Quotulatiousness

August 14, 2018

Ontario embraces online sales for marijuana, with retail stores to follow in 2019

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Selley on the Ontario government’s surprisingly sensible approach to phasing in retail sales of cannabis over the next eight months:

Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government called a brief truce in its multi-front war with the federal Liberals on Monday to give one of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s signature policies a major boost: as had been widely rumoured, the Tories will scrap the previous Liberal government’s tentative public marijuana retail scheme and instead hand out licenses to the private sector.

How many licenses and what kinds of stores are just two of many unresolved details. The government says it will consult widely to determine how best to proceed, with a target opening date for licensed brick-and-mortar stores of April 1, 2019 (with publicly run online sales to commence in October). But it seems safe to hope the cap, if any, will be significantly higher than the previous government’s laughably timid 150.

Thanks to Toronto’s reluctantly laissez-faire approach to illegal storefront (nudge-wink) “medical” marijuana “dispensaries,” we know 150 might not even satisfy a free market in the country’s largest city. Trudeau has always said the goal of legalization was to smash the illegal market and plunk down a legal one in its place. The Ontario Liberals’ plan seemed almost tailor-made to fail in that endeavour.

There remains ample room for the new government to screw this up. But if it gets pricing and regulation and enforcement halfway right, the country’s most populous province should now be well placed to give legalization a good shot at achieving what proponents have always said it should — which is, basically, to make it like booze. Of course kids still get their hands on booze, but at least it’s a bit of a chore. And at least when kids get drunk, they’re not drinking moonshine.

The need to claim the retail market from the existing extra-legal networks will hinge on quality, availability and (especially) the prices that the province sets. Price it too high (pun unintentional), and the legal market will not take over distribution and sales from the black market. Provide poor quality and get the same results. Restrict sales too stringently, and watch the profits go back to the current dealers … who are not noted for their sensibilities about selling drugs to the under-aged.

In the meantime, it’s interesting to ponder why they’re going in this direction. Fedeli and Attorney-General Caroline Mulroney were at great pains Monday to stress their primary concern was the children.

“First and foremost, we want to protect our kids,” said Mulroney. “There will be no compromise, no expense spared, to ensure that our kids will be protected following the legalization of the drug.”

“Under no circumstances — none — will we tolerate anybody sharing, selling or otherwise providing cannabis to anybody under the age of 19,” said Mulroney. Fedeli vowed that even a single sale to a minor would void a retailer’s license.

Yet, let’s be honest, kids well under the age of 19 can already get cannabis and other illicit drugs — more so in urban and suburban areas, but it’s hard to imagine that legalizing cannabis for 19-plus customers somehow magically renders the under-19s uninterested in getting access, too.

August 7, 2018

Grasping at straws to virtue signal

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

Richard Morrison points out just how banning plastic straws will not do anything meaningful to save the environment, but will definitely have a negative impact on consumers:

Of all the consumer products one might have expected to become a flashpoint for political controversy, the humble plastic drinking straw is an unlikely contender. Leap into the headlines it has, though, with communities like Seattle and San Francisco recently enacting bans on disposable straws. The city council of Santa Barbara, California, initially voted for a ban that would have punished restaurant workers with up to six months of jail time for giving out a disposable plastic straw, but city officials agreed to revisit the ordinance when it appeared to also ban the sale of straws at supermarkets.

[…] the case against the plastic straw is exceedingly weak. There aren’t as many plastic straws thrown away as claimed, and only a tiny portion of U.S. straws end up anywhere near the oceans — the vast majority of municipal solid waste in this country ends up either buried in landfills, recycled, or burned up in incinerators, far from any congested sea turtles.

The vast majority of plastic waste in oceans actually comes not from advanced countries like the U.S. but from countries like China and Indonesia that consume a large volume of plastic products but lack our modern waste collection infrastructure. Much of their plastic waste ends up washed into major river systems that empty into the oceans. A study published last year in the journal Environment Science & Technology by three German researchers found that 90 percent of the plastic debris found in the world’s oceans is dumped there by just ten of the world’s rivers — none of which are in the Western Hemisphere, much less the United States.

