Quotulatiousness

February 14, 2020

The reaction to the Mohawk blockade near Belleville shows that VIA Rail isn’t a serious company

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

Mohawk protesters began blocking the main CN and VIA line between Toronto and Montreal near Belleville nearly a week ago. The police, having learned so often that the government and the courts won’t back them up, did little to try to get the blockade lifted other than to prevent active confrontations with the First Nations activists. Canadian National announced that they were being forced to park trains all over Eastern Canada as a result of the blockade and that deliveries of goods would be snarled for quite some time even after service is allowed to resume. VIA rail, on the other hand, seems to care not a bit about the thousands of travellers who have been stranded mid-journey and made no apparent efforts to bring in buses or any other arrangements. Chris Selley says this proves that VIA is not an essential service even in their own minds:

“The 6424” by Stephen Downes is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Of all the bad news to befall VIA Rail this week, with the cancellation of all its trains between Toronto and Ottawa and Toronto and Montreal — that’s roughly 50 per cent of its ridership and 60 per cent of its revenues — the worst news might be just how little news it has made. Mostly, the Mohawk blockade of the CN main line near Belleville, Ont., has been treated as a side story to the anti-pipeline protests and arrests in the British Columbia interior.

That’s what it is in the grand scheme of things: The battle between Wet’suwet’en members and chiefs and the federal government speaks to much larger, existential questions about the future of the Canadian economy, about the Liberal government’s reconciliation agenda, about the very nature of the Canadian federation and the rule of law. This blockade, launched in the name of solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en, just means people have to take the bus, or fly, instead of the train.

But that’s no small inconvenience, no small expense. Canadians in general are not quick to anger, but very few of the VIA refugees interviewed by various news outlets sounded even slightly furious, which they had every right to be. When protesters from the same First Nation blockaded the same set of tracks six years ago, VIA properly exhibited some concern with getting their customers to their destinations and put on replacement buses.

This time around, no buses. No suggestions. No response to media inquiries asking why there are no buses. Just a cancellation notice on the website and a fare-thee-well. At a time when VIA is seeking untold billions from the federal government to build a new Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal route and run vastly more trains, this does not bespeak a company that takes itself very seriously.

[…]

And never mind VIA, what sort of country lets a few people close down a key piece of national infrastructure, in violation of a court injunction — not for an hour or a day, but literally indefinitely? For a time it wasn’t even clear whose job it was to enforce the injunction: On Sunday an Ontario Provincial Police spokesperson told Global News it was up to the CN Police Service. On Tuesday, a CN spokesperson told the National Post it was up to the OPP, and indeed, late Tuesday OPP officers warned protesters to leave or they would be forced out. Perhaps the threat of massive economic disruption finally lit a fire under them: earlier in the day, CN had said it was considering shutting down huge parts of its freight network across the country. Had it just been rail passengers, though, the idea of this side-protest dragging on for weeks or even months seems absurdly plausible.

VIA Rail 918, a General Electric model P42DC locomotive, at Belleville, Ontario on 23 December 2008.
Photo by Martin Cathrae via Wikimedia Commons.

While VIA may not be serious, others are extremely serious:

Left-wing blogs have been offering instructions and maps during the #ShutDownCanada protests on how to blockade and destroy train tracks and other pieces of Canada’s infrastructure, according to True North.

Two websites in particular, these being North Shore and Warrior Up, have instructed demonstrators how to damage Canada’s pipelines, roads and railways.

In some of North Shore’s posts, for instance, they told their readers to stand in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en tribe by destroying train tracks. In this article, the author makes it perfectly clear that he wants to damage Canada’s economy at large.

More absurdly, however, the article then went on to instruct the reader on how to compose a chemical mixture that destroys steel rail tracks — taking particular care to describe how not to leaving fingerprint or DNA evidence.

Thursday evening, VIA Rail announced their whole passenger network would be shut down until further notice: Service cancellation notice.

February 12, 2020

“… perhaps the biggest Internet cash grab in the OECD with mandated payments and levies on thousands of Internet services with Canadian users”

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

Michael Geist refutes the claim that the recent Broadcast and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel report does not recommend a “Netflix tax”:

The reference to a Netflix tax in the overview is the only such reference in the 235 page report. It was likely included in the overview in the hope that media coverage would jump on the claim and seek to re-assure Canadians that there was no Netflix tax or higher prices likely for consumers as a result of the report’s recommendations.

Yet the reality for anyone that reads beyond the overview is that the panel’s report not only recommends what would widely be considered a Netflix tax but proposes perhaps the biggest Internet cash grab in the OECD with mandated payments and levies on thousands of Internet services with Canadian users. This includes online streaming services, social media companies, news aggregators, and online communications services such as Skype, WhatApp, and Viber. In the view of the panel, any service or site with Canadian users is part of the “Canadian system” and should be expected to contribute to the development of Canadian content, Canadian news organizations, or building broadband connectivity. Note that all of this is above and beyond sales taxes, which the panel also recommends should be implemented with respect to foreign services.

