The Great War
Published on 2 Apr 2019It’s time for another episode of Beyond The Great War where we answer questions from the community. This time we take a look at the Greater Poland Uprising and the situation of Poland in early 1919, Jesse recommends a few of his favourite history books and we also talk about how veterans were treated after the 1918 armistice.
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Boysen, Jens. “Polish-German Border Conflict”, in 1914-1918 online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War. https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online…Davies, Norman. White Eagle, Red Star. The Polish-Soviet War 1919-1920 and the ‘Miracle on the Vistula’ (London: Pimlico, 2003 [1972]).
Gattrell, Peter. Russia’s First World War (Pearson, 2005).
Gerwarth, Robert. The Vanquished. Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917-1923 (Penguin, 2017).
Horne, John. “The Living,” in Jay Winter, ed. The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 3: Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014): 592-617.
Leonhard, Jörn. Der überforderte Frieden. Versailles und die Welt 1918-1923 (CH Beck, 2018).
Pawlowsky, Verena/Wendelin, Harald. “Government Care of War Widows and Disabled Veterans after World War I,” in: Contemporary Austrian Studies, XIX: From Empire to Republic: Post-World War I Austria, eds. Bischof, Günter/Plasser, Fritz/Berger, Peter (2010): 171-191
Prost, Antoine. “Les anciens combattants”, in Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Jean-Jacques Becker, eds. Encyclopédie de la Grande guerre 1914-1918 (Paris: Bayard, 2013): 1025-1036.
Snyder, Timothy. The Reconstruction of Nations. Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (Yale University Press, 2003).
April 3, 2019
Greater Poland Uprising – Book Picks – Veteran Care I BEYOND THE GREAT WAR
April 2, 2019
How Trains Changed China | Stuff That I Find Interesting
Jabzy
Published on 27 Mar 2016Thanks to Xios, Alan Haskayne, Lachlan Lindenmayer, William Crabb, Derpvic, Seth Reeves and all my other Patrons. If you want to help out – https://www.patreon.com/Jabzy?ty=h
Music by Derek Fiechter – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVRJ…
April 1, 2019
Sean Gabb on the Brexit crisis
In his latest email newsletter, Sean Gabb discusses the Brexit situation:
The consensus in the media appears to be that Parliament is out of control, and is attempting to stop our exit from the European Union – even if this means tearing up every settled constitutional norm. I disagree. No doubt, the House of Commons is filled with some very trashy people, and I have little doubt most of them would like to stay in the European Union. Even so, they are acting collectively with strict constitutional propriety. For the first time in my life, they are earning their inflated salaries and expenses and bribe allowances.
Three years ago, we vote to leave the European Union. The margin was respectable, though not substantial. The Government was therefore given one reasonably difficult job. This was to detach us from the institutions of the European Union, while respecting the wish of a large majority for continued good relations with the European Union. This was difficult, but hardly in the same class as trying to win a war against the greatest military power in the world, or dismantle an Empire, or even reform the structures and financing of local government. The most obvious compromise was to rejoin EFTA and remain in the Single Market, while negotiating a longer term set of arrangements. Most people, I think, would have accepted such a compromise. I would, and I may have written about it at the time.
Instead of doing this, however, Theresa May loaded us with endless vague promises, while negotiating in secret with the European Commission. At the end of two years and six months, she presented us with a draft Withdrawal Agreement that was universally unacceptable. I will not rehearse why it was unacceptable. Everyone has read it for himself, or read a fair summary and critique. When this was presented to the House of Commons, it was overwhelmingly rejected. Why the Labour Party and the various open Remainers voted against it is less important than that they did vote against it. This is why we have a Parliament. It is there to stop the Executive from acting against the public good. It is there to make the voice of the people heard.
Our present set of crises blew up when it emerged that Theresa May had allowed no one to think about any alternative to her Agreement. Her only solution to losing the first vote was to arrange for another, and then for another. Each time, her Agreement was rejected – and rejected, I repeat, for good reasons. But, thanks to her wickedness or stupidity, there were only three options available to Parliament. One was to swallow her Agreement. Another was to leave without any deal. The other was to give up on leaving – to cancel the Referendum result.