Beside the fact that U.S. consumers are contributing very little to the ostensible problem is the other side of the equation: the benefits of the straws themselves. I suspect many Americans who were initially receptive to the idea of a ban were genuinely surprised to learn that disposable drinking straws are very important to people with certain disabilities. British disability rights activist Penny Pepper recently commented in the Guardian about how she depends on plastic straws — and other single-use, disposable products like baby wipes — writing “I don’t have the luxury of a plastic-free life.” The durability, convenience, cleanliness, low price, and resistance to heat of disposable plastic straws make them irreplaceable to people with many different physical limitations.

Vancouver, as any Canadian would have guessed, was the first Canadian city to pick up on this particular variant of virtue signalling.

July 31, 2018

A gruesome experiment in determining the actual need for social housing

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

Tim Worstall discusses an aspect of the terrible Grenfell Tower fire in London that I hadn’t considered:

The fire at Grenfell Tower in London, 14 June 2017.
Photo by Natalie Oxford via Wikimedia Commons

That the Grenfell Tower fire was a tragedy is obvious. That lessons need to be learned is equally so. At which point, OK, which lessons would we like to learn? One that would be useful is to work out how much of social housing in London – for that’s what the evidence allows us to estimate – is illegally sublet. Or, as we might also put it, how much social housing in London is not actually needed as social housing?

For sublets are, by their nature, at something close to market rents, the difference between those and the social rents being pocketed by those doing the renting out.

No, we don’t know and that might be just because we’ve not been paying the detailed attention required. But it’s also something we tend to think will have been glossed over in investigations into the events. Something that perhaps should not have been glossed over – if indeed it has.

[…] The thought that a place, in the centre of London, where we could house – safely perhaps this time – several hundred people not be used to house several hundred people? We have a housing shortage or not?

However, it’s the insight into that larger question that interests. We know that some amount of social (and or council) housing in London is illegally sublet. The very fact that it is shows that it’s not needed. Those who are paying the landlord a reduced rent clearly don’t need the property as they’re not living in it. Those paying the near market rents don’t need social housing as they’re paying near market rents. Thus subletting shows that the entire structure of – at least in that instance – the social rent isn’t necessary.

So, how prevalent is it? We know that some of it occurred at Grenfell. We’ve all admitted it, clearly, for we’ve not insisted that only those on the tenants’ listing are those who should be granted aid for having had their home burned down. So, we know there’s some. So, how much?

It’s unlikely that we’ve as much information on this concerning any other building in the country. Thus this is an excellent place to actually conduct such research.

July 27, 2018

Toronto’s proposed handgun ban is a feelgood/do nothing distraction

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

Every time there’s a tragedy, there are calls from the local media for politicians to “do something”. Politicians are hard-wired to want to “do something” even without prompting. They want (and need, for electoral purposes) to be seen to be “doing something”, if only to divert any blamecasting away from themselves. The most recent tragedy was a senseless shooting on Toronto’s Danforth in the Greektown district. The shooter, who was either killed by police or committed suicide shortly after the attack, was apparently not a legal gun owner, and under current gun laws would not have been able to obtain a handgun. So, in the wake of the tragic deaths and injuries, Toronto city council jumped into action to be seen “doing something”. Chris Selley explains why the proposed ban of handgun and ammunition sales in the city will not make a difference, except to punish non-criminals:

The whiz-bang solution on everyone’s lips — from Mayor Tory to city councillors to the Toronto Star’s and Globe and Mail’s editorial boards and the usual activists — is to ban handguns. Tory admits there is no “magic wand” that will solve Toronto’s gun problem. But still he asks: “Why does anyone in this city need to have a gun at all?”