Some of the panel’s plans are admittedly somewhat confusing. For example, the panel states:

Media curation undertakings brought under the regime – including Netflix and other online streaming services – would be required to devote a portion of their program budgets to Canadian programs.

That statement, along with chair Janet Yale’s comment at the opening press conference that there was no need for Netflix to spend additional money on Cancon but rather merely divert existing on foreign location and service production spending in Canada, has been interpreted by some to mean that Netflix would not have to increase its Canadian programming budget. But that is apparently not what the panel means. I spoke with Yale who confirmed that the panel expects the CRTC to establish a minimum Cancon spend requirement on Netflix based on its Canadian revenues. In other words, the requirement has nothing to do with its existing spending on production in Canada. For Netflix, that could certainly represent an increase in spending costs in Canada with those costs likely passed along to consumers.

Yet the panel’s plan extends far beyond just online streaming services such as Netflix. It also envisions mandatory levies against social media services and news aggregators that would be used to fund Canadian news services. It similarly targets a myriad of communications services that would pay into funds to support broadband development.

QotD: Experienced political operators after an unexpected paradigm shift

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

I think this is causing some confusion, blindness and otherwise inexplicably stupid behavior in people who never seemed stupid before. This is what I call The Years the Masks Fell off.

Look, take a just-now thing: the DNC says that all precincts in Iowa WERE counted. The app recorded every vote, they say. They just need to tally them.

Turns out that’s probably not precisely true.

As a friend noticed, that’s not precisely a lie, that’s just “making sh*t up.”

We’re seeing that a lot from the other side of the aisle suddenly. Unbelievably stupid behavior like the sham wow impeachment.

They keep telling us “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” and being shocked and appalled when we choose our lying eyes.

[…]

And then they’re shocked, nay astonished, when these tactics don’t work. While we who are standing outside this look at them and go “Who would think that would work? Some two year old?”

I mean half of the bizarre behavior of our government and its agencies falls under that heading too. “Who could think that would work/wouldn’t be found out/made any sense?”

But the thing you have to understand is that you’re not dealing with stupid people. Not by half. You’re dealing with people who were very competent and comfortable in — for lack of a better term — the previous paradigm of politics, or publishing or whatever.

The more comfortable they were; the easier it was for them, the harder it is to accept that it’s gone and it’s not coming back

For instance, the dems could trust the media would cover for them absolutely and completely, and that their pettiness, idiocy or outright corruption would never be revealed.

They got used to it, they got comfortable. They got to believing it was their natural right. It was just the way things were. They were the good people. Their hearts were pure. No one would ever look into their behavior outside the limelight.

If some psychological tests are correct, they grew to believe they were entitled to corruption and unethical behavior for all the “good” they did, such as Clinton thinking he was entitled to all the women he wanted for “fighting for women’s rights” (Which for men like him always mean abortion, but never mind.)

They can’t adapt. They can’t believe things have changed.

Sarah Hoyt, “How Things Have Always Been”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2020-02-09.

February 11, 2020

QotD: Agriculture and the rise of the state

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

Why should cereal grains play such a massive role in the earliest states? After all, other crops, in particular legumes such as lentils, chickpeas, and peas, had been domesticated in the Middle East and, in China, taro and soybean. Why were they not the basis of state formation? More broadly, why have no “lentil states,” chickpea states, taro states, sago states, breadfruit states, yam states, cassava states, potato states, peanut states, or banana states appeared in the historical record? Many of these cultivars provide more calories per unit of land than wheat and barley, some require less labor, and singly or in combination they would provide comparable basic nutrition. Many of them meet, in other words, the agro-demographic conditions of population density and food value as well as cereal grains. Only irrigated rice outclasses them in terms of sheer concentration of caloric value per unit of land.

The key to the nexus between grains and states lies, I believe, in the fact that only the cereal grains can serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and “rationable.” Other crops — legumes, tubers, and starch plants — have some of these desirable state-adapted qualities, but none has all of these advantages. To appreciate the unique advantages of the cereal grains, it helps to place yourself in the sandals of an ancient tax-collection official interested, above all, in the ease and efficiency of appropriation.

The fact that cereal grains grow above ground and ripen at roughly the same time makes the job of any would-be taxman that much easier. If the army or the tax officials arrive at the right time, they can cut, thresh, and confiscate the entire harvest in one operation. For a hostile army, cereal grains make a scorched-earth policy that much simpler; they can burn the harvest-ready grain fields and reduce the cultivators to flight or starvation. Better yet, a tax collector or enemy can simply wait until the crop has been threshed and stored and confiscate the entire contents of the granary.

