Historia Civilis
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January 14, 2020
Cursus honorum – Quaestors
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January 13, 2020
QotD: Early civilizations and the barbarians
The book [Against The Grain] ends with a chapter on “barbarians”. Scott reminds us that until about 1600, the majority of human population lived outside state control; histories that focus on states and forget barbarians are forgetting about most humans alive. In keeping with his thesis, Scott reviews some ancient sources that talk about barbarians in the context of people who did not farm or eat grain. Also in keeping with his thesis, he warns against thinking of barbarians as somehow worse or more primitive. Many barbarians were former state citizens who had escaped state control to a freer and happier lifestyle. Barbarian tribes could control vast trading empires, form complex confederations, and enter in various symbiotic relationships with the states around them. Scott wants us to think of these not as primitive people vs. advanced people, but as two different interacting lifestyles, of which the barbarian one was superior for most people up until a few centuries ago.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Against The Grain“, Slate Star Codex, 2019-10-15.
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January 12, 2020
The shoot-down of Flight 752
Colby Cosh discusses the destruction of Ukraine International 752 in the historical context of the Vincennes incident (later on Friday, the Iranian official position appears to have shifted to accepting responsibility for an accidental missile launch):
Some of the wreckage of Ukraine International flight 752 near Tehran, Iran.
Photo from MOJ Newsagency via Wikimedia Commons.
It has become fairly obvious, whatever the Iranian authorities may say now or later, that Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 was shot down after departing Tehran. This was, in truth, overwhelmingly probable the moment the news broke, but there was still widespread shock and disbelief on Thursday when several Western heads of government announced signal-intelligence evidence of a missile strike. There are still “How could such a thing happen?” reactions pouring forth — mostly from people who are old enough, in theory, to recall the USS Vincennes accidentally shooting down an Iran Air Airbus A300 in 1988.
I say “in theory,” but the truth is that popular memory of the Vincennes incident has been much diminished — outside Iran — by later events in the region. This must qualify as one of the good Lord’s most sadistic jests. The United States wasn’t officially at war with anyone in the region at the moment when its best-trained sailors, equipped with scorchingly new and uncannily powerful missile and battlespace-mapping technology, blew up a commercial airliner full of religious pilgrims.
The Navy was in the Gulf not to fight or oppose anybody in particular, but to protect neutral shipping from the Iran-Iraq War. Up to the time of the accident, it was Iraq that demonstrably presented the greater danger to American warships. Ronald Reagan was still president. The First Gulf War wouldn’t kick off until 1990.
In other words: we forgot. The memory of Vincennes was overwritten by a generation of Middle East conflict, like an old computer file.
Which leaves a paradox. Liberals who regard recent U.S. history as one enormous, indistinguishable mass of bloodthirsty actions don’t seem especially aware of one of the most horrifying tactical blunders in American military history. What’s one jet plane more or less in the black ledger of imperialism? Conservatives, meanwhile, are racing to accuse Iran of “murder” in the case of Flight 752.
Blunders can be worse than crimes, according to one of the most famous of all military maxims. But if one points out that Iran’s “murder” of innocents is starting to look like a nightmarish replay of Vincennes, one risks being accused of postulating “moral equivalence” between the United States and Iran.
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QotD: Progressive snobbery is part of the kink
Yes, they do. For liberals, the distinction between the “dumb masses” and their enlightened selves renders life meaningful. Disdain for ordinary folks is not just an ancillary trait of liberalism. It is fundamental to the its nature.
At its heart, liberalism is a gnostic religion, and the essence of that religion is the believer’s faith that he possesses the means of changing the world for the better. The belief that the world must be changed requires there to be a mass of individuals whose lives are in need of change. Following this logic, it is the liberal, not those deplorables in need of change, who knows what must be changed. For liberals, there must be a mass of people in need of this knowledge for life to make sense.
Above all, liberalism is a hubristic faith. Its followers share the fatal flaw of pride in their own intellectual capacity. This is why liberalism appeals so strongly to those in the knowledge trades: teachers, journalists, writers, psychologists, and social workers. The sense of “knowing more than others” is its strongest attraction – particularly to the young, who otherwise know so little. Liberalism confers, or seems to confer, almost immediate power and authority to those who embrace it.