The idea has a very superficial appeal. We all wish the Danforth shooter hadn’t managed to get a hold of a gun. Toronto is having a bad year for shootings — not much worse than last year, but at the wrong end of a distinct and steady five-year-trend. (At this point in 2014 there had been 101 shootings and 127 fatalities; so far in 2018 there have been 228 shootings and 308 fatalities.) It is understandable (if not entirely creditable) that the Danforth shooting would have rapidly intensified demands for something to be done: the victim count was high, and it happened in a wealthy part of town where it would have been easy to pretend there wasn’t a problem at all.

Still, the limitations of a “handgun ban” are both many and obvious. When Canadian police forces occasionally report on the sources of crime guns, they often find the vast majority have been smuggled across the border. In Toronto nowadays, the number is reportedly more like 50 per cent; the rest of the supply comes from licensed handgun owners who sell them on illegally — a spectacularly risky thing to do, as any used in crimes would be instantly traced back to the registered owner, but apparently worth it to some.

But we all know how permeable the Canada-U.S. border is. If we made it impossible to own a handgun legally in Canada, is there any reason to suspect the cross-border flow couldn’t regain its market share? Furthermore, CTV reported Wednesday that the Danforth shooter’s handgun was prohibited — i.e., it could never have been licensed in Canada — and that he had obtained it from some gang associates. If true, his carnage illustrates the limitations of handgun bans better than it does their efficacy.

July 26, 2018

The Trump tariffs are working exactly as designed

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

That is, they’re becoming a drag on the economy and will take away a lot of the economic activity that was stimulated by the tax cuts enacted earlier. Warren Meyer says that it’s time that congress reclaimed the tariff powers it has outsourced to the executive branch over the years:

I Know Congress Hates To Challenge A President of Its Own Party, But…

…Congress simply has to pare back the tariff authority it has delegated the President. It is simply insane that Trump can just unilaterally impose 20% tariffs on foreign automobiles, a $200 billion new tax on US consumers.

It is appalling to see Trump following the usual blue model of economic regulation, imposing one intervention after another, each meant to fix the unintended consequences of the last intervention. Steel tariffs increased costs to domestic auto makers, so Trump proposes tariffs on foreign autos. When tariffs result (inevitably) in counter-tariffs on US agricultural exports, Trump proposes more agricultural subsidies. People (not me) lament gridlock in government and want more fluid lawmaking — well here it is. And it sucks. It is mindless and reactive and emotional and totally ignorant of economics.

These tariffs, when combined with earlier actions, will result in tax increases on consumers that swamp the tax cuts Trump and the Republicans were so proud of last year.

Jon Gabriel on the most recent “fix” for one of those unintended consequences:

A few months back, President Trump declared that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” Now, just as nearly every economist on the left and right predicted, Americans are being hurt.

The White House slapped tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. China retaliated with planned tariffs on soybeans, meats and various agricultural products. Mexico, Canada and the European Union also struck back at farm goods and other U.S. exports.

A smart leader would notice his mistake and end the destructive policy. Instead, Trump declared that “tariffs are the greatest” and created a multibillion-dollar federal program to mitigate a small part of the mess he created.

Since Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue estimated $11 billion in damage to the industry, he announced a $12 billion payoff to make up the difference.

The administration used emergency executive powers created during the Great Depression; that way Congress wouldn’t get to weigh in.

“This is obviously a short-term solution that will give President Trump time to work on a long-term trade policy and deal to benefit agriculture as well as all sectors of the American economy,” Perdue told reporters.

It’s certainly short-term, but hardly a solution. Trade deals and networks are disrupted, farmers can’t plan for the future, and non-agricultural industries are still losing money. Not to mention all the American consumers watching prices rise on all sorts of household goods.

But red states have a lot of farmers and the midterms are just three months away. Maybe borrowing a few billion dollars will hide enough economic pain to convince voters to keep Republicans in power for two more years.