[…]
It may be that the plan was to unveil a fraudulent leaving agreement, and to whip this through Parliament, leaving the rest of us to grumble about it for the next generation, though unable to do anything about it. If so, the plan has failed. The problem is not that our ruling class does not want to be bound by the will of the people – this is hardly a novel discovery. The problem is the crude inflexibility of our rulers. The EFTA compromise I and most other people would have accepted three years ago would have allowed any number of quiet understandings in London that let things as they matter to our rulers go on much as before. Instead, they wanted complete victory on their terms, and they planned for no other outcome. No competent strategist or negotiation behaves like this. The Tory ultras did not behave like this in 1832 or 1911. Labour did not behave like this after 1983. On the whole, we are lucky that we have asked these people only to arrange a departure in good order from a customs
union. They might instead have messed up something really important.These crises have been a useful learning experience. Theresa May and the interests she has been chosen to front are both wicked and stupid. Speaking for myself, I think our Members of Parliament – wretched creatures if these may be in themselves – for doing their job and lifting the stone to show the pale and stinking bugs in full light of day. Sooner or later, we shall leave the European Union. This will be a messier and more acrimonious departure than it needed to be. But I suspect that the debate between Leavers and Remainers is turning to a shared demand for our will to be obeyed by the Executive. This is a much wider matter than our membership of the European Union. Leaving is now a symbol of who has the final say in this country. The longer our decadent rulers try to hold firm, the more radical the demands will grow for a reconstruction of the system.
I have no idea what will happen in the next few weeks. But I am glad we have the Parliament that we have.
Alex Noble feels the situation is going pretty much exactly how the EU wanted it to go from the start:
For a few months now I have written about how the EU’s plan is increasingly transparent, and it is becoming possible to anticipate their every move.
I believe we are now so close to the outcome they wargamed a year ago, that the final week is now almost completely predictable.
For what it’s worth, here we go.
[…]
So this coming week, the EU will water down or remove the backstop they never cared about, and the British people will be betrayed into vassalage by their Vichy Parliament.
That’s right – another “breakthrough” is imminent, although I suspect the EU will once again trot out the gap-toothed Belgian bumpkin Verhofstadt to pretend to find the whole affair insulting, so we remember to be properly grateful to his paymasters.
All other options now are just scare tactics – No Brexit, No Deal, long extensions, a general election, a loss of drinking water, or pet food, or medicine – these are all just the Bad Cop act designed to get us to gratefully turn to the Good Cop.
Namely the EU’s Withdrawal Agreement, which as I’ve pointed out is like the Withdrawal Technique in that despite the promises made, it usually involves no actual withdrawal.
We have been herded for nearly a year like scared children towards the EU’s treaty, which imprisons us forever in the EU – it is what they wanted all along, and they have used our government, our MPs (with a few dozen honourable souls still resisting as I write), our media, and the craven statists embedded in our institutions to convince us that the EU’s Withdrawal Agreement represents freedom.
In this coming week, all but a few dozen stalwarts will crumble, and then the only question is whether enough Labour europhiles will cross the House to pass this grotesque betrayal and inflict it on the British people.
At that stage, I wonder whether our cries of fury and anguish will fade into silence, or swell into carnage?
March 30, 2019
The EU’s copyright regulation is a stalking horse for online censorship and control
To the amazement of many non-EU observers, the European Parliament passed blatantly authoritarian and corporatist changes to the rules on copyrights that will have potentially vast impact on the internet across the world, not just inside the EU. At City A.M., Kate Andrews explains why this is such bad news for all internet users:
The two most controversial points in the law – Article 11 and Article 13 – are almost certain to stifle digital activity, and interfere with the free way that people currently use online platforms.
Article 11, known as the “link tax”, would make online platforms compensate press publishers for links and article content posted on their sites.
As my colleague Victoria Hewson highlighted in her latest briefing, this approach has been “widely criticised as a distortive measure that seeks to prop up a declining industry”.
As many local and national newspapers decline in readership and revenue, governments have become increasingly protectionist in their attempts to “rebalance” the sector, by cracking down on online platforms.
The link tax has little merit, even if rebalancing is the goal. News outlets which require payment for readership already have logins and paywalls to protect their content from free access.
[…]
Article 13 will also be distortive to the market, as it makes online platforms increasingly liable for copyright infringement.
As Hewson’s briefing notes, major online platforms already have routine screening processes for content that violates copyright law or their own rules. But the new regulations “remove the protection for platforms previously available if they removed violating content promptly on receiving notice of it, and contravene fundamental rights such as free expression and freedom from monitoring”.