Compare this situation with, say, that of farmers whose staple crops are tubers such as potatoes or cassava/manioc. Such crops ripen in a year but may be safely left in the ground for an additional year or two. They can be dug up as needed and the reaminder stored where they grew, underground. If an army or tax collectors want your tubers, they will have to dig them up tuber by tuber, as the farmer does, and then they will have a cartload of potatoes which is far less valuable (either calorically or at the market) than a cartload of wheat, and is also more likely to spoil quickly. Frederick the Great of Prussia, when he ordered his subjects to plant potatoes, understood that, as planters of tubers, they could not be so easily dispersed by invading armies.

The “aboveground” simultaneous ripening of cereal grains has the inestimable advantage of being legible and assessable by the state tax collectors. These characteristics are what make wheat, barley, rice, millet, and maize the premier political crops. A tax assessor typically classifies fields in terms of soil quality and, knowing the average yield of a particular grain from such soil, is able to estimate a tax. If a year-to-year adjustment is required, fields can be surveyed and crop cuttings taken from a representative patch just before harvest to arrive at an estimated yield for that particular crop year. As we shall see, state officials tried to raise crop yields and taxes in kind by mandating techniques of cultivation; in Mesopotamia this included insisting on repeated ploughing to break up the large clods of earth and repeated harrowing for better rooting and nutrient delivery. The point is that with cereal grains and soil preparation, the planting, the condition of the crop, and the ultimate yield were more visible and assessable.

James Scott, Against The Grain: A deep history of the earliest states, 2017.

February 10, 2020

QotD: Welfare programs as a form of subsidy to employers

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

A final line of argument is that these public assistance programs have become de facto subsidies for low-wage employers. For a program to be a subsidy for an employer, it needs to lower wages. Is this plausible for the public assistance programs considered? I think it is for the EITC [Earned Income Tax Credit], but not for other programs. Depending on where one is on the EITC schedule, that policy can increase work incentives. And there is a lot of empirical evidence showing EITC encourages labor force participation. An unintended consequence of that labor supply response, however, is that employers capture some of the tax subsidies. This can happen in a simple supply and demand framework, where an increased labor supply to the market drive wages down. This can also happen in a bargaining context where the size of the bilateral surplus expands from lower taxes, and employers capture some of this increased surplus. Work by UC Berkeley’s Jesse Rothstein suggests that for every $1 of transfer to workers using the EITC, post-tax income rises only by $0.73 because of employer capture.

But what about other programs like food stamps or housing assistance? These means tested public assistance programs are not tied to work, and we should not expect them to lower wages. Let’s take food stamps, which are available to eligible families whether or not a family member works or not. Indeed, when people are not working, they are more likely to be eligible for food stamps since their family incomes will be lower. Therefore, SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] is likely to raise, and not lower a worker’s reservation wages — the fallback position if she loses her job. This will tend to contract labor supply (or improve a worker’s bargaining position), putting an upward pressure on the wage. Whether or not wages are increased is an empirical matter: there is evidence that the initial roll-out of the food stamps program across counties in the 1970s lowered work hours, consistent with an increase in the reservation wage. The key point is that it is difficult to imagine how food stamps would lower wages. And if they don’t lower wages, they can’t be thought of as subsidies to low wage employers. The same logic applies to other means tested programs like energy or housing assistance. Moreover, these conclusions hold in a wide array of models of the labor market, including ones that emphasize bargaining or efficiency wage concerns.

Arindrajit Dube, “Public Assistance, Private Subsidies and Low Wage Jobs”, Arindrajit Dube, 2015-04-19.

February 9, 2020

The lightbulb conspiracy again

Filed under: Business, China, Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’ve banged on a few times over the years about lightbulbs, specifically about our government’s passionate desire for us to abandon the tried-and-tested (and cheap) incandescent bulbs to move first to (ultra-expensive, dim, and potentially dangerous) compact fluorescent bulbs and now to (cheaper, but still not living up to longevity promises) LED bulbs instead. Tim Worstall explains how governments were persuaded to enforce this crony capitalist plot over the years (he’s discussing the European market, but Canadian regulators were doing exactly the same thing):

We all recall when we used to use incandescent light bulbs. Simple, cheap, the result of a century’s worth of fiddling with the basic technology to make it around and about right for the use to which it was put.

A spiral compact fluorescent bulb (CFL).
Image by Sun Ladder via Wikimedia Commons.

Then they were banned. Sure, there was that energy and thus planet saving argument but that was always very weak indeed. It was an excuse, not the actual reason itself. The reason was that the big three manufacturers, Phillips, Osram and GE, had invested heavily in the next generation of technology, compact fluorescents. These cost not pennies per bulb but pounds. Rather better profit margins that is. Oh, and also, not subject to that crippling competition from China.