July 22, 2018

QotD: A touching naivety

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

… the typical “Progressive” continues to imagine the state to exist in the same way that a four-year old child imagines Santa Claus to exist: as a super-human force for good that possesses a supernatural capacity for pursuing and achieving that good. There is, in practice, no epistemological difference between the belief of many children that dusk on December 24th causes reindeer to fly and the belief of many adults that minimum-wage legislation causes the incomes of all low-skilled workers to rise. Higher-skilled workers, and the labor unions that represent them – as well as some firms that use fewer low-skilled workers than are used by their competitors – are only too happy to promote this juvenile fantasy.

Don Boudreaux, “Bonus Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2016-09-04.

July 20, 2018

Fiat currency and the impact of cryptocurrencies

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

At Catallaxy Files, Sinclair Davidson explains some of the advantages and disadvantages of both fiat (government-issued) and private currency:

As George Selgin, Larry White and others have shown, many historical societies had systems of private money — free banking — where the institution of money was provided by the market.

But for the most part, private monies have been displaced by fiat currencies, and live on as a historical curiosity.

We can explain this with an ‘institutional possibility frontier’; a framework developed first by Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer and his various co-authors. Shleifer and colleagues array social institutions according to how they trade-off the risks of disorder (that is, private fraud and theft) against the risk of dictatorship (that is, government expropriation, oppression, etc.) along the frontier.

As the graph shows, for money these risks are counterfeiting (disorder) and unexpected inflation (dictatorship). The free banking era taught us that private currencies are vulnerable to counterfeiting, but due to competitive market pressure, minimise the risk of inflation.

By contrast, fiat currencies are less susceptible to counterfeiting. Governments are a trusted third party that aggressively prosecutes currency fraud. The tradeoff though is that governments get the power of inflating the currency.

The fact that fiat currencies seem to be widely preferred in the world isn’t only because of fiat currency laws. It’s that citizens seem to be relatively happy with this tradeoff. They would prefer to take the risk of inflation over the risk of counterfeiting.

One reason why this might be the case is because they can both diversify and hedge against the likelihood of inflation by holding assets such as gold, or foreign currency.

The dictatorship costs of fiat currency are apparently not as high as ‘hard money’ theorists imagine.

Introducing cryptocurrencies

Cryptocurrencies significantly change this dynamic.

Cryptocurrencies are a form of private money that substantially, if not entirely, eliminate the risk of counterfeiting. Blockchains underpin cryptocurrency tokens as a secure, decentralised digital asset.

They’re not just an asset to diversify away from inflationary fiat currency, or a hedge to protect against unwanted dictatorship. Cryptocurrencies are a (near — and increasing) substitute for fiat currency.

This means that the disorder costs of private money drop dramatically.

In fact, the counterfeiting risk for mature cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is currently less than fiat currency. Fiat currency can still be counterfeited. A stable and secure blockchain eliminates the risk of counterfeiting entirely.

July 19, 2018

Crony capitalists of the military-industrial complex

Filed under: Business, Government, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Matthew D. Mitchell comments on some of the problems with government contractors and their all-too-cosy relationship with the government officials who hand out the public’s funds:

… as economist Luigi Zingales explains in his book, A Capitalism for the People, governments contracting with private interests has its own set of risks:

    The problem with many public-private partnerships is best captured by a comment that George Bernard Shaw once made to a beautiful ballerina. She had proposed that they have a child together so that the child could possess his brain and her beauty; Shaw replied that he feared the child would have her brain and his beauty. Similarly, public-private partnerships often wind up with the social goals of the private sector and the efficiency of the public one. In these partnerships, Republican and Democratic politicians and businesspeople frequently cooperate toward just one goal: their own profit.

When President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex,” he was concerned that certain firms selling to the government might obtain untoward privilege, twisting public resources to serve private ends. It is telling that one of those contractors, Lockheed Aircraft, would become the first company to be bailed out by Congress in 1971.