The Directive claims that safeguards – including pastiche, parody, and quotations – will be protected, and that meme content has been excluded.
But the algorithms which these platforms will have to implement to adhere to Article 13 are going to struggle to see the difference between infringement and fair use when comparing uploads to content that is registered as copyrighted.
March 27, 2019
“This was the week it became necessary to destroy the village of good government in order to save it”
It may be hard to believe, but in his latest at Maclean’s, Paul Wells appears to be getting a little bit cynical about recent shenanigans in Ottawa:
We have learned so much. Within minutes Monday afternoon, two good reporters had stories (here and here) about the Chief Justice of Manitoba, who was a candidate to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada and who, later, wasn’t. Both reporters unfurled similar yarns about a lone Prime Minister standing athwart the tide of conservatism by blocking — shudder — a Harper appointee from sitting on the top court. Jody Wilson-Raybould plays the role of villain in the piece.
Both reporters decorously neglect to mention that Trudeau’s choice for Chief Justice, Richard Wagner, was a Harper appointee.There are many things we can say about this story, working outward in concentric rings from the thing itself. First, Glenn Joyal’s views, as expressed in speeches that were said to alarm the prime minister, are almost comically orthodox. I first became aware of the notion that Charter litigation systematically airlifts important matters from the parliamentary arena and into the realm of jurisprudence in a Chantal Hébert column in the late 1990s. If I had paid more attention to literally any of my Canadian public administration profs a decade earlier I would have caught the argument then, because it is canvassed in every Canadian political science class. This is not wild-eyed Hayekism.
Second, perhaps the many thousands of Canadians who have applied for federal government appointments under what they thought was a confidential process, introduced by this prime minister, will want to contemplate a class-action suit against him. Because it is now radiantly clear to each of them that their CV is being held hostage by a claque of embattled sorcerers’ apprentices who will cheerfully wheel it over the transom to any waiting scribe if anything about them — their opinions, a fallen political star’s unfortunate decision to argue for their advancement — becomes politically inconvenient. This is the very stuff of the police state.
It was immediately fashionable to wonder on social media how everyone would react if Stephen Harper had done such a thing. It’s germane to note that Stephen Harper never did. Because he had more class. Welcome to the Tet offensive of Charter rights: This was the week it became necessary to destroy the village of good government in order to save it.
Third, Justice Joyal’s wife was in poor health. Apparently we are to believe that 9,000 jobs depended on your knowing that.
If the Trudeau government is not the source of the leak, I assume we will see spectacular efforts deployed in the next 36 hours to find the leaker. Mark Norman-scale efforts. But I’m pretty sure that we needn’t hold our breath, because the government is the source of the leak; that the amiable chap who currently sits in the office once occupied by the Attorney General of Canada will not bestir himself to question Monday’s sickening attack on due process; and that the leak will actually be roundly applauded by the ambient cloud of Liberal and Liberal-adjacent opinion, which became self-aware this weekend and decided Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott are a virus endangering the party’s re-election chances and must therefore be stopped.
March 23, 2019
“[T]he Withdrawal Agreement … resembles the surrender terms that might be offered to a vanquished enemy”
Alex Noble isn’t a fan of the surrender document Withdrawal Agreement:
Let’s be clear – The Withdrawal Agreement is poorly-named.
It does not involve withdrawing from the EU in any meaningful sense, but instead commits us to Remaining within the EU and strips the UK of any future self-determination. It removes from the UK control of any future departure from the EU, and places it in the hands of those who reside in the building in Brussels with the statute of Europa outside – a woman riding a bull, keen students of the Book of Revelation may notice.
To this extent, the Withdrawal Agreement is actually a treaty for staying in the EU – it resembles quite closely the surrender terms that might be offered to a vanquished enemy, or the document that might be initially given to a small country wishing to join the EU.
Like say, Scotland.
One wonders if the EU wrote it in the run-up to the independence vote of 2014, threw it on a shelf when the Scots voted to stay in the UK, and then Angela Merkel simply tossed it across the desk at her puppet Theresa May at their meeting the day before it was announced at Chequers?
If the EU was a lending institution, this would not be a lengthy mortgage offered at a very low fixed rate, to a woman of considerable status, means and integrity (as might be expected of a deal offered to the fifth-largest economy in the world, the second-largest in Europe and the EU’s biggest customer), but is instead deeply punitive, almost insulting, perhaps comparable to a payday loan.
