Quotulatiousness

February 21, 2019

“Excessive fines can be used … to retaliate against or chill the speech of political enemies”

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The US Supreme Court delivered a unanimous body blow to excessive use of asset forfeiture by state and local police:

Timbs challenged that seizure, arguing that taking his vehicle amounted to an additional fine on top of the sentence he had already received. The Indiana Supreme Court rejected that argument, solely because the U.S. Supreme Court had never explicitly stated that the Eighth Amendment applied to the states.

On Wednesday, the high court did exactly that.

“For good reason, the protection against excessive fines has been a constant shield throughout Anglo-American history,” wrote Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the opinion. “Excessive fines can be used, for example, to retaliate against or chill the speech of political enemies,” she wrote, or can become sources of revenue disconnected from the criminal justice system.

Indeed, some local governments do use fines and fees as a means to raise revenue, and that has created a perverse incentive to target residents. After the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a federal investigation into the city government found that 20 percent of its general fund came from criminal fines. And Ferguson is not alone in relying heavily on revenue from fines. Making clear that the Eighth Amendment applies to the states will make it far easier to challenge unreasonable fines and fees — including not just asset forfeiture cases, but also situations where local governments hit homeowners with massive civil penalties for offenses such as unapproved paint jobs or Halloween decorations.

Some of those cases are already getting teed up. As C.J. Ciaramella wrote in this month’s issue of Reason, a federal class action civil rights lawsuit challenging the aggressive asset forfeiture program in Wayne County, Michigan, that was filed in December argues that the county’s seizure of a 2015 Kia Soul after the owner was caught with $10 of marijuana should be deemed an excessive fine.

February 18, 2019

Mis-measuring inequality

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

Tim Worstall explains why any protest in a western country about “inequality” is probably bogus from the get-go:

Their opening line, their justification:

    We live in an age of astonishing inequality.

No, we don’t. We live in an age of astonishing and increasing equality. Thus any set of policies, any series of analysis, that flows from this misunderstanding of reality is going to be wrong.

And that’s all we really need to know about it all.

The problem is that their measurements – the ones they’re paying attention to – of inequality just aren’t the useful ones, the ones we’re interested in. They’re usually pre-tax, pre-benefits. They’re always pre-government supplied services. And they never, ever, look at the thing we’re actually interested in, inequality of living standards.

To give an example, the Trades Union Congress did a calculation a few years back looking at top 10% households in the UK and bottom 10%. They took the average of each decile – so, the average of the top 10% households, the average of the bottom. Then they looked at the ratio between them.

The top 10% gain some 12 times the market income of the bottom 10%. Now take account of taxes and benefits. Then add in the effects of the NHS, free education for all children and so on. Government services. We end up with a ratio of 4 to 1. Life as it’s actually lived gives the top 10% four times the final income – income being defined by consumption of course – of the bottom 10%.

That’s not a high level of inequality.

February 16, 2019

Indian government considers hiking the national minimum wage

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, India — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tim Worstall explains why this is a bad idea that won’t do much — if anything — to improve the lot of workers already earning the current minimum wage, and might well make things worse:

It’s not surprising that this is happening, India mooting a rise in the national minimum wage. There is, after all, an election in the offing. Just when we would expect crowd pleasing but bad ideas to surface. The problem here is that the Indian minimum wage is already too high. Increasing something that’s too high is not sensible policy. […]

Sure, we can declare a floor price and that will be valid wherever the government’s writ runs. Which, in the Indian economy, isn’t all that far.

    The national minimum wage could be set at Rs 9,750 per month, almost double the current level, along with an additional Rs 55 per day of average HRA for urban workers, an expert committee has submitted. The January report, which went public for suggestions on Thursday, has also suggested an alternate plan, with a range of Rs 8,892-11,622 per month of national minimum wage for five different regions as they have diverse socio-economic and labour market situations, The Indian Express reported.

The specific details don’t matter all that much because the Indian government isn’t that powerful in economic matters.

The point being that any formal minimum wage will only apply to people in the formal economy. Depending upon who you want to believe between 80 and 90% of the Indian economy is over in the informal sector. That’s the part of the economy that doesn’t have health and safety standards, proper contracts and minimum wages. And our proof that the current minimum wage is too high is exactly that, that most of the economy isn’t in the formal sector where it applies.

In one manner raising that Indian minimum wage is an irrelevance because it affects so few people. In another it’s actively bad, as it makes it more expensive to join that formal economy, thus making it less likely. Thus it’s a bad idea either way. But you know, elections, politics.

