several female Liberal MPs whom I have come to know and respect, such as @juliedabrusin @cafreeland @JulieDzerowicz. It is mortifying to watch them being forced to line up in defence of this.
As for SNC itself, I don’t really blame it for doing what it did. If u were running a company and knew you could dictate terms to a govt, why not? The lesson to other CEOs would be that if youre accused of a crime, just threaten to lay ppl off and move your HQ. Problem solved.
final note…u can see y the Libs are going hard with demagoguery about @AndrewScheer being white supremacist-adjacent. A traditional leftist claim was that Tories would sell out to corporate interests. That’s a hard claim for Libs to make now. bcuz the Libs have already done it
It’s been a day since I wrote this thread, & some commenters are saying the SNC scandal shows Trudeau & the Libs are unscrupulous people. But I dont think that’s it. I have met some of these protagonists, and have found them to be *more* public-minded than the average citizen…
As noted in a response to @staceylnewman, the problem is that politics changes ppl. There’s a chilling quote in the report, from a meeting, where a Lib says to @Puglaas (paraphrasing here) “It doesn’t matter how great our policies are. We need to get re-elected to implement them”
To me, that sums everything up: The means justifies the ends, bcuz the ends (the “good” side wins power, & the “bad” side loses) are taken to have existential importance. That’s the myth that leads all politicians astray. If JT just admitted this, I bet many would forgive him
August 19, 2019
UBI: threat or menace?
At Samizdata, Samizdata Illuminatus outlines the arguments for some form of Universal Basic Income (UBI) or Negative Income Tax (NIT) and argues that it’s a terrible idea that should not be implemented anywhere:
Cartoon that appeared with Michael K. Spencer’s article “Is Universal Basic Income really a solution?” at https://medium.com/@Michael_Spencer/is-universal-basic-income-really-a-solution-c0d6d95f100e
For those that are not familiar with the term, UBI (Universal Basic Income) means, roughly, “the government should guarantee everyone some minimum level of income whether they work or not”.
The notion began simply enough. Some economists observed that there are a myriad of intersecting government programs for the poor (in many countries, dozens) which distort behaviour in horrible ways and which cost a fortune in overhead to administer. This is where the problem of UBI begins, in the hubris of the armchair philosopher. “What if”, these economists asked, “we can’t get rid of the dole entirely (even though that would be better) but we could at least make it efficient by replacing the entire morass with a single program, say a negative income tax?”
Trained to explore ideas (no matter how bad) for a living, said academic economists then vigorously explored this impossible hypothetical world in which they could not get rid of the dole but could somehow get politicians to perfectly implement their hypothetical improved alternative, and proceeded to write lots of papers about it.
Again, this academic musing was already a utopian impossibility, for in the real world, there are interests that would act to block the elimination of existing welfare schemes and insist that the new scheme be added to the current ones rather than replacing them. This sort of thing is routine, of course; originally, VAT schemes were thought of by academic economists as a less distorting replacement for income taxes but ended up added in addition.
The interest groups arrayed against replacement of existing welfare schemes range from the bureaucrats whose job it is to administer said schemes (and who for whom “efficiency” means unemployment), to the vast range of contractors employed in providing benefits of one sort or another, to the politicians who get votes and power in exchange for largesse paid for with other people’s money, to the current recipients of existing benefit schemes who will correctly reason that the notion behind “efficiency” is not to increase their benefits. There’s no advantage in replacement for any member of the existing system, and thus, it was a non-starter to begin with.
This did not, however, prevent many people from falling in love with the idea, as wouldn’t-it-be-ever-so-elegant-if-it-could-happen so often trumps this-is-reality in the minds of those saying “what if” over a pint or seven late in the evening at the pub next to the economics department offices.
Oh, and of course, a form of the negative income tax was created in the United States under the name of the “earned income tax credit”; as might have been predicted in advance, it was added to existing welfare programs rather than in any way replacing them.
From this simple yet benighted beginning as a completely unrealistic thought experiment, the idea of UBI gained traction and then, as most cancers do, developed a mutant and even more virulent cell line, one that allowed it to spread and grow in the minds not only of leftists (who are already inclined towards redistribution of all sorts) but those on the right who are inclined to view ordinary people as useless.
We are now informed that UBI is a solution to a different problem as well. We are informed, in not-so-hushed tones, that the rise of new technologies like Artificial Intelligence will soon automate away most jobs, resulting in a vast class of people who will be unemployable in any trade whatsoever, which will consequently lead to mass unemployment, and that said permanently unemployable people will starve to death if we don’t find ways to provide them with income.
We are told we thus must guarantee a minimum income for all, without regard to whether they are capable of earning a living on their own, or we’ll have riots on our hands once AI based systems become ubiquitous. They claim that we should, nay, must, promise everyone some minimal subsistence income, whether they work or not. This will provide the masses with the ability to survive, and thus society will be preserved.