The left’s obsession with superior knowledge runs through its entire history. As Woodrow Wilson remarked, the “instrument” of political science “is insight. A nice understanding of subtle, unformulated conditions.” Lyndon B. Johnson thought “a president’s hardest task” is “to know what is right.” And the most hubristic of all is Obama’s “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Yes, we are wonderfully bright, and we’ve been waiting eons for ourselves to appear.
Jeffrey Folks, “Leftists versus the People”, American Thinker, 2018-02-24.
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January 11, 2020
What does a former royal do?
At UnHerd, Douglas Murray discusses membership in the (extended) royal family as a “predicament”:
The royal family at Buckingham Palace for the Trooping of the Colour 2010, 30 June, 2015.
Photo by Robert Payne via Wikimedia Commons.
There is a line in Alan Bennett’s play The Madness of George III which is so good that the makers of The Crown lifted it — without attribution — in their most recent season. The heir to the throne, waiting for Parliament to declare him regent, says that to be Prince of Wales is not a position: “It is a predicament.”
Whether or not that is the case for the current Prince of Wales, it is certainly true for the Sussexes, who have just announced that they are going to step back from public duties in order to become “financially independent”.
Even the most devout republican will recognise that there is something worse than the now-defunct Civil List; something undisguisably worse than members of the Royal Family receiving public subsidy. It is the predicament of Royal privilege.
Such is the cruelty of public life, that people born into a position of undeniable privilege are rewarded — or revenged — by being placed into an impossible situation. If a prince or princess is carrying out public duties, but also having the occasional moment of private enjoyment, they will be lambasted by the press for freeloading and gallivanting on the public’s dime. If they decide to relieve the strains on the public coffers by accepting the largesse of some wealthy individuals, then the same press will attack said royal for freeloading on someone else’s dime, and being caught up with sleazy or shallow celebrity characters.
There is a way out, of course, one demonstrated by Her Majesty the Queen throughout her public life, which has been to doggedly and dutifully carry out an unceasing round of obligations for so many years that in her tenth decade of service, no reasonable person could begrudge her the occasional day off.
But the head of the family is at an advantage. That role is well defined. It is the other royals — especially the “minor royals” — who find themselves in the worst situation. True, there are people — almost everybody else on earth if it comes to that — who are in a materially worse position. But in terms of being born into a difficult role, being born a non-monarch in the royal family must count as among the most impossible to carry out.
In the 1990s, when the Civil List was whittled down, we were given an inkling of how the Sussex situation might play out. Members of the Royal Family, such as the Michaels of Kent, were suddenly expected to strike out on their own; forced to sell their home while the press enjoyed ogling at their embarrassment. When the Michaels had an attic sale, they were attacked for cheapening themselves and the Royal Family by auctioning their possessions. They then attempted to make money through various forms of consultancy and authorship, but every way they turned they were accused of using their position to “cash in”. What else were they to do, though? What other commodity — other than royalty — did they have?
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The bubbly 1720s
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes looks at Britain’s volatile financial scene in the 1720s:
William Hogarth – The South Sea Scheme, 1721. In the bottom left corner are Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish figures gambling, while in the middle there is a huge machine, like a merry-go-round, which people are boarding. At the top is a goat, written below which is “Who’l Ride”. The people are scattered around the picture with a sense of disorder, while the progress of the well-dressed people towards the ride in the middle represents the foolishness of the crowd in buying stock in the South Sea Company, which spent more time issuing stock than anything else.
Scanned from The genius of William Hogarth or Hogarth’s Graphical Works via Wikimedia Commons.
Over in France, a Scottish banker named John Law had in the late 1710s overseen an ambitious scheme to reorganise the government’s finances. He ran the Mississippi Company, one of the many companies with monopolies on France’s international trade. His scheme was for the company to acquire all of the other similar monopolies, so that it could have a monopoly on all of the country’s intercontinental trade routes. By 1719, the Mississippi Company had swelled into a Company of the Indies, which in turn had purchased the right to collect French taxes, from which it took took its own cut. In exchange for acquiring these monopolies, Law’s new super-monopoly would buy up the French government’s accumulated war debts, allowing repayment on more generous terms. By allowing the state to borrow more cheaply, the scheme was to be a key plank in improving French military might.