The Withdrawal Agreement is actually The Wonga Agreement.
And this is to be expected of course, because while Britain leaving the EU would be a disaster, Britain leaving the EU and thriving would mean the end of the generational attempt at reviving communism at the heart of Europe – many other countries (and the richer ones at that) would all suddenly be demanding the same terms and the EUSSR would fracture irreparably.
And at that point, all the ex-communists currently gorging at the trough in Brussels would have to accept the death of their dream.
If Britain left and thrived.
So the EUSSR can only survive Britain’s departure if it is made into a disaster for the UK.
Which meant they simply could not offer us a good deal, even if they had wanted to.
The NHS, Britain’s “national treasure”, gets panned by other EU patients who’ve experienced non-NHS care
In The Conversation, Chris Moreh, Athina Vlachantoni, and Derek McGhee report that — contrary to British myth-making — the National Health Service isn’t the envy of the civilized world:
Britain’s National Health Service is often described as a “national treasure”. And it is a sentiment those on the left and the right of the political divide agree on. The British public are so proud of the NHS, they made it the central theme of the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games.
But this pride has also been coupled with fears that the universal healthcare provided by the NHS might be taken advantage of by patients from outside the UK. A few months after the Olympics, the then health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, felt the need to clarify that “we are a national health service, not an international health service”. The 2015 election-winning manifesto of the Conservative party made this point even clearer when it pledged to “tackle health tourism” and “recover up to £500m from migrants who use the NHS”.
But our research shows that while the NHS may be a national treasure to British people, EU migrants would rather be treated in their countries of origin. As a 38-year-old woman from Germany put it: “Sorry, NHS? No thanks.” And the reasons for rejecting the NHS? A 25-year-old man from the Netherlands says it’s because the “NHS is slow and the medical care mediocre”. Or, at least, it “is rather poor compared to healthcare in my country,” says a 45-year-old woman from Germany.
But why should British people worry about what EU migrants think of their health service? What EU migrants think and choose is important because they are familiar with at least two European healthcare systems. They have the information and personal experience that most British citizens do not. There is a lot to be learnt from them.
March 22, 2019
Understanding the Great Depression
Marginal Revolution University
Published on 23 May 2017In this video, we examine the causes behind the Great Depression with the help of the aggregate demand-aggregate supply model.
In 1929, the stock market crashed and an air of pessimism swept across America — making bank depositors nervous. What would you do if you thought your money might not be safe with the bank? You’d probably want it back in your own hands. What happened next? A run on the banks.
Along with the Stock Market Crash of 1929, it’s one of the iconic moments of the early days of Great Depression. However, the Great Depression was an incredibly complex downturn in which the economy experienced a series of aggregate demand shocks. By the end of this video, you’ll walk away with a better understanding of the many factors behind the Great Depression and how to apply the AD-AS model to a real-world scenario.
March 21, 2019
“It’s back to normal, basically. The emperor is naked. Votes are for sale. Caveat emptor“
Chris Selley somehow seems, I dunno, a bit … cynical about Prime Minister Trudeau and Finance Minister Morneau’s 2019 federal (election) budget:
Ahoy there, relatively young and middle-class Canadian! Did you vote Liberal in 2015? And are you, shall we say, somewhat less enthused about that prospect four years later, for various reasons we needn’t go into here?
Now, what if Justin Trudeau were to offer you a down payment on a shiny new condominium?
Well, that’s just the kind of guy he is. Starting this year, so long as your household income is below $120,000, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation will pitch in 5 per cent of the price of your first home — 10 per cent if it’s a new home, the construction of which the government hopes to incentivize.
That’s Item One in the 460-page federal budget tabled Tuesday in Ottawa.
On a new $400,000 condo, you could put down your own $20,000; CMHC would chip in another $40,000; and your monthly mortgage payment, on a 25-year term at 3.25 per cent, would drop by a not inconsiderable 12 per cent. You would reimburse CMHC, interest-free, if and when you sell. Cost to the taxpayer: $121 million over six years.