For many observers, the George W. Bush administration’s “no-bid” contracts to Halliburton and Blackwater appeared to exemplify the sort of deals that Eisenhower had warned of. It is true that federal regulations explicitly permit contracts without open bidding in certain circumstances, such as when only one firm is capable of providing a certain service or when there is an unusual or compelling emergency. In any case, a report issued by the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in 2011 estimated that contractor fraud and abuse during operations in Afghanistan and Iraq cost taxpayers an estimated $31 to $60 billion. This includes, but is not limited to:

    requirements that were excessive when established and/or not adjusted in a timely fashion; poor performance by contractors that required costly rework; ill-conceived projects that did not fit the cultural, political, and economic mores of the society they were meant to serve; security and other costs that were not anticipated due to lack of proper planning; questionable and unsupported payments to contractors that take years to reconcile; ineffective government oversight; and losses through lack of competition.

Governments may also award contracts to perform a service that has more to do with serving a parochial interest than with providing a benefit to the paying public. For example, Congress may order the Pentagon to procure more tanks even though the Pentagon itself says the tanks aren’t needed. Paying General Dynamics hundreds of millions of dollars to produce unneeded tanks in order to protect jobs in particular congressional districts may be an abuse even if the underlying process by which the contract was awarded is legitimate.

July 18, 2018

QotD: Understanding how company profits can be used

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

In its fight against company tax cuts, [the Australian] Labor [Party] peddles the myth that company tax cuts are a windfall for big businesses and their shareholders, this week even launching ads suggesting [Australian PM] Malcolm Turnbull supports company tax cuts because he’ll personally benefit as an investor.

It’s a myth easily debunked. Think about it. What exactly can a company do with the extra money retained from paying less tax? It can only spend profits in two ways: paying dividends to shareholders or spending more on its operations.

Dividends are subject to tax, including withholding tax for foreign shareholders. Suggesting Turnbull or any other investor will get a windfall is a blatant lie.

In fact, many shareholders will pay more tax to make up the greater difference between the company tax rate and their own tax rate. That’s how dividend imputation works, as Labor well knows.

Alternatively, the company can spend more on things like technology, plant and equipment, funding research and development, expanding its sales force or opening new shopfronts or branches. In other words, more money paid in wages to workers and buying goods and services from suppliers.

All of that spending is also taxed. Workers pay income tax. GST [Goods and Services Tax] is collected on goods and services. Suppliers pay company tax or income tax themselves.

Lower company tax simply allows a business to use more of its money on something productive before the money is collected by government.

Nyunggai Warren Mundine, “Bill Shorten’s Labor would kill the reforms of Hawke and Keating”, Financial Review, 2018-06-26.

July 17, 2018

QotD: The incentive problem for universities

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

Incentives matter. This is a fundamental tenet of economics: People respond to their incentives. If something in a market seems to be going wrong, it’s because the incentives have gotten screwed up.

Looking at the market for education, it’s hard not to think that there’s something wrong with the incentives. Tuition keeps going up and so does debt. The percentage of people who are not paying off that debt — either because they are in default, deferment, or an income-based repayment program — is staggering. Naturally, a lot of folks would like to get the government in there to start tweaking those incentives until the market stops being so crazy.

One issue involves the incentives that schools have to ensure that their graduates get value out of their degrees. At the moment, a school can enroll you in practically any program, and the government will lend you money for tuition and living expenses, whether or not that degree is likely to produce the means to repay the loan. Since schools are often in a better position to know the economic value of their degrees than naive potential students, that twists the incentives. Eventually, the student will pay, either with money or trashed credit. If the loan defaults, taxpayers will pay too. The school has the most information about the transaction and yet it has the least at stake. No wonder we have such high tuition, so many dubious degree programs and such a troubling rate of default.

Megan McArdle, “Don’t Make Colleges Pay for Student-Loan Defaults”, Bloomberg View, 2016-09-07.

July 15, 2018

QotD: “Temporary” government programs

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

Obamacare will not collapse imminently — or maybe not even ever. But that is not because it is “working” as a public policy. Countries around the world have carried the husk of their far more socialized health-care systems for generations. Rent control, the minimum wage, and countless other economically ridiculous policies endure because they satisfy the political needs of politicians, bureaucrats, and a whole phylum of remora-like rent-seekers. That’s why Milton Friedman said, “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” He should know, given how it was basically his idea to implement tax-withholding from paychecks as a wartime measure.

You might say that these programs also help real people too. And that is true. But wealth distribution efforts always help someone. And those someones become vested interests who demand perpetuation of the status quo. If the federal government implemented a program to give every left-handed person in the country $20,000 a year free and clear (no doubt to compensate for the fact that such people are witches), you can be sure the Left Handed Association of America would work assiduously to protect their entitlement.

Jonah Goldberg, “The Consequences of Overpromising on Obamacare”, National Review, 2016-10-08.

July 14, 2018

Trump’s tariffs are working

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

Tim Worstall explains that the recent US price hikes in washing machines is exactly what the Trump administration wanted:

The part of import tariffs that all too many fail to understand is that it is consumers being “protected” by them who actually pay them. That is, import tariffs on foreign goods entering the United States are paid by those inside the United States. Or, as we can also put it, Trump’s tariffs are making Americans poorer. This isn’t a known to be desired effect of economic policy.

However, it’s important to note that the real burden doesn’t come from the rise in price of the imports. It’s what the domestic producers do to us all in the absence of that foreign competition which is important:

The clear and obvious effect of import tariffs – Credit, BLS, via Mark Perry and AEI, by permission

    If you’re unfortunate enough to be shopping for a new washing machine, you can thank the Trump tariffs on imported washing machines, washing machine parts, steel and aluminum for the largest three-month price increase — 16.4% from February to May this year — in the 40-year history of the BLS series for Major Appliances: Laundry Equipment that started in January 1978 (see chart above). In the May CPI report (see Table 2), the one-month increase in the CPI for Laundry Equipment of 7.4% in May followed a 9.6% increase in April, and in both months was the largest monthly price increase of any of the 300 individual CPI categories or sub-categories. For the month of May, the 7.4% increase in the washing machine series was twice the increase of the next highest increase of 3.7% for educational books and supplies (mostly college textbooks).

What’s worse than this price rise is that this is planned. This is the desired outcome from the people who imposed these taxes.

July 12, 2018

QotD: Bloomberg Syndrome

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

It is a human trait to focus on cheap lofty rhetoric rather than costly earthy reality. It is a bureaucratic characteristic to rail against the trifling misdemeanor rather than address the often-dangerous felony. And it is political habit to mask one’s own failures by lecturing others on their supposed shortcomings. Ambitious elected officials often manage to do all three.

The result in these hard times is that our elected sheriffs, mayors and governors are loudly weighing in on national and global challenges that are quite often out of their own jurisdiction, while ignoring or failing to solve the very problems that they were elected to address.

Quite simply, the next time your elected local or state official holds a press conference about global warming, the Middle East or the national political climate, expect to experience poor county law enforcement, bad municipal services or regional insolvency.

Victor Davis Hanson, “The Bloomberg Syndrome”, Private Papers, 2011-01-24.

July 11, 2018

Environmentalists against science

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

At Catallaxy Files, Jeff Stier looks at situations when activists who normally fetishize their devotion to science will go out of their way to fight against scientific findings that don’t co-incide with their preferences:

The debate over regulation often devolves into a debate about “too little” versus “too much” regulation, split along the ideological divide. Too little regulation, goes the argument, and we are exposed to too much risk. Too little, and we don’t advance.

This binary approach, however, represents the dark-ages of regulatory policy. It was more frequently relevant when our tools to measure risk were primitive, but today’s technology allows much more precise ways to evaluate real-world risks. With less uncertainty, there’s less of a need to cast a broad regulatory net.

Regulation not warranted by countervailing risk just doesn’t make sense. That’s why a pseudoscientific approach, dubbed the “precautionary principle,” behind much of today’s regulation is so pernicious. This dogma dictates that it’s always better to be safe than to ever be sorry. The approach is politically effective not only because it’s something your mother says, but because it’s easier to envision potential dangers, remote as they may be, than potential benefits. Uncertainty, it turns out, is a powerful tool for those who seek to live in a world without risk.

But what happens when regulators can get a reasonably good handle on benefits and risks? Some potential risks have been eliminated simply because the basis for the concern has proven to be unwarranted. For more than two decades, the artificial sweetener, saccharin, came with a cancer warning label in the U.S.But it turned out that the animal experiment which led to the warning was later found to be irrelevant to humans, and the warning was eventually removed.

Warning about a product when risks are not well-understood is prudent. But it would be absurd to continue to warn after the science tells us there’s nothing to worry about.

Today, an analogous situation is playing out in the EU, where activists are using outmoded tests not just to place warning labels on silicones, a building block of our technological world, but to ban them outright.

The playbook is predictable: as the scientific basis for a product’s safety grows, opponents go to increasingly great lengths to manufacture uncertainty, move the goalposts and capitalize on scientific illiteracy to gain the political upper-hand.

We’ve seen these tactics employed in opposition to everything from growing human tissue in a lab, to harm-reducing alternatives to smoking, such as e-cigarettes. Now, the effort to manufacture uncertainty is playing out in the debate over the environmental impact of silicones, which are used to in a wide range of consumer, medical, and industrial products.

Fortunately, in the case of silicones, regulators in a number of countries, including Australia, have put politics aside and adhere to appropriate scientific methods to inform their decision-making.

July 8, 2018

QotD: Marx on how to run a true communist state

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

What really clinched this for me was the discussion of Marx’s (lack of) description of how to run a communist state. I’d always heard that Marx was long on condemnations of capitalism and short on blueprints for communism, and the couple of Marx’s works I read in college confirmed he really didn’t talk about that very much. It seemed like a pretty big gap.

[…]

I figured that Marx had just fallen into a similar trap. He’d probably made a few vague plans, like “Oh, decisions will be made by a committee of workers,” and “Property will be held in common and consensus democracy will choose who gets what,” and felt like the rest was just details. That’s the sort of error I could at least sympathize with, despite its horrendous consequences.

But in fact Marx was philosophically opposed, as a matter of principle, to any planning about the structure of communist governments or economies. He would come out and say “It is irresponsible to talk about how communist governments and economies will work.” He believed it was a scientific law, analogous to the laws of physics, that once capitalism was removed, a perfect communist government would form of its own accord. There might be some very light planning, a couple of discussions, but these would just be epiphenomena of the governing historical laws working themselves out. Just as, a dam having been removed, a river will eventually reach the sea somehow, so capitalism having been removed society will eventually reach a perfect state of freedom and cooperation.

Singer blames Hegel. Hegel viewed all human history as the World-Spirit trying to recognize and incarnate itself. As it overcomes its various confusions and false dichotomies, it advances into forms that more completely incarnate the World-Spirit and then moves onto the next problem. Finally, it ends with the World-Spirit completely incarnated – possibly in the form of early 19th century Prussia – and everything is great forever.

Marx famously exports Hegel’s mysticism into a materialistic version where the World-Spirit operates upon class relations rather than the interconnectedness of all things, and where you don’t come out and call it the World-Spirit – but he basically keeps the system intact. So once the World-Spirit resolves the dichotomy between Capitalist and Proletariat, then it can more completely incarnate itself and move on to the next problem. Except that this is the final problem (the proof of this is trivial and is left as exercise for the reader) so the World-Spirit becomes fully incarnate and everything is great forever. And you want to plan for how that should happen? Are you saying you know better than the World-Spirit, Comrade?

I am starting to think I was previously a little too charitable toward Marx. My objections were of the sort “You didn’t really consider the idea of welfare capitalism with a social safety net” or “communist society is very difficult to implement in principle,” whereas they should have looked more like “You are basically just telling us to destroy all of the institutions that sustain human civilization and trust that what is baaaasically a giant planet-sized ghost will make sure everything works out.”

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Singer on Marx”, Slate Star Codex, 2014-09-13.

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