Meanwhile, in Britain, a very similar project was afoot. Following the War of the Spanish Succession, one of the things Britain won from France was the asiento – the monopoly on supplying African slaves to Spain’s colonies in America. The asiento was given to the South Sea Company, which had the monopoly on British trade with South America, and which in 1720 began to follow a scheme similar to Law’s. Given developments in France, it would not do for the British state to be left behind in terms of its capacity to take on more debt for war. Thus, with political support, the South Sea Company began to buy up the government’s debt, persuading its creditors to exchange that debt for increasingly valuable company shares.
In 1720, both schemes came crashing down. In the case of Law’s scheme, he had printed paper currency with which people could buy his company’s shares, but in 1720 discovered he had printed too much. When he prudently tried to devalue the company’s shares to match the quantity of paper notes, the devaluation spun out of control. In the case of the South Sea Company, the causes of the crash were a little more mysterious, perhaps even verging on the mundane. One explanation is that too many wealthy investors simply tried to sell their shares so that they would have ready cash to spend on holidaying in Europe, precipitating a minor fall in the share price which then led to a more widespread panic. Regardless, it did not end well. The company itself continued for many years thereafter — it even got involved with whaling off the coast of Greenland — but the collapse of its share price ended its chance to restructure the government’s debts.
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QotD: “Don’t ask, don’t tell”
That’s not remotely what happened. Rather, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, as enacted by Congress, has long deemed Sodomy, which covered more than just homosexual conduct, as a criminal offense potentially carrying severe penalties. Moreover, the procedure for entering into service demanded that prospective recruits deny or admit to homosexual leanings, in writing, which admissions would usually bar the man or woman from service. Of course, back when the shame of being publicly homosexual was very great, people who wanted to join the armed forces simply lied about it and then, as a general rule, hid it while in service.
Liberal Democratic President Bill Clinton, acting in his capacity as Commander in Chief of the armed forces, simply ordered that prospective recruits were not to be asked if they were gay or had homosexual leanings, and were not to volunteer the information. That, young Millennial, is where DADT came from; it came from a liberal, liberally motivated, and pandering to his liberal base.
Did you know that? No? Well, then; ask yourself, WHY didn’t you know?
What the loss of history does to you, dear Millennial, is that it robs you of the ability to reason your way to cause and effect. Never mind the crappy to the point of idiotic decisions and programs this might lead you to support, consider what it does to you as a person. What, after all, is the effect of shielding people from contrary opinions by designating and maintaining, under color of law or regulation, “safe spaces” for this or that minority? Does it make them stronger? Better able to deal with a harsh world? Does it change that objective world to something less harsh? No and no and no; it does none of that. Do you gain grit in a safe space? Ha. Do you learn endurance in a safe space? Oh, please.
Tom Kratman, “It’s Up to You, Millennials. Deflect or Be Doomed”, Milo, 2017-12-06.
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January 9, 2020
The “Ostrich” school of Canadian foreign policy
Ted Campbell on what former Canadian diplomat David Mulroney calls the “Ostrich” school:
John Ibitson, writing in the Globe and Mail, suggests that Justin Trudeau might want to try what former diplomat, national strategic planner in the Privy Council Office, and commentator David Mulroney refers to (on social media) as …
… “the ‘Ostrich’ school of Canadian foreign policy.” It has, he says, two pillars:
First, “Canada has no interests/allies“; and
Second, “The best way to deal with bad regimes, bad people is to pretend they’re nice.”
Mr Ibbitson himself says that it may be impossible to work “with European and Asian allies, including Japan, to forge a coherent response that provokes neither the Americans nor the Iranians.”
The situation in the Middle East is, as I have explained several times, hideously complex. President Trump may have made it worse … although it’s hard for me to see how any added complications really matter all that much. The socio-cultural and religious hatreds that bedevil the region are likely beyond making “worse.”
In fact, there may be an argument that a nice, all-out, albeit contained, Middle East war might be useful. Perhaps the Iranians and Saudis and Iraqis and Syrians and Yemenis and so on need to sort one another out in the way that tends to produce lasting results: on a bloody battlefield … it worked for Europe, more than once, in 1648, in 1815 and again in 1945.