If you’re worried giving home-seekers free money might just push the price of a $400,000 condominium nearer to $440,000, Finance Minister Bill Morneau would first of all like you to stop. (“You’re wrong,” he admonished a reporter who dared suggest it during a press conference in the budget lockup Tuesday.) But if all else fails and you’re forced to rent, the feds also found $10 billion extra over nine years to throw at the Rental Construction Financing Initiative, a CMHC program that offers low-interest loans to qualified builders. The goal is 42,500 new rental units in a decade.
Can’t even think of home ownership until you pay off your student loans? Again, the government is here to help: From now on you’ll pay the Bank of Canada’s prime interest rate, instead of prime plus 2.5 points. And for the first six months after you graduate, you’ll pay nothing. The budget document introduces us to Angela, a recent psychology grad carrying $13,500 in student debt who landed a job at “a medium-sized consumer goods company.” (It doesn’t matter where she works. The writers just wanted to add some colour.) Angela will save something like $2,000 in interest over 10 years.
There’s also the new Canada Training Benefit, which the government intends to help Canadians with “the evolving nature of work.” (Maybe your parents were right, Angela. Maybe that psych degree wasn’t the best idea, Angela.) Starting in 2020, the feds will chip in $250 a year, and you can use the accumulated credit to pay up to half the cost of courses or training. And you can draw on up to four weeks of EI to complete it.
March 20, 2019
A Supreme Court case that created huge sales tax problems for online firms
Eric Boehm explains why an obscure US Supreme Court ruling is making life extremely complicated for thousands and thousands of online businesses:
… Until last year, that meant Heitman was responsible for collecting and paying sales taxes to exactly one place: the Wisconsin Department of Revenue. But thanks to an under-the-radar ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in June, he’s now receiving letters, phone calls, and emails from revenue officials across the country, each wanting a piece of his business.
The source of Heitman’s frustrations is Wayfair v. South Dakota, which allowed states to collect sales taxes from online businesses located beyond their borders. Many states view the Wayfair ruling as a potential tax revenue windfall in which the taxes are paid by non-residents who can’t vote against them. That’s why businesses like Heitman’s are now facing the chilling prospect of owing taxes in dozens, and possibly hundreds, of different jurisdictions — while being hounded by out-of-state tax collectors.
Since the Supreme Court issued its ruling in June, Heitman has been scrambling to become compliant with tax commissions and revenue departments from coast to coast. He’s spent thousands of dollars on new software to help navigate the complexities of state sales tax law, but that’s only been so much help. “It almost seems like I have another full time job dumped on me with this sales tax thing,” he says. “It’s burning me out.”
As the 2019 tax season begins, states are ramping up efforts to squeeze extra revenue out of remote retailers like Heitman, putting an expensive new burden on businesses that have found broad customer bases online. The burden is particularly large in the five U.S. states that charge no sales tax, where entrepreneurs could now be charged with paying a tax they have never had to pay before, to a government over which they have no voice. And while Congress could clean up the Supreme Court’s mess, it’s far from certain that it will.
Warren Meyer points out that it’s not just the individual states who are taking advantage of this windfall opportunity to collect taxes from non-residents:
Like most writers, Mr. Boehm actually understates the problem. Because the potential exists not to have 50 new taxing authorities for every sales, but thousands. I have to deal with this every day. I wrote a while back:
Take Arizona, which seems from my experience to be roughly average. The sales tax rate table is 18 pages long in a small font. There are 29 separate rate categories which each have different rates in each of Arizona’s 15 counties. My business is in 6 counties and we have 3 rate categories that apply, or 4 if you consider items with no tax as another rate category. This is 24 different state/county sales tax rates we charge. But that is the easy part. Because then there are, in addition to county taxes, 92 different towns and cities that have their own rate tables with up to 29 different rate categories that add to the base state/county rate. Other states such as Washington (rule of thumb — if the state has no income tax then it has a LABYRINTHIAN sales and business tax systems) have additional overlay taxes such as for transit and stadium districts.
When my company opens a new location, we have to spend hours on the Internet and with maps trying to figure out what sales taxes to collect, and even with good due diligence we sometimes get it wrong and find in an audit we are actually just inside or outside some line where the rate changes (we once had a location 30 miles outside of Seattle on a long dirt road where we found we had to collect the Seattle Rapid Transit tax). Thatcher, AZ is a town of like 4000 people but has its own special sales tax rates — do you know where the town line is? Well neither do they, because last time I checked they did not have any sort of online lookup system to tell one automatically if the address is inside or outside the town and its sales tax district…
But even after registering in all 50 states, you are STILL not done, because many states don’t have a fully unified sales tax collection system. In Arizona, for example, the larger cities require their own registration and monthly reporting.
Meyer is operating a company that has physical assets and employees in each of the states and lesser jurisdictions to which taxes are due. Internet businesses generally only have physical assets in a single state, yet an expansive reading of the Wayfair ruling (the type of reading most jurisdictions will prefer) makes them liable for taxes almost everywhere.
March 18, 2019
QotD: The eternal bad bet that was feudalism
From time immemorial, the reigning myth of rule has been that the rulers provide a quid pro quo: in exchange for the people’s submission and payment of tribute, the rulers protect the people from the enemies who lurk “out there.” The promise was often unfulfilled, however. The lord of the manor might well flee into his castle, leaving the peasants outside the walls to suffer whatever outrages an invader chose to wreak on them. Or the lord might haul them off to a distant war in which they had no real interest, merely to satisfy the lord’s feudal obligation to the baron or duke just above him in the feudal pecking order.
Most important, however, is the sheer fact that the ordinary people’s most dangerous enemy, the one by far the most likely to plunder and abuse them, was their own impudent lord, the selfsame “nobleman” who forbade them to leave their place of birth or to engage in a variety of tasks and pleasures they might prefer — that is, the man who held and exploited them in a condition of serfdom.
Robert Higgs, “I Reject the Right of the Government to Choose My Friends and Enemies for Me”, The Beacon, 2017-04-03.
March 16, 2019
MMT – Magic Money Theory
Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan explain just why so many progressives are so excited about MMT:
Modern Monetary Theory, or MMT, is all the rage in the halls of Congress lately.
To hear the Progressive left tell it, MMT is not unlike a goose that keeps laying golden eggs. All we have to do is pick up all the free money. This is music to politicians’ ears, but Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is singing a decidedly different tune. Said Powell recently on MMT, “The idea that deficits don’t matter for countries that can borrow in their own currency … is just wrong.”
MMT advocates see this as outdated thinking. We can, they claim, spend as much as we want on whatever we want, unencumbered by trivialities like how much we have. But MMT is a bait-and-switch wrapped in a sleight-of-hand. It focuses on debt and dollars rather than resources and products. Debt and dollars are merely tools we use to transfer ownership of resources and products. It’s the resources and products that matter. Shuffling debt and dollars merely changes the ownership of resources and products. It doesn’t create more.
[…]
So here’s the sleight of hand. MMT advocates say that we won’t experience inflation because the U.S. dollar is a reserve currency — foreigners hold lots of U.S. dollars. First, increasing the money supply, other things constant, does create inflation. But when a reserve currency inflates, the pain gets spread around the world instead of being concentrated within one country. In short, MMT advocates believe our government should print money and let foreigners bear some of the inflation pain. Second, there’s no law that says that the U.S. dollar must be a reserve currency. The British Pound was one, but as its value declined, foreigners stopped holding it. Foreigners will stop holding U.S. dollars too as their value declines.
And here’s the bait-and-switch. MMTers say that if inflation does become a problem, the government can simply raise tax rates to soak up excess dollars. In short, the government would print money with one hand, buying whatever it wants and causing inflation. It would then tax with the other, thereby removing dollars from the economy and counteracting the inflation. In the end, all that’s happened is that the government has replaced goods and services that people want with goods and services politicians want.
After a bout of MMT, we might have the same GDP and zero inflation, but what constitutes that GDP would have changed dramatically. Instead of having more cars and houses, we might have more tanks and border walls.
March 10, 2019
There’s something bigger at stake in the SNC-Lavalin affair than Trudeau’s career
Chris Selley explains why SNC-Lavalin is an example of Canada’s less-than-stellar record of holding corporations to account:
… University of Michigan law professor David Uhlmann argues in a 2016 paper, “criminal prosecution of corporations upholds the rule of law, validates the choices of law-abiding companies, and promotes accountability. … When corporations face no consequences for their criminal behavior, we minimize their lawlessness, and increase cynicism about the outsized influence of corporations.”
No kidding. And in a country like Canada, not to say a province like Quebec, it’s safe to say these lines of accountability and trust get severely tangled. Once a government deems any company “too big to fail,” whether it’s because of political donations or connections, or because its pension plan is heavily invested, or because it has acquired a creepy semi-sacred status among otherwise normal people — or indeed, because of an alleged 9,000 jobs — all these nice theories about the rule of law break down. That’s what we’ve been witnessing.
But there’s an even bigger breakdown going on that’s received far less attention. Employees allegedly behind Lavalin’s Libyan capers were criminally charged as well. Between them, former vice-president Sami Bebawi and former controller Stéphane Roy faced charges including defrauding the Libyan state, money laundering, violating UN sanctions, bribing Saadi Gadhafi — Moammar’s soccer-playing, Montreal-enjoying third son — and trying to extract him from Libya once it all kicked off in 2011.
Those charges were laid in February 2014. Last month, some against Bebawi and all against Roy were dismissed because the Crown didn’t manage to bring them to trial in five blessed years. In a scathing decision, judge Patricia Compagnone characterized the Crown’s behaviour as a perfect illustration of the “culture of complacency” and the “culture of delays” the Supreme Court had assailed in its landmark 2016 Jordan decision, which established empirical standards for the Charter right “to be tried within a reasonable time.”
It is an ever-more-curious mystery that Canada’s comprehensively screwed-up justice system never rises to the level of political crisis. In the first year after the Jordan decision alone, some 200 cases were thrown out on grounds of excessive delays. Some of the accused make the Friends of Moammar look like saints. They include alleged murderers, child molesters and drunk drivers.
The charges against SNC-Lavalin were laid in February 2015. More than four years later, we’re still fighting over whether to pursue them — and not, it must be said, in a way that makes us look like a terribly serious country. How nauseatingly fitting it would be if a court threw the case out before the feds even got a chance to decide what to do with it.
March 9, 2019
QotD: “Scientific” urban planning versus messy, unscientific, evolved town growth
Natural organically-evolved cities tend to be densely-packed mixtures of dark alleys, tiny shops, and overcrowded streets. Modern scientific rationalists came up with a better idea: an evenly-spaced rectangular grid of identical giant Brutalist apartment buildings separated by wide boulevards, with everything separated into carefully-zoned districts. Yet for some reason, whenever these new rational cities were built, people hated them and did everything they could to move out into more organic suburbs. And again, for some reason the urban planners got promoted, became famous, and spread their destructive techniques around the world.
Ye olde organically-evolved peasant villages tended to be complicated confusions of everybody trying to raise fifty different crops at the same time on awkwardly shaped cramped parcels of land. Modern scientific rationalists came up with a better idea: giant collective mechanized farms growing purpose-bred high-yield crops and arranged in (say it with me) evenly-spaced rectangular grids. Yet for some reason, these giant collective farms had lower yields per acre than the old traditional methods, and wherever they arose famine and mass starvation followed. And again, for some reason governments continued to push the more “modern” methods, whether it was socialist collectives in the USSR, big agricultural corporations in the US, or sprawling banana plantations in the Third World.
Traditional lifestyles of many East African natives were nomadic, involving slash-and-burn agriculture in complicated jungle terrain according to a bewildering variety of ad-hoc rules. Modern scientific rationalists in African governments (both colonial and independent) came up with a better idea – resettlment of the natives into villages, where they could have modern amenities like schools, wells, electricity, and evenly-spaced rectangular grids. Yet for some reason, these villages kept failing: their crops died, their economies collapsed, and their native inhabitants disappeared back into the jungle. And again, for some reason the African governments kept trying to bring the natives back and make them stay, even if they had to blur the lines between villages and concentration camps to make it work.
Why did all of these schemes fail? And more importantly, why were they celebrated, rewarded, and continued, even when the fact of their failure became too obvious to ignore? Scott gives a two part answer.
The first part of the story is High Modernism, an aesthetic taste masquerading as a scientific philosophy. The High Modernists claimed to be about figuring out the most efficient and high-tech way of doing things, but most of them knew little relevant math or science and were basically just LARPing being rational by placing things in evenly-spaced rectangular grids.
But the High Modernists were pawns in service of a deeper motive: the centralized state wanted the world to be “legible”, ie arranged in a way that made it easy to monitor and control. An intact forest might be more productive than an evenly-spaced rectangular grid of Norway spruce, but it was harder to legislate rules for, or assess taxes on.
The state promoted the High Modernists’ platitudes about The Greater Good as cover, in order to implement the totalitarian schemes they wanted to implement anyway. The resulting experiments were usually failures by the humanitarian goals of the Modernists, but resounding successes by the command-and-control goals of the state. And so we gradually transitioned from systems that were messy but full of fine-tuned hidden order, to ones that were barely-functional but really easy to tax.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Seeing Like a State”, Slate Star Codex, 2017-03-16.
March 5, 2019
If Brexit doesn’t happen, will there be a meaningful reaction?
The British government under Prime Minister Theresa May believes — or appears to believe — that with sufficient delay, muddle, and obfuscation, the voters will mutter and grumble but in the end do nothing. David Betz and MLR Smith believe differently:
What do you get when you have a Conservative party that doesn’t conserve, a Labour party that doesn’t represent the interests of the working class, and a Liberal Democrat Party that is neither liberal nor democratic?
The answer is, a pretty accurate description of the current British political landscape. Here are different kinds of political ice cream for sale, but when licked they all turn out to have roughly the same unpalatable taste: a bland, socially progressive, anti-traditionalist, globalist, corporatist flavour. And, you the people, don’t ask for anything else! We know how to make ice cream. You don’t.
Of course, it is Brexit and the reactions of the political classes to it, that most clearly reveals the startling democratic deficit in the United Kingdom. Brexit is, though, not the cause of political strife. It is merely the symptom that has brought these latent anti-democratic inclinations to the surface. Arguably, they have always been there in one form or another since ancient times.
In November 2016, Nigel Farage told the BBC’s Andrew Marr: ‘Believe you me, if the people in the country think they’re going to be cheated, they’re going to be betrayed, then we will see political anger the likes of which none of us in our lifetimes have ever witnessed in this country’. It was an obvious point and true. Yet the striking thing about such a warning has been the degree to which national politicians and media have tried to ignore it.
How, we might wonder, has it all come to this and, just as vitally, what are the possible long-term consequences?
The government is gambling that reaction will be fierce, but localized and short-lived, and that the establishment can ride out the storm with little or no real problem. They may be seriously underestimating the anger and resentment of a voting public who are being explicitly denied the outcome they chose. But will there be serious outbreaks of violence?
Cumulatively, over the past three decades, then, the empirically demonstrable lesson is that violence and threats work. Crudely, there is simply no arguing with the fact that violence is the deus ex machina for changing the way people think and act. Physical force is a method of political communication, and when it is sustained it invariably succeeds in changing minds and changing policies.
Under the threat of violence, it is often easier for governments to knuckle under for the sake of maintaining a semblance of peace, to wax piously about societal cohesion and resilience, and to climb onwards as though the status quo ante were not crumbling beneath them. The progressive factions of academia, culture, and media cheer them for it. So, if the populace don’t really react in the face of such threats and actual violence, and merely light candles and hug teddy bears, then the bet of the political classes is sustained. They have gambled correctly.
But do enough people feel that violence is their only resort when the government refuses to do what the voters want? Might things go beyond mere loud, angry protests and transition towards rioting? Worse?
Thus, we come to the ultimate gamble of the political class, one that appears strongly to be operative in the minds of many in Parliament, namely, that Britons do not rebel and, therefore, faced with a fait accompli they will lump it even if they do not like it. Unlike the French, Italians, or Germans each of which nation is prone in its own way to violent mass spasms of political passion, the British are a phlegmatic people given to the sensible path. So the cliché goes.
It is true to an extent that revolution is a continental phenomenon that does not travel well across the English Channel — British governments have been better at responding to incipient uprisings, sometimes deflecting them, betimes co-opting their leaders, but mostly muddling through by accommodating their demands within the parameters of the status quo. This is a system that has succeeded precisely because parliamentary democracy, for over 300 years now, is able to internalise the will of the people, even when faced with threats of violent revolt, be it in the demands of Chartists, Irish nationalists or suffragettes.
Should we be so sanguine to believe that the British political system, for so long a beacon of stability, is immune from the turbulence that has afflicted other societies? As Remainers are so keen to remind us, we are not an island whose fortunes and follies are separate from those of our near-neighbours. If people, goods, and ideas flow freely across the borders of Europe why should not the concept of the Yellow Jackets too? White Van Man voted strongly for Brexit, after all. Why should there be an Alternative for Germany movement but not an alternative for Britain, even though the people were asked to choose one and did?