February 14, 2019

We’re all shocked, shocked to hear allegations of Liberal Party corruption (again)

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

At Blazing Cat Fur, surprise is expressed that anyone is surprised that corruption in the federal Liberal Party is again in the news. As I commented on Gab last week, “But this has been ‘business as usual’ for the Natural Governing Party for generations. Why is it suddenly not okay now?” It’s no wonder that veteran Liberal politicos are shocked that anyone even cares at this late stage.

Paul Wells of MacLean’s has written Canada, the show in which he professes surprise and disappointment at the back-room dealings exposed in the SNC-Lavalin affair, why he’s almost in shock! Shock I tell you! – “You thought this government was about family benefits and boil-water advisories? The Lavalin affair offers a glimpse of the real scene — maybe the real Canada.”

Seriously? Is anyone over age 8 shocked to learn that Canada is run for the benefit of the Liberal Party and its crony capitalist backers?

I mean besides the media cheerleaders who helped elect the cardboard cutout known as Justin Trudeau.

You shouldn’t be surprised at the antics of a Liberal party whose moral universe dictates no strings attached abortion on demand and the demonization of its opponents. Or whose “leader” experiences sexual assault differently than his victim.

A brokerage party that has weaponized “diversity and multiculturalism” to implement a divisive mass immigration policy that benefits – Surprise! Our corporate welfare class.

The antics of a party that labels citizens who object to their mass-immigration Ponzi-scheme as intolerant, racists, islamophobes & Nazis has surprised you with its shady dealings? Really?

February 9, 2019

QotD: The global utility of a national carbon tax

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

James Griffin [of] Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government […] is a carbon-tax advocate who begins by acknowledging what everyone knows but hardly anyone says: that, absent subsidies and mandates, renewables and so-called green energy could not begin to compete with oil and coal, and the market would be entirely dominated by fossil fuels.

The carbon tax is one of those policy ideas that is largely sound in theory but runs up hard upon the shoals of reality. I am not convinced that a national carbon tax would change U.S. consumer behavior to such an extent that it would have positive effects on what is after all a global phenomenon, nor am I convinced that the U.S. government would use the revenue from a carbon tax to invest in real climate-change mitigation. That makes the carbon tax a very expensive way of demonstrating good intentions, which does not seem to me like a very fruitful way to work. And compared to more direct programs, such as clearing the way for the development of new, modern, nuclear-power facilities, a carbon tax is even less attractive.

Kevin D. Williamson, “The Case for a Carbon Tax”, National Review, 2017-03-08.

February 6, 2019

Yes, Minister – The North

Filed under: Britain, Government, Humour, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Greger Tomasson
Published on 9 Oct 2012

QotD: “Get off my lawn!”

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

The zeitgeist, of course, has also changed since 2002. Childhood obesity and screen addiction are now perceived as urgent matters of public health. A politician who wants those damn kids off his lawn is likely to be told “You’re a monster who is spreading diabetes and ruin, and, frankly, it’s amazing that there are kids on your lawn in 2017 and we would like to know how you accomplished this.”

Colby Cosh, “Hamilton finally ends its decades-old ban on street hockey, and it won’t actually change a thing”, National Post, 2017-03-06.

February 5, 2019

Macron’s desperate efforts to keep the “European Project” on life-support

Filed under: Economics, Europe, France, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Justin Raimondo on the plight French President Emmanuel Macron is facing:

The EU was a joint project of Euro-intellectuals who wanted a super-socialist State and were afraid Europeans might turn away from “Europe.” They sought to create an ersatz Euro-nationalism that has still only caught on among deracinated yuppies and oligarchs, if anyone at all. What they wanted and still want is what every true state has – an army. Which Macron has been agitating about for some time now. He doesn’t want to persuade Italy and Poland and Hungary to take more refugees – he wants to force them. Even more, he wants a reliable force to crush domestic protests, one that is unlikely to sympathize with the protesters.

Protests are everywhere: the media loves to cover them provided it’s the right cause – and one of the qualifying requirements of coverage should be drama. One would think therefore that the most recent and most violent would attract the media. Not so! We hear nothing about the twelve-week riots that have shaken the Macronist regime to its foundations.

But as the so-called Yellow Vests run roughshod in France – and all over the self-proclaimed “anti-nationalist” Macron – their origins, their ideology, their story remains untold.

French President Macron, a fanatic environmentalist, decided to revise the fuel tax code so that the small urban cars beloved by his circle had their tax reduced, while fuel for trucks and more industrial uses went up as much as 30%. It was a deliberate insult to the rural working poor who must drive long distances.

Macron went out of his way to convey his contempt for the rural voters who did not vote for him. The original reduction was actually intended for long-distance fuel, but Macron changed it around at the last minute to punish this use.