John Ibbitson says that “Iran’s rage over the U.S. assassination of Qassem Soleimani risks dragging Canada and the rest of the Western alliance into a new confrontation in the Middle East, courtesy of Donald Trump … [that true, as far as it goes, and he adds] … Most Canadians would want no part of such a conflict, especially since the U.S. President might simply be seeking to distract attention from his impending impeachment trial in the Senate … [and that, the first part about Canadians wanting no part of any conflict, is also true, but President Trump’s motives are irrelvant]. The fact is that he has ignored many Iranian provocations while he attempts, vainly, in my opinion, to disengage America from the wider world. The attack on a US embassy seems to have crossed a “red line.”
[…]
But, John Ibbitson says, “Mr. Trump’s high stakes gamble – that killing one of the most senior figures in the Iranian regime will deter rather than provoke further acts of aggression from Iran – could lead to some kind of asymmetrical war, with the U.S. military attacking Iranian targets, and Iran responding through militias and proxies in Iraq and possibly in North America and Europe … [true enough, and he asks] … What would Mr. Trump expect from Canada in such a conflict?” That’s the key question.
My guesstimate is that President Trump will ask little or nothing, militarily, because his military chiefs of staff will not even have mentioned Canada when they proffer lists of nations that might help or hinder US efforts. Canada is not on any of their lists of countries that matter. Diplomatically, however, I think we do matter to the USA and I would not be surprised if the phone lines have been busy all weekend as US officials tell (rather than ask) Canadian officials to get our government “onside” with the USA. The Americans hold ALL the high cards in the game of power.
I’m sure that Prime Minister Trudeau will follow John Ibbitson’s advice and adopt the “Ostrich” strategy … head buried in the sand, pretending that Canada has neither interests nor allies and pretending that evil people are good.
Perhaps co-incidentally with the “revenge” Iranian missile attacks on Iraqi airbases known to have US troops in the area, a Ukraine International Airlines Boeing 737-800 passenger jet crashed shortly after take-off from Tehran airport. Officially, the Iranian authorities are saying it was due to catastrophic mechanical breakdown, but they have refused to hand over the aircraft’s “black box” flight recorders for analysis. All of the 176 passengers and crew died in the crash, including 63 Canadians. It has been suggested by many that the timing was not a co-incidence and that the plane was likely hit by an Iranian surface-to-air missile due to the heightened state of tension in Iranian airspace during and after the missile launches against Iraq. Colby Cosh has more:
Some of the wreckage of Ukraine International flight 752 near Tehran, Iran.
Photo from MOJ Newsagency via Wikimedia Commons.
I am writing these words at a strange moment Wednesday morning. The president of the United States has just been on television, reassuring the American public that the crisis inspired by the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani has reached a satisfactory equilibrium. Iran made a demonstrative show of force against U.S. installations in the Middle East that killed nobody. Honour has been satisfied. Relief, among American observers, is general.
Meanwhile, Canada is mourning the deaths of dozens of its citizens in a passenger jet crash on Iranian soil. Perhaps it is a terrible coincidence. Stranger things have happened. But if you are old enough to remember the shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655 by the U.S. Navy missile cruiser USS Vincennes in 1988, you are old enough to doubt it.
The Vincennes incident is part of the historical litany that has made news consumers innately distrustful of the first draft of history. The ship was in the Persian Gulf, which at the time was swarming with Iranian gunboats trying to squeeze off the supply of arms to its enemy Iraq. The U.S. Navy had rushed to the area to keep one of the world’s economic arteries open to neutrals. But this had foreseeable consequences — plenty of confusing penny-ante firefights, and some notable accidents, including a puzzling Iraqi attack with air-launched Exocet missiles on an American frigate, USS Stark.