So, we get the EU ban on incandescents, driven entirely by the manufacturers. There’s a lot of the Baptist and Bootlegger in here given the environmentalist support for it.

The problem with the technology being the use of mercury in those bulbs.

An aside, I made my living for a number of years selling weird metals that are added to that mercury. I do actually know quite a bit about the nuts and bolts here. I’m also out of the business and have been for a decade and more. So it’s knowledge driving this, not knife sharpening.

Mercury’s not good stuff to have floating around. So, what happens next? Yep, a decade or a bit more after the incandescents were banned so now they’re coming for the CFLs.

The mercury issue was not as well publicized here in Canada as it was in Australia, for example:

How many of them have looked up the Environment Department’s website to find what its bureaucrats falsely describe as the “simple and straightforward” precautions to take against poisoning should one of these lamps smash:

  • Open nearby windows and doors to allow the room to ventilate for 15 minutes before cleaning up the broken lamp. Do not leave on any air conditioning or heating equipment which could recirculate mercury vapours back into the room.
  • Do not use a vacuum cleaner or broom on hard surfaces because this can spread the contents of the lamp and contaminate the cleaner. Instead scoop up broken material (e.g. using stiff paper or cardboard), if possible into a glass container which can be sealed with a metal lid.
  • Use disposable rubber gloves rather than bare hands.
  • Use a disposable brush to carefully sweep up the pieces.
  • Use sticky tape and/or a damp cloth to wipe up any remaining glass fragments and/or powders.
  • On carpets or fabrics, carefully remove as much glass and/or powdered material using a scoop and sticky tape; if vacuuming of the surface is needed to remove residual material, ensure that the vacuum bag is discarded or the canister is wiped thoroughly clean.
  • Dispose of cleanup equipment (i.e. gloves, brush, damp paper) and sealed containers containing pieces of the broken lamp in your outside rubbish bin – never in your recycling bin.
  • While not all of the recommended cleanup and disposal equipment described above may be available (particularly a suitably sealed glass container), it is important to emphasise that the transfer of the broken CFL and clean-up materials to an outside rubbish bin (preferably sealed) as soon as possible is the most effective way of reducing potential contamination of the indoor environment.

February 8, 2020

ESR on the Wuhan coronavirus

Filed under: China, Government, Health, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

He’s backing away from his — to me unfathomable — earlier belief in the accuracy of official Chinese government statistics:

My willingness to believe the official line didn’t stem from any credulity about what the Chinese government would do if it believed the truth wouldn’t serve. As Communists they are lying evil scum pretty much by definition, and denial would have been politically attractive for as long as they thought they could nip the pandemic in the bud. I thought their incentives had flipped and they would now be honest as a way of assisting their own countermeasures and seeking international help.

My first clue that I was wrong about that came from a friend who is plugged into the diaspora Chinese community. According to him, there is terrifying video being sent from Chinese clans to the overseas branches they planted in the West to prepare a soft landing in case they have to bail out of China. Video of streets littered with corpses. And of living victims exhibiting symptoms like St. Vitus’s Dance (aka Sydenham’s chorea), which means the virus is attacking central nervous systems.

My second clue was the Tencent leak. […] the takeaway is that there is now reason to believe that as of Feb 1st the actual coronavirus toll looked like this: confirmed cases 154023, suspected cases 79808, cured 269, deaths 24589.

Compare that with the Johns Hopkins tracker numbers for today, a week later: Confirmed cases 31207, cured 1733, deaths 638. Allowing for the Tencent leak being roughly one doubling period earlier, the official statistics have been lowballing the confirmed case number by a factor of about 8 and the deaths by a factor of about 80. And then inflating cures by a factor of about 12.

Even given what I’d heard about the video, I might have remained skeptical about the leak numbers if someone (don’t remember who or where) hadn’t pointed out that the ratio between reported cases and deaths has been suspiciously constant in the official Chinese statistics. In uncooked statistics one would expect more noise in that ratio, if only because of reporting problems.

So my present judgment, subject to change on further evidence, is that the Tencent-leak numbers are the PRC’s actual statistics. And that has a lot of grim implications.

The Trial of Charles I (1649)

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

Historia Civilis
Published 6 Feb 2020

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Sean Kelsey, Politics and Procedure in the Trial of Charles I | https://www.jstor.org/stable/4141664
Clive Holmes, The Trial and Execution of Charles I | https://www.jstor.org/stable/40865689

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

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

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

Nissan Leaf electric vehicle charging.
Photo by Nissan UK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

QotD: Canadian peacekeeping, myth and reality

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

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

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

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

February 7, 2020

Modern day Kremlinology and show trials

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

QotD: The negative economic and human value of foreign aid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

February 5, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

February 4, 2020

“Who could oppose such an obviously sound idea?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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