The French “Deplorables” reacted swiftly and not with the usual threat to strike: they simply started an insurrection. No preliminaries. They call themselves Yellow Vests referencing the safety vests required by French law of all motorists to signal emergency: yes, they declare: there IS an emergency going on!

QotD: Democracy and diversity

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

Whether ethnic diversity is compatible with democratic republican government is open to question, though it is considered impolite, or worse, to raise that question. Democracy requires a demos. Truly free, democratic, and stable multiethnic societies are rare, as the Europeans are learning again. There’s Switzerland, sure, but a core principle of the Swiss solution is separation: the country’s four ethnicities are mostly concentrated in their own cantons. Switzerland is a highly decentralized confederacy, where most political issues get decided at the canton level, which minimizes ethnic and regional tensions. The federal government in Bern is practically invisible; most Swiss can’t name their country’s president. This is not a model easily replicated.

The history of the United States does not convincingly prove that ethnic diversity is part and parcel with democracy. Ask a random man in the street of any blue-state city what the purpose of America is, and he’s likely to tell you that it’s immigration—though the word appears nowhere in the founding documents. The U.S. was, from its beginnings, multiethnic, multiracial, multi-religious, and multilingual. But until recently, this background condition was not seen as the font of our national strength. Rather, for most of our history, it was a problem to be overcome through nation-building and assimilation, which America excelled at. By the early 1960s, United States had come close to creating its own unique national ethnicity, albeit one that starkly excluded African-Americans. But even this exception seemed to be moving rapidly toward resolution before the country gave up on nation-building in the late 1960s. One can make a strong case that the early Civil Rights movement was a product of the mid-century high-water mark of American nationalism. Listen to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech; it’s striking how classically nationalist it is, from its evocation of the country’s geographical features to the reaffirmation of its basic creed of freedom, equality, and individual rights, to its Old Testament rhetoric rooted in John Winthrop’s Puritanism.

E.M. Oblomov, “The Case for National Realism: Diversity is the hallmark of empires, not democracies”, City Journal, 2019-01-02.

February 3, 2019

The CBC, Netflix, and the questionable role of mandatory “CanCon”

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

Chris Selley explains why the CBC’s own shows are appearing on Netflix and how this undermines the raison d’être for government-funded CBC television:

To the vast majority of Canadians, including those who support the CBC, the idea that Netflix represents any kind of threat — and should thus be taxed or forced to carry minimum amounts of Canadian content or otherwise regulated, as various groups urge — will just seem irretrievably bizarre. Whether or not it’s a good idea, CanCon only works in a restricted market where channels broadcast specific things at specific times. Back in the day you might just find yourself bored enough to watch or listen to something you didn’t really want to, and it might just be Canadian.

No one watches anything on Netflix that they don’t want to — no one single, anyway — so there’s no earthly reason to put stuff there if people don’t want it. The irony, though, is that there’s a ton of Canadian content on Netflix, precisely because people want to watch it. And as University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist explained in a blog post on Friday, Netflix makes it very easy to find: Not only are there direct links to Canadian TV shows and films, but it algorithmically detects a user’s preference for CanCon and recommends other titles.

Goodness, just look at all the Canuck shows: Baroness Von Sketch Show, Workin’ Moms, Mr. D, Kim’s Convenience, Schitt’s Creek, Intelligence … hang on a tic, those are all CBC shows! How did those imperialist Silicon Valley pigdogs get their filthy hands on it? Because as more and more Canadians cut the cord, Netflix is a perfectly logical place for CBC and the production companies it works with to showcase their work — not just to Canada but to the world. In short, there doesn’t seem to be any problem or threat here at all, to anyone — just success, and the opportunity for more.

We cut the cord about six months ago, and haven’t missed broadcast TV in the slightest (so I hear … I wasn’t watching much TV even before then). I watch Minnesota Vikings games on DAZN and The Grand Tour on Amazon Prime, and that’s just about all my screen time (YouTube and other online video sources more than compensate).

January 31, 2019

Coming soon for Canadians – mandatory maple-flavoured search results

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

Michael Geist relates the ongoing efforts of ACTRA to get the federal government to mandate high visibility for Canadian content in search engines:

The escalating battle being waged for new Internet taxes to fund Canadian content does not stop with proposals for new fees on Internet access and online video services. Cultural groups also want to increase the “discoverability” of Canadian content by mandating its inclusion in search results. According to the ACTRA submission to the broadcast and telecom legislative review panel, it has been calling for search engine regulation for the past 20 years:

    ACTRA stated during the 1999 CRTC process that Internet search engines would become the gateway for consumers to access the vast array of entertainment and information now available from around the world. We argued then the CRTC should regulate them.