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January 4, 2020
QotD: “Starchitects”
One is the idea that an architect aspiring to greatness must also aspire to novelty. It is this imperative to “innovate” that underpins the diagrammatic design concepts of the Deconstuctivists. There is of course nothing wrong with innovation per se; it is the knee-jerk compulsion to innovate, or “reinterpret” — as a kind of moral imperative — that is the mid-20th-century aesthetic legacy. To be fair to the profession, I would come to the defense of much innovative public and commercial architecture, most of it by architects that the public has never heard of. Tragically though, these unpretentious and unsung essays in steel, glass, and masonry have been eclipsed in the public imagination by the “starchitect” bling that is currently turning the centers of our great cities into a collection of (in James Stevens Curl’s memorable phrase) “California-style roadside attractions”.
The other cancer is the idea that building design has sociological, psychological, and macro-economic dimensions that the architect — simply by virtue of being an architect — is competent to judge. What really matters to your average architecture student is drawing — which is fine, and just as it should be, until the vain idea emerges that their drawings represent some kind of implicit vision for mankind. At my school, any student’s design presentation had to include a verbal rationale — often post hoc and invariably half-baked — of how the form, massing, and materials of the design are expressive of such imponderables as the supposed psychological “needs” and “aspirations” of the users and the wider “community” that the building is to serve. The students were simply reciting the bogus language of their tutors — in which buildings might be said to be “fun,” “thought provoking,” “democratic,” “inclusive” and other such nonsense.
Graham Cunningham, “Why Architectural Elites Love Ugly Buildings”, The American Conservative, 2019-11-01.
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January 3, 2020
QotD: Against The Grain
Against The Grain should be read as a prequel to Scott’s most famous work, Seeing Like A State. SLaS argued that much of what we think of as “progress” towards a more orderly world – like Prussian scientific forestry, or planned cities with wide streets – didn’t make anyone better off or grow the economy. It was “progress” only from a state’s-eye perspective of wanting everything to be legible to top-down control and taxation. He particularly criticizes the High Modernists, Le Corbusier-style architects who replaced flourishing organic cities with grandiose but sterile rectangular grids.
Against the Grain extends the analysis from the 19th century all the way back to the dawn of civilization. If, as Samuel Johnson claimed, “The Devil was the first Whig”, Against the Grain argues that wheat was the first High Modernist.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Against The Grain“, Slate Star Codex, 2019-10-15.
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December 29, 2019
Changing western views about China
John Gray charts the image of China that has held steady for years among western countries but which has been severely shaken with the unrest in Hong Kong and the Chinese government’s reactions:
“The Chinese People’s Liberation Army is the great school of Mao Zedong Thought”, 1969.
A poster from the Cultural Revolution, featuring an image of Chairman Mao, published by the government of the People’s Republic of China.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.
The most important year of the decade is the one that is just ending. The struggle that will most deeply shape the global scene in years to come is not occurring in Britain, the US, Europe or any Western country. It is underway in Hong Kong, where a popular demand for democracy is confronting the immovable power of the world’s most highly developed authoritarian state.
It is a struggle no government wants to see escalate. More realistic than its Western counterparts, the Chinese leadership shows few signs of believing the conflict can be definitively resolved any time soon. Incremental concessions and large-scale repression both carry high levels of risk for Xi Jinping’s regime. The ideal end-state for Beijing is probably long-term containment. But the situation in the former colony is not stable, and it is difficult to exaggerate the impact that suppressing the protestors by force would have on China’s position in the world.
It is often pointed out that Hong Kong’s economic importance has dwindled with the rise of mainland cities such as Shanghai. But this leaves out how much two-system governance shapes global perceptions of China and its future. Xi’s progress towards a neo-totalitarian surveillance state has deflated the Western elites’ confidence that China is on a path of slow evolution towards liberal democracy. Yet the fantasy still lingers. The likelihood that China will be an authoritarian great power in any realistically imaginable future is too disturbing to contemplate.
“Hong Kong night Panorama” by Andos_pics is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
It is worth recalling the comforting tale on which Western governments have modelled China’s development. The country was getting rapidly richer, and while average incomes remained low by international standards, the middle class was steadily growing. This process of embourgeoisement would lead to stronger demands for democratic freedoms, and China would become ever more like the West. Embedded in practically every Western government and regularly invoked by the Western businesses that operate in China, this is a story with almost no basis in reality.
It is true that the rise of the middle classes in early 19th-century Europe coincided with an expansion of liberal freedoms in some countries. This was the main thrust of Marx’s analysis of bourgeois democracy. (A little-noted aspect of recent liberal thinking is that it relies heavily on a crude version of Marxian class analysis.) But there is nothing in the historical record that says the middle classes are inherently a force promoting liberalism. In the late 19th century, they backed the restoration of monarchy and empire in France and militarism In Prussia. In the early 20th century, large sections of the European middle classes embraced ethnic nationalism and then fascism. There was not much sign of the freedom-loving bourgeoisie in interwar Europe.
Protests continue in Hong Kong, 25 November 2019.
Photo by Studio Incendo via Wikimedia CommonsWhile it is so far less developed, a similar pattern of bourgeois support for illiberal politics has emerged in many European countries since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Across the continent, far-Right parties enjoy the support of significant sections of the middle classes. In America, Trump’s constituency includes many from precarious middle income groups.
So, the linkage between the middle classes and liberal values is tenuous throughout Western countries. In the UK and other English-speaking countries, it is middle class students, professors and administrators that have shut down freedom of inquiry and expression in higher education. Woke capitalism and much of the mainstream media are continuing this trend. Threatened by what they call populism, bourgeois liberals have ditched the values that once defined them. Far from being a universal law, middle class support for liberalism looks like a brief historical accident.
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December 28, 2019
American railways are simultaneously world-beating and terrible
That’s because, as Sean Smith and Peter Earle point out, there are two very different entities running on America’s rails:
Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) locomotive 5399, Kansas City Southern (KCS) 4807, and 1890 westbound on the BNSF Emporia Sub near Timberland Blvd West of Northgate Street in Olathe, Kansas.
Photo by Tyler Silvest via Wikimedia Commons.
American railways are the envy of the world.
Many might shake a collective head at that statement. In the case of passenger rail that is an appropriate reaction. Since it was pieced together – a government-constructed Franken-rail system built of numerous bankrupt railways which were essentially nationalized – Amtrak has been a reliable money sink, losing tens of billions of dollars since 1970.
Any traveler that has used Amtrak to any significant extent has firsthand experience with the crumbling infrastructure, frequent delays, and general unpleasantness that accompanies U.S. passenger rail service. Even the oft-cited bright spot of Amtrak, the “high speed” Acela system (which shuttles between Boston and Washington D.C) pales in comparison when compared to high-end passenger rail systems in Western Europe, Japan, and China.
Bullet trains routinely travel at least 200 mph, whereas Acela trundles along at a pedestrian 84 mph, and there is no indication (and probably no intention) of that gap closing anytime soon.
U.S. passenger rail services in general are money-losing and antiquated versus their global counterparts, an inarguable (and to public transport proponents, embarrassing) fact. Passenger rail is just one part of the story, and serves as an excellent example of how not to manage a rail system. In fairness, efforts to turn Amtrak around (mainly through aggressive cost cutting) do seem to be having an impact, as current year losses total a shade under $30 million. It’s an admirable effort to be sure, but decades of losses, poor service, and general mismanagement cannot be ignored.
The U.S. freight railway system, conversely, is the envy of the world, and this is not hyperbole or chest thumping; the facts back it up. Since the Staggers Act of 1980, which deregulated freight rail, improvements have been substantial. U.S. freight railways carry 81% more ton-miles of freight, and costs have fallen 46%. (It isn’t common for an industry to increase its capacity by 81% while reducing costs by nearly half.) That level of success has even been noted by the Community of European Railway and Infrastructure Companies, which might be surprising, given the common assumption that Europe has a monopoly on rail excellence.
Compared side by side, it seems a conundrum: Amtrak limps along, still relying upon billions of dollars worth of taxpayer-financed subsidies, while U.S. freight railways evince growing profitability and capacity amid rapidly falling costs. Why are U.S. freight rails so profitable when U.S. passenger rail – sometimes traveling the same routes, on some of the same rails – remains a perennial money pit?
New Amtrak Viewliner diner Atlanta deadheading on the eastbound Capitol Limited at Point of Rocks in November 2017.
Photo by Mark Levisay via Wikimedia Commons.
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December 27, 2019
QotD: The perils of tax reform
This is why deductions rarely go away, no matter how stupid and detrimental to the fiscal and economic health of the republic. For example, virtually every wonk in Washington, from radical libertarian to fervent socialist, can agree upon at least one thing: the tax deductibility of employer-sponsored health insurance is a terrible idea. On the one hand, it costs the government a packet of money every year, money that has to be raised by higher taxes on someone else. On the other hand, it encourages employers to load as much compensation as possible into the health benefit package, which distorts our economy and contributes to ballooning costs. There is nothing nice to be said about this particular tax deduction, except that it undoubtedly seemed like a good idea during World War II.
And yet, when it comes time to, say, pass a major health-care reform, or reform the tax code, do our nation’s legislators start with the obvious, and get rid of this egregiously stupid deduction? I regret that there is no way to convey my hollow, despairing laugh in pixel form. Of course they don’t touch it. The very egregiousness of its immense costs, the massive distortions it has induced in American consumption patterns, mean that getting rid of it would be far too disruptive.
Megan McArdle, “Republicans Turned the Tax Code Into a Weapon”, Bloomberg View, 2017-11-03.
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December 26, 2019
“Make Gas Cans Great Again”
At Ace of Spades H.Q., Buck Throckmorton offers a simple, yet fiendishly clever policy for Donald Trump to secure millions of votes in the next election:
If Donald Trump wants to ensure he recaptures the 2020 electoral votes in the Great Lakes states he won in 2016 — and possibly add Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Maine — there is one simple thing he could do that would make him a hero to every snow-blowing American — issue an executive order to restore functioning gas cans.
To be clear, this would also make him a hero to tens of millions of other Americans throughout the country who use lawn mowers, power tools, etc around their homes or in their jobs. In 2009 the EPA banned the sale of gas cans that functionally pour gas. To be specific, the scientifically illiterate bureaucrats at the EPA outlawed gas cans with vents, mandating that all new gas cans must have crazy contraptions that require three hands to operate. Unlike the old gas cans, the new ones spill gas all over the user and onto the ground. The result of the EPA’s incompetence is a new gas can that is much worse for the environment than the one it replaced. The incompetent regulators at the EPA are so scientifically illiterate that they honestly believed that the vents on gas cans were there to allow gas fumes to escape, rather than the actual purpose of allowing air to flow in to the can so that gas can be poured out. Having received their “science” education in Oppression Studies classes at Grievance State University, these morons making rules for how we gas up our power tools have likely never handled a tool more powerful than their own personal groomers.
The government-mandated non-functioning gas can may be the most unpopular government-imposed regulatory rule since the 55 mile per hour speed limit. If you don’t know someone who mocks and despises these stupid red canisters, then you are living a very sheltered urban or upscale lifestyle. Most all working-class and middle-class Americans deal with these awful containers, and they mock the government for imposing them on us.
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December 25, 2019
Repost – The market failure of Christmas
Not to encourage miserliness and general miserability at Christmastime, but here’s a realistic take on the deadweight loss of Christmas gift-giving:
Christmas gifts under the tree.
Photo by Kelvin Kay via Wikimedia Commons.
In strict economic terms, the most efficient gift is cold, hard cash, but exchanging equivalent sums of money lacks festive spirit and so people take their chance on the high street. This is where the market fails. Buyers have sub-optimal information about your wants and less incentive than you to maximise utility. They cannot always be sure that you do not already have the gift they have in mind, nor do they know if someone else is planning to give you the same thing. And since the joy is in the giving, they might be more interested in eliciting a fleeting sense of amusement when the present is opened than in providing lasting satisfaction. This is where Billy Bass comes in.
But note the reason for this inefficient spending. Resources are misallocated because one person has to decide what someone else wants without having the knowledge or incentive to spend as carefully as they would if buying for themselves. The market failure of Christmas is therefore an example of what happens when other people spend money on our behalf. The best person to buy things for you is you. Your friends and family might make a decent stab at it. Distant bureaucrats who have never met us — and who are spending other people’s money — perhaps can’t.
So when you open your presents next week and find yourself with another garish tie or an awful bottle of perfume, consider this: If your loved ones don’t know you well enough to make spending choices for you, what chance does the government have?
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