It now argues for mandated inclusion of Canadian content in search results for cultural content under threat of economic sanction:

    Regulating search engines would be difficult, but ACTRA recommends the government approach search engines like Google, Bing and others, and request they ensure Canadians are offered some Canadian choices in their search results. While it is neither possible nor appropriate to interfere in the final selection made by individuals, Canadian consumers should have a real choice, including Canadian films, television programs and music. We expect companies would concur with the government’s reasonable request to be seen as good corporate citizens. If a particular search engine does not agree to this request, the government should impose an appropriate regulatory constraint or burden, such as amending the Income Tax Act to discourage Canadians from advertising on search engines that fail to comply.

QotD: Top-down solutions

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

The closest analogy I can think of right now – maybe because it’s on my mind – is this story about check-cashing shops. Professors of social science think these shops are evil because they charge the poor higher rates, so they should be regulated away so that poor people don’t foolishly shoot themselves in the foot by going to them. But on closer inspection, they offer a better deal for the poor than banks do, for complicated reasons that aren’t visible just by comparing the raw numbers. Poor people’s understanding of this seems a lot like the metis that helps them understand local agriculture. And progressives’ desire to shift control to the big banks seems a lot like the High Modernists’ desire to shift everything to a few big farms. Maybe this is a point in favor of something like libertarianism? Maybe especially a “libertarianism of the poor” focusing on things like occupational licensing, not shutting down various services to the poor because they don’t meet rich-people standards, not shutting down various services to the poor because we think they’re “price-gouging”, et cetera?

Maybe instead of concluding that Scott is too focused on peasant villages, we should conclude that he’s focused on confrontations between a well-educated authoritarian overclass and a totally separate poor underclass. Most modern political issues don’t exactly map on to that – even things like taxes where the rich and the poor are on separate sides don’t have a bimodal distribution. But in cases there are literally about rich people trying to dictate to the poorest of the poor how they should live their lives, maybe this becomes more useful.

Actually, one of the best things the book did to me was make me take cliches about “rich people need to defer to the poor on poverty-related policy ideas” more seriously. This has become so overused that I roll my eyes at it. “Quantitative easing could improve GDP growth…but instead of asking macroeconomists, let’s ask this 19-year old single mother in the Bronx!” But Scott provides a lot of situations where that was exactly the sort of person they should have asked. He also points out that Tanzanian natives using their traditional farming practices were more productive than European colonists using scientific farming. I’ve had to listen to so many people talk about how “we must respect native people’s different ways of knowing” and “native agriculturalists have a profound respect for the earth that goes beyond logocentric Western ideals” and nobody had ever bothered to tell me before that they actually produced more crops per acre, at least some of the time. That would have put all of the other stuff in a pretty different light.

Finally, I understand Scott is an anarchist. He didn’t really try to defend anarchism in this book. But I was struck by his description of peasant villages as this unit of government which were happily doing their own thing very effectively for millennia, with the central government’s relevance being entirely negative – mostly demanding taxes or starting wars. They kind of reminded me of some pictures of hunter-gatherer tribes, in terms of being self-sufficient, informal, and just never encountering the sorts of economic and political problems that we take for granted. They make communism (the type with actual communes, not the type where you have huge military parades and kill everyone) look more attractive. I think Scott was trying to imply that this is the sort of thing we could have if not for governments demanding legibility and a world of universal formal rule codes accessible from the center? Since he never actually made the argument, it’s hard for me to critique it. And I wish there had been more about cultural evolution as separate from the more individual idea of metis.

Overall, though, I did like this book. I’m not really sure what I got from its thesis, but maybe that was appropriate. Seeing Like A State was arranged kind of like the premodern forests and villages it describes; not especially well-organized, not really directed toward any clear predetermined goal, but full of interesting things and lovely to spend some time in.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Seeing Like a State”, Slate Star Codex, 2017-03-16.

January 25, 2019

Putting the federal cabinet on a radical diet

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

Earlier this week, Ted Campbell suggested that one (of many) problems Justin Trudeau faces is the sheer size of his cabinet: there are limits to the number of people who can be successfully managed to achieve an organization’s goals by a single person. This is the reason most armies limit the size of their smallest tactical units to at most ten soldiers … much more than that, and the average leader is unable to maintain direct control without delegating sub-groups to subordinates. Running a federal government is a much more complicated task than running an infantry section. He begins by praising what he feels was the best cabinet in federal history:

A friend and regular interlocutor, reacting to a comment I made about a week ago, suggesting that the Trudeau cabinet is still too large, challenged me to look at the “ideal” cabinet. Now, it is certainly no secret that I think the “best” government Canada ever had, in modern times, say during the past century, was a Liberal one, led by Louis St Laurent. It was firmly grounded in liberal political philosophy that was shared, and broadly accepted, by most Canadians; the St Laurent cabinet was determined to govern for the people, for each person, not just to govern the people; it was economically bold but, at the same time, fiscally prudent; it believed, firmly, in a principled foreign policy and a strong enough military to give it the muscle it would need, from time to time; it advanced increasingly progressive social policies, step-by-step, but always in moderation; it was about as competent and as honest as almost any government was ever going to be … bearing in mind that governments are composed of men and women much like us.

This was the St Laurent cabinet:

There is some doubt about the date of this picture; one Government of Canada source says 1948 and another says 1953; the few familiar faces around the table, Douglas Abbott, Brooke Claxton, Brigadier Milton Gregg VC, C.D. Howe and Lester B. Pearson all served throughout that entire period. What is not in doubt is that the cabinet was much smaller than what we see today: fewer than 20 members. Today’s cabinet has over 35 members.

The problems of large cabinets are grounded in two realities: more and more complex issues, especially social issues, and more choices. Louis St. Laurent had between 245 and 265 MPs in the whole House of Commons and he governed with between 118 and 191 Liberal MPs on the government side. Justin Trudeau has a bigger problem: any modern majority government has 170+ members and Canadians are much better informed (or at least aware) of what government might do for (and to) them. He, like every prime minister before him, responds to the challenge by giving every group a voice. The outcome is a larger and larger cabinet. It’s not Justin Trudeau’s fault, it wasn’t Pierre Trudeau’s fault, either.

The correct answer, in my opinion, is a two tier cabinet: senior and junior ministers or an “inner” and “full” cabinet.

January 24, 2019

The latest incarnation of the Canada Food Guide

Filed under: Cancon, Food, Government — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s … not as bad as it could have been, says Chris Selley:

The Canada Food Guide reliably gets a rise out of Canadians who would prefer the government get off our lawns and stop trying to tell us how to live. And the long-awaited update, released Tuesday fully 12 years after the past one, is something of a feast for curmudgeons. In addition to new guidance on what foods we should be consuming — in brief: more plants, fewer animals — it suggests we consider such novel concepts as cooking foods ourselves more often, and eating foods with other people.

Have you considered that if you cook a larger batch of food, you’ll have more food left over to eat at future meals — perhaps having frozen the food and then defrosted it? If you struggle to drink as much water as the guide thinks you should, have you considered that you can “drink it hot or cold”?

I try to keep my curmudgeonly instincts in check. An exercise like this is bound to produce a few silly, infantilizing recommendations. Most countries like Canada have a food guide of sorts. It makes sense that a health ministry would have basic nutritional guidelines on the books to inform institutional policies, not least what kids get fed at schools. Goodness knows you needn’t follow them at home — and indeed, it would surprise me if very many of us do. Modern Western human beings do seem to love being told what to eat, but it’s generally by people with a hell of a lot more charisma than the authors of “Eat well. Live well.” Food porn this ain’t. Protein choices suggested in accompanying photographs include a few tragic slices of skinless chicken, a mighty kebab of three (3) cubes of mystery meat and nothing else, and a portion of salmon to which something brown has happened.

In Canada, “total revenue per GB is roughly 70 times higher than in India and 23 times higher than in Finland”

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

Canadians are used to being screwed by our telecommunications companies, but it’s worse than I thought, as Michael Geist illustrates:

Tefficient, a European-based consultancy on the wireless market, released its latest report this morning comparing pricing and usage in the global wireless market. The data, which incorporates the most recent CRTC numbers on the Canadian market, shows Canada as a global outlier when it comes to the revenues generated by wireless carriers. The report notes the unsurprising correlation between high prices and low data usage:

    There is a prerequisite for continued data usage growth, though: The total revenue per gigabyte can’t be too high – like in Canada and Belgium. The total revenue per gigabyte here is roughly 70 times higher than in India and 23 times higher than in Finland. And consequently, mobile usage is lower than average.

The charts show where Canada stands relative to other countries with carriers generating more revenue per GB than anywhere else in the world and consequently Canada lagging behind many other countries in wireless usage.

Source: https://tefficient.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/tefficient-industry-analysis-3-2018-mobile-data-usage-and-revenue-1H-2018-per-country-final-17-Jan-2019.pdf

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress