Quotulatiousness

March 4, 2024

Japan’s Meiji Restoration, 1868-1912

Filed under: Government, History, Japan — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Lawrence W. Reed outlines the end of Japan’s Shogunate Period and the start of the reign of Emperor Mutsuhito, known as the Meiji Period:

The Imperial Household Agency chose Uchida Kuichi, one of the most renowned photographers in Japan at the time, as the only artist permitted to photograph the Meiji Emperor in 1872 and again in 1873. Up to this point, no emperor had ever been photographed. Uchida established his reputation making portraits of samurai loyal to the ruling Tokugawa shogunate.
Wikimedia Commons.

In the 15 years that followed [American Commodore Matthew] Perry’s venture, the grip of the military dictatorship in Tokyo declined. Civil war erupted. When the smoke cleared in the first few days of January 1868, the shogunate was gone and a coup d’etat ushered in a new era of dramatic change. We call it the Reform Period, or the era of the Meiji Restoration.

That seminal event brought 14-year-old Mutsuhito to the throne, known as Emperor Meiji (a term meaning “enlightened rule”). He reigned for the next 44 years. His tenure proved to be perhaps the most consequential of Japan’s 122 emperors to that time. The country transformed itself from feudal isolation to a freer economy: engaged with the world and more tolerant at home.

In 1867, Japan was a closed country with both feet firmly planted in the past. A half-century later, it was a major world power. This remarkable transition begins with the Meiji Restoration. Let’s look at its reforms that remade the nation.

For centuries, Japan’s emperor possessed little power. His was a largely ceremonial post, with real authority resting in the hands of a shogun or, before that, multiple warlords. The immediate effect of the Meiji Restoration was to put the emperor back on the throne as the nation’s supreme governor.

In April 1868, the new regime issued the “Charter Oath,” outlining the ways Japan’s political and economic life would be reformed. It called for representative assemblies, an end to “evil” practices of the past such as class discrimination and restrictions on choice of employment, and an openness to foreign cultures and technologies.

After mopping up the rebellious remnants of the old shogunate, Emperor Meiji settled into his role as supreme spiritual leader of the Japanese, leaving his ministers to govern the country in his name. One of them, Mori Arinori, played a key role in liberalizing Japan. I regard Arinori as “the Tocqueville of Japan” for his extensive travels and keen observations about America.

The Meiji administration inherited the immediate challenge of a raging price inflation brought on by the previous government’s debasement of coinage. The oval-shaped koban, once almost pure gold, was so debauched that merchants preferred to use old counterfeits of it instead of the newer, debased issues. In 1871, the New Currency Act was passed which introduced the yen as the country’s medium of exchange and tied it firmly to gold. Silver served as subsidiary coinage.

A sounder currency brought stability to the monetary system and helped build the foundation for remarkable economic progress. Other important reforms also boosted growth and confidence in a new Japan. Bureaucratic barriers to commerce were streamlined, and an independent judiciary established. Citizens were granted freedom of movement within the country.

The new openness to the world resulted in Japanese studying abroad and foreigners investing in Japan. British capital, for instance, helped the Japanese build important railway lines between Tokyo and Kyoto and from those cities to major ports in the 1870s. The new environment encouraged the Japanese people themselves to save and invest as well.

For centuries, the warrior class (the samurai) were renowned for their skill, discipline, and courage in battle. They could also be brutal and loyal to powerful, local landowners. Numbering nearly two million by the late 1860s, the samurai represented competing power centers to the Meiji government. To ensure that the country wouldn’t disintegrate into chaos or military rule, the emperor took the extraordinary step of abolishing the samurai by edict. Some were incorporated into the new national army, while others found employment in business and various professions. Carrying a samurai sword was officially banned in 1876.

In 1889, the Meiji Constitution took effect. It created a legislature called the Imperial Diet, consisting of a House of Representatives and a House of Peers (similar to Britain’s House of Lords). Political parties emerged, though the ultimate supremacy of the emperor, at least on paper, was not seriously questioned. This nonetheless was Japan’s first experience with popularly elected representatives. The Constitution lasted until 1947, when American occupation led to a new one devised under the supervision of General Douglas MacArthur.

March 3, 2024

QotD: The pushback against EVs

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

Parts of the automotive press seem to have sensed conspiracy in this. One senior figure recently asked who exactly has been “driving the anti-electric-car agenda”, while a respected publication claimed an “increasingly vehement anti-electric-car rhetoric” had hampered consumer confidence. The truth, however, is far simpler: people aren’t buying electric cars because they’re not very good.

Don’t think me a luddite – EVs are lovely in their own right. Smooth, brisk and easy to drive, there is a certain serenity in piloting a battery-powered vehicle. But EVs don’t exist in isolation. Instead, they are competing with a century of petrol and diesel power that has established cars as providers of comfort, freedom and convenience. And while the quiet nature of an EV arguably brings more comfort than an engine, batteries offer so much less freedom and convenience than fuel tanks as to barely be worth comparing.

My old diesel Mercedes, for instance, cost £4,000 and could go from London to Aberdeen, and most of the way back, on a single tank of fuel. A typical EV would need to recharge at least twice – just on the way up. This would add perhaps 90 minutes to the journey, assuming the public plugs were working and conveniently located. That, in my book, makes an EV demonstrably inconvenient. And cries of “how often do you drive to Aberdeen?” don’t hold water, because the freedom cars bring is absolutely intrinsic to their appeal. Perhaps tomorrow I get the urge to cross the Bridge of Dee; perhaps it’s none of your business. That’s freedom for you, and EVs curtail it.

Hugo Griffiths, “Why the public isn’t buying electric cars”, Spiked, 2023-11-20.

March 2, 2024

Brian Mulroney, RIP

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

In a guest post at Paul Wells’ Substack, Ian Brodie describes former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s role in ending the Cold War:

Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, Mila Mulroney, Nancy Reagan, and President Ronald Reagan at the “Shamrock Summit”, 18 March, 1985.
Photo from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library via Wikimedia Commons.

Mulroney’s role has long been poo-poohed by intellectuals on the Canadian left. He was said to have an unhealthy obsession with pleasing the Americans. As a young boy, his fine voice won him an opportunity to entertain visiting American executives with a song. Amateur psychologists diagnosed a disturbing link between Mulroney’s having grown up in a company town, under the shadow of a US owned mill, and his reinvigoration of St. Laurent’s post-war grand strategy.

Mulroney never automatically fell in with US positions on the global issues of the day. His opposition to the apartheid regime in South Africa ran counter to the positions of both Reagan and Thatcher. But he drove the effort to link the American and Canadian economies through the free trade agreement. He backed our allies in the strategic competition with the Soviet bloc. And in helping to create the International Democratic Union, he helped put the west’s centre-right parties on the side of international political cooperation on the side of democracy, liberty, and the rule of law. The contrast with an earlier prime minister who could not bring himself to condemn the declaration of martial law in Poland a few years earlier was clear.

His personal relationships with a generation of American leaders gave substance to the transactional successes. As the Soviet Union came apart, he secured a spot for Canada as the first NATO country to recognize Ukraine’s independence and bolstered the independence movements of the Baltic republics. When Iraq tried to establish a precedent that, following the Cold War, large, powerful countries could invade their neighbours with impunity, Mulroney backed the US led coalition to liberate Kuwait with all the diplomatic and military power he had on hand.

And along the way, he so closely befriended both Reagan and the first Bush that he was given a privileged platform at two US state funerals, an honour never extended to a Canadian leader before and unlikely to be extended to one again soon.

Mulroney deserves to be remembered along with St. Laurent as Canada’s grand strategist of the 20th century. A trusted confidant of world leaders.

February 29, 2024

The incredibly harmful Online Harms Act

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Michael Geist thinks a substantial part of the Online Harms Act should be removed:

Having a spent virtually the entire day yesterday talking with media and colleagues about Bill C-63, one thing has become increasingly clear: the Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions found in the Online Harms Act should be removed. In my initial post on the bill, I identified the provisions as one of three red flags, warning that they “feature penalties that go as high as life in prison and open the door to a tidal wave of hate speech related complaints”. There is no obvious need or rationale for penalties of life in prison for offences motivated by hatred, nor the need to weaponize human rights complaints by reviving Human Rights Act provisions on communication of hate speech. As more Canadians review the bill, there is a real risk that these provisions will overwhelm the Online Harms Act and become a primary area of focus despite not being central to the law’s core objective of mitigating harms on Internet platforms.

Indeed, these concerns are already attracting media coverage and were raised yesterday in columns and commentary from Andrew Coyne and Professor Richard Moon, who I think rightly describes the core provisions of the Online Harms Act as “sensible and workable” but notes that these other provisions are troubling. Bill C-63 is effectively four bills in one: (1) the Online Harms Act, which forms the bulk of the bill and is focused on the duties of Internet platforms as they respond to seven identified harms, (2) the expansion of mandatory child pornography reporting requirements to include those platforms, (3) the Criminal Code provisions, which opens the door to life in prison for committing offences that are motivated by hatred of certain groups, and (4) the changes to the Canadian Human Rights Act, which restores Section 13 involving communicating hate speech through the Internet as a discriminatory practice. The difference between the first two and the latter two is obvious: the first two are focused on the obligations of Internet platforms in addressing online harms, while the latter two have nothing directly to do with Internet platforms at all.

The Criminal Code and Human Rights Act changes originate in Bill C-36, which was introduced in 2021 on the very last sitting day of the Parliamentary session. The bill died on the order paper with an election call several weeks later and did not form a core part of either the online harms consultation or the 2022 expert panel on online harms. These provisions simply don’t fit within a legislative initiative that is premised on promoting online safety by ensuring that social media services are transparent and accountable with respect to online harms. Further, both raise legitimate concerns regarding criminal penalties and misuse of the human rights complaint system.

At the National Post, Carson Jerema points out that under the Online Harms Act, the truth is no defence:

As much as the Liberals want everyone to believe that their proposed online harms act is focused almost exclusively on protecting children from predators, and that, as Justice Minister Arif Virani said, “It does not undermine freedom of speech,” that simply isn’t true. While the legislation, tabled Monday, could have been much worse — it mercifully avoids regulating “misinformation” — it opens up new avenues to censor political speech.

Under the bill, condemning the Hamas massacre of 1,200 people on Oct. 7, could, under some circumstances, be considered “hate speech”, and therefore subject to a human rights complaint with up to $50,000 in penalties. As part of the new rules designed to protect Canadians from “online harms”, the bill would reinstate Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, the hate speech provision repealed under the Harper government.

The new version is more tightly defined than the original, but contains the same fatal flaws, specifically that truth is no defence and that what counts as hate speech remains highly subjective.

Under the new Section 13: “it is a discriminatory practice to communicate or cause to be communicated hate speech by means of the Internet or any other means of telecommunication in a context in which the hate speech is likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination”.

It is distressingly easy to imagine scenarios where everyday political speech finds itself under the purview of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Criticizing Hamas and the murderous ideology that motivates it could, to some, be seen as “likely to foment detestation or vilification” against a group, especially if the condemnation of Hamas notes that Palestinians generally support the terrorist group or that Hamas is driven by religious fanaticism.

Dan Knight calls it “the sequel no one asked for”:

Morning my fellow Canadians and lets break into the liberals latest sequel with Bill C-63 the its failed predecessor, Bill C-36, which is a sequel nobody asked for in the saga of online hate speech legislation. We’re witnessing a government’s second attempt to police what you can say online.

Now, the Liberal government in Canada initially put forward Bill C-36. This bill aimed to tackle extreme forms of hate speech online. It sought to bring back a version of a section that was repealed from the Canadian Human Rights Act in 2013. Why was it repealed, you might ask? Because critics argued it violated free speech rights. But here we are, years later, with the Liberals trying to reintroduce similar measures under the guise of combating hate speech. Under the proposed changes, folks could be fined up to $20,000 if found guilty of hate speech that identifies a victim. But here’s the kicker: the operators of social media platforms, the big tech giants, are initially left out of the equation. Instead, the focus is on individuals and website operators. Now, the government says it plans to hold consultations over how to make these social media platforms more accountable. But the details are hazy, and the timeline is, well, as clear as mud.

The justice minister of Canada has framed these amendments as a way to protect the vulnerable and hold individuals accountable for spreading hatred online. But let’s be clear: there’s a thin line between protecting individuals and infringing upon free speech. And that line is looking blurrier by the day in Canada. Critics, including the Opposition Conservatives, have voiced concerns that these measures could curb freedom of speech and be difficult to enforce. They argue that the government’s efforts might not just be about protecting citizens but could veer into controlling what can and cannot be said online. And when the government starts deciding what constitutes “hate speech”, you have to start wondering: Who gets to draw that line? And based on what standards?

And, just when you thought it couldn’t get any more Orwellian, enter the pièce de résistance: the Digital Safety Commission of Canada. Because, clearly, what’s missing in the fight against “hate speech” is another layer of bureaucracy, right? Another set of initials to add to the alphabet soup of governmental oversight. So, here’s the deal: this newly minted commission, with its CEO and officers — oh, you better believe there will be officers — is tasked with overseeing the online speech of millions. And let me tell you, nothing says “independent” like a government-appointed body policing what you can and cannot say on the internet. I can just imagine the job postings: Now Hiring: Online Expression Regulators, proficiency in silencing dissent highly valued.

Arizona GOP pushes to legalize hunting down suspected illegal immigrants with deadly force! Film at 11!

Filed under: Government, Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray reports on this utterly abhorrent piece of proposed legislation that will literally condemn any brown person in the state of Arizona to be murdered out of hand by evil red-hatted Trump supporters … or will it?

Republicans in the Arizona legislature have advanced a bill that would allow anyone in the state to just casually gun down any migrant anytime they feel like that filthy brown person might be trespassing. You can trust that this is really happening, because it’s in the news.

Delightfully, Axios reporter April Rubin trained at the New York Times. Here’s how she starts this story:

    Arizona Republicans are advancing a bill that would allow people to legally kill someone accused of attempting to trespass or actively trespassing on their property.

    The big picture: The legislation, which is expected to be vetoed if it reaches the state’s Democratic governor, would legalize the murder of undocumented immigrants, who often have to cross ranches that sit on the state’s border with Mexico.

These monsters, they’re legalizing the murder of undocumented migrants.

So, as always, let’s read the actual bill:

A person in lawful possession of property can threaten deadly force, or potentially use deadly force, in response to an act of criminal trespassing: You can go out on your property with a gun and tell a trespasser to get lost.

But Subsection B is the key to the actual use of deadly force, and journalists aren’t saying anything about it (emphasis added): “A person may use deadly physical force under subsection A only in the defense of himself or third persons as described in sections 13-405 and 13-406,” existing sections of Arizona state law. The bill explicitly references an existing legal standard for the use of deadly force.

February 28, 2024

Accusations aplenty, but still no clear evidence

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

Michelle Stirling outlines the establishment of the North West Mounted Police (today’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police) and their role in driving out American whiskey traders and criminal gangs who had invaded the Canadian west, and the initial role of Sir John A. Macdonald in setting up the first residential schools for First Nations children:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

It is clear that the claim of “mass graves” of children allegedly found by Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School is false. The main reason is that there is no list of names of missing persons — over the course of 113 years of Indian Residential Schools, which saw 150,000 students go through the system, some staying for a year, most for an average of 4.5 years, some staying for a decade or more and graduating, and some orphans being taken in to the school as children, then remaining to work as Indigenous staff — these many thousands of children passed through Indian Residential Schools, their parents enrolling and re-enrolling them year after year.

And there is no list of names of missing persons.

There are many claims of missing persons.

Some of these claims are quite fatuous — with one person claiming that in their Band, every family had four or five children who went missing at that school. Another person claimed that their grandfather had ten siblings disappear in that school.

If that were true, the Band would have ceased to exist.

Despite these claims, there are no missing persons records.

And every student who went to that school is documented on the Band’s Treaty rolls, in documents of the Indian Agent, in the enrollment forms at the Department of Indian Affairs, along with the student’s medical certificate for entry, and in the quarterly reports of the department.

In fact, the Indigenous population of Canada grew from about 102,358 in 1871 to now 1.8 million.

It seems that the claim of a “mass grave” on the former Kamloops Indian Residential School site was timed to “nudge” the approval of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People through parliament — which it did! The bill had been “stuck” as six provinces had requested delay and clarity on key issues. Once the claim of “mass graves” surfaced — boom!

Less than a month after the “mass graves” news shot round the world, shocking the global community that Canadians — once known as international peacemakers, were actually hideous murderers of Indigenous children — UNDRIP swept through the Canadian Parliament with no objection.

A day later, China accused Canada of genocide, citing the Kamloops “mass graves” find as proof. For those of you following the concerns about China’s alleged interference in elections in Canada, this rather convenient timing might set off some alarm bells.

If anything, the RCMP should be investigating this matter on grounds of false pretences or fraud. But the RCMP appear to have transferred the investigation of the Kamloops “mass grave” to the people who claimed to have found them! Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) can only identify “disturbances” under ground, not bodies or coffins. In fact, based on previous land use records, most likely the GPR found 215 clay tiles of an old septic trench.

February 27, 2024

Thank goodness we don’t get all the CBC we pay for!

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the dim, dark recesses of history … say twenty-five years ago … the CBC was what the government still seems to believe it is: a credible, trusted source of news and entertainment. In truth, it was never as loved as some might claim, as it had a deep bias in favour of Quebec and Ontario issues and tended to only occasionally remember the rest of the country. The federal government has been subsidizing the CBC, yet the network’s audience has shrunk to the point that it’s rare to encounter anyone who consumes very much of the programming on offer. Part of that is just the sheer variety of other options available to Canadians and part of it is the CBC’s sour, toxic, hectoring tone when lecturing about “the current thing”. Far from being a major player in upholding Canadian culture, the CBC is clearly one of the major factors that are destroying it:

… looking at the viewer and listener stats for the CBC, our national behemoth, which eats up $1.5 billion annually, and which amounts to 50% of the media dollars spent, is equally disheartening. The state spends another $600 million supporting once-successful media because “internet”. CBC television is watched by 3.9% of Canadians and only 0.8% watch CBC News. Again, half of all media dollars, half. Half is spent engaging less than 4% of Canadians. CBC radio is considered reasonably good, and is listened to by 10%, despite its vindictive calling out of anyone who disagrees with their hard socialist stance. As to other mainstream media, propped up by government via hundred of millions, it is still shedding staff and readers in double digits.

Despite every conceivable advantage, advertising on the CBC dropped 20% during the pandemic. In fact, they are so disliked that CBC is hiring “close protection security” for the next two years. They are so disliked, they have turned off commenting on their various programs. They are so disliked that there is a brand of coffee called “Defund the CBC”. This isn’t passive ignoring, this is active dislike to the point of needing bodyguards.

Why? Because our media show us to ourselves as racist, stupid, sexist, stupid, stupid and more stupid. And while they are at it, shallow and violent. That is the real reason, and the only reason CanCon is dying. They hate us. Why? The only people who have thrived during the past twenty years in Canada when private and public wealth doubled then doubled again, are the ones who live off the government, whether through mandated consulting in the enviro and other business, or direct granting or though quasi-private-sector jobs that are heavily subsidized. Public Private Partnerships have to be the most fiendish way to flat out loot the public ever been invented. Or straight up public sector jobs which are among the most lushly funded and unionized in the known universe, the number of which have grown 400% in the last ten years. Do or did you get six weeks of paid holiday a year?

And do they hate us, in fact correcting us is how they get the grants, the jobs, the subsidy. Everything they do is meant to fix us deplorable Canadians.

Sit at a downtown Toronto dinner party as I have, with say, the head of CBC drama, as I have and listen to just how much they hate the rest of Canada. Why? They hate the rest of Canada because they feel guilty. They know they are cheating and they know they are stealing. I tell ya, I needed close protection security — this woman was terrifying. “Sit Down While I’m Talking to You“, she roared at me.

Javier Milei gets ghosted by US media after posting rare budget surplus in Argentina

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

Jon Miltimore on Argentine President Javier Milei’s good economic news that the legacy US media are resolutely ignoring:

Argentine President Javier Milei speaking at the World Economic Forum gabfest in Davos, Switzerland, January 2024.
Photo by Flickr – World Economic Forum | CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Argentines witnessed something amazing last week: the government’s first budget surplus in nearly a dozen years.

The Economy Ministry announced the figures Friday, and the government was $589 million in the black.

Argentina’s surplus comes on the heels of ambitious cuts in federal spending pushed by newly-elected President Javier Milei that included slashing bureaucracy, eliminating government publicity campaigns, reducing transportation subsidies, pausing all monetary transfers to local governments, and devaluing the peso.

Milei’s policies, which he has himself described as a kind of “shock therapy,” come as Argentina faces a historic economic crisis fueled by decades of government spending, money printing, and Peronism (a blend of national socialism and fascism).

These policies have pushed the inflation rate in Argentina, once one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America, above 200 percent. Today nearly 58 percent of the Argentine population lives in poverty, according to a recent study.

And Milei rightfully blames Argentina’s backward economic policies for its plight — policies that, he points out, are spreading across the world.

“The main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism,” Milei said in a recent speech in Davos. “We’re here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world — rather they are the root cause.”

The revelation that Argentina has done something the US government hasn’t done in more than two decades — run a budget surplus — seems like a newsworthy event.

Yet to my surprise, I couldn’t find a word about it in major US media — not in the New York Times, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, or Reuters. (The New York Sun seems to be the only exception.)

I had to find the story in Australian media! (To be fair, the Agence France Presse also reported the story.)

One could argue that these outlets just aren’t very interested in Argentina’s politics and economics, but that’s not exactly true.

The Associated Press has covered Argentinian politics and Milei extensively, including a recent piece that reported how the new president’s policies were inducing “anxiety and resignation” in the populace. The same goes for Reuters and the other newspapers.

A cynic might suspect these media outlets simply don’t wish to report good news out of Argentina, now that Milei is president.

The Company that Broke Canada

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, Government, History, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

BobbyBroccoli
Published Nov 4, 2023

For a brief moment, Nortel Networks was on top of the world. Let’s enjoy that moment while we can. Part 1 of 2.

00:00 This is John Roth
02:04 The Elephant and the Mouse
12:47 Pa without Ma
26:27 Made in Amerada
42:15 Right Turns are Hard
57:43 Silicon Valley North
1:07:37 The Toronto Stock Explosion
(more…)

February 26, 2024

The Freedom Convoy’s European echoes

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Europe, Food, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Niccolo Soldo on the widespread protests against the EU and various national governments’ intrusive and anti-human attempts to restrict or destroy European farmers in pursuit of their climate change agenda:

I wish there was a way to measure the gulf between ruling elites and the people that they lord over. Don’t Political Scientists have such a methodology already on hand? I don’t know.

What I do know is that this gulf is very palpable on both sides of The Pond, and that this gulf shows no signs of narrowing any time soon. Whether the issue is migration, crime, COVID-19, etc., it seems that the views of the people are simply ignored by those who can and do ignore them, and proceed to make policy that suits their own interests and the interests of their allies and class.

Judging by American media reporting, you would most likely not be aware that massive farmers’ protests are rocking the European continent as we speak. From Portugal to Poland, farmers are protesting the EU’s drive to push policies like “Net Zero” in order to “combat Climate Change” … policies that would severely impact the livelihoods of our food producers. These proposed changes are entirely top-down, indicative of just how divorced the Brussels elites are from the daily lives of the people whose lives they wish to upend with a stroke the pen. “Oppose us? You must be far right … probably a Nazi too.”

    The “far-right” political libel against hard-pressed farmers is really a sign of how far the EU elites have lost touch with the reality of life for the peoples of Europe. We should ignore the slurs, and get behind the fighting farmers.

    The protests by angry farmers have spread across the European Union, with mighty convoys of tractors blockading roads and cities from Romania to Rome, from Portugal to Poland, from Bulgaria to Brussels and beyond.

    There might be some national variations in the farmers’ specific demands. But what unites them all is opposition to the way that the EU elites are subordinating agricultural policy to their Green agenda and Net Zero obsession, leading to more hardship for farmers and higher food prices for other Europeans.

    As tractor convoys blockaded German cities in January, farmers’ association president Joachim Rukwied spelt out that they were protesting not just against the government’s proposed cuts in fuel subsidies, but against an EU-wide system where “agricultural policy is being made from an unworldly, urban bubble and against farming families and rural areas”.

    This week in Poland, 62-year-old protesting farmer Janusz Bialoskorski told the media that, “They’re talking about climate protection. But why should it be done at farmers’ expense?” Farmers, he pointed out, are not responsible for industrial pollution, and “nor do we fly to Davos on our jets”.

Pitchfork Populism. The fact that the elites in Brussels have invited this in a year when elections for the EU’s Parliament are scheduled to occur indicates just how out of touch they really are.

    These farmers are now in the front line of a wider populist revolt, against those elitists who DO fly in their private jets to the World Economic Forum in luxurious Davos, Switzerland, where they lecture the rest of us about how to save the planet by sacrificing our living standards.

    Their protests expose the yawning gap between the high-minded talk of the Brussels Green oligarchy, and the grim reality of what those Net Zero policies mean for normal people in the muddy fields of Flanders or on the supermarket shelves of Florence.

If you can’t shut them up, call them “far right”:

    Last weekend, UK Observer newspaper (Sunday sister of the liberal Guardian), the most pro-EU voice in the British media, worried aloud about how the European farmers’ cause “has been enthusiastically adopted by a resurgent populist far-right”.

    Similar fears have repeatedly been expressed in the Brussels-backing news media this year: “Brussels struggles to placate farmers as far-right stokes protests,” and “EU farmers egged on by the far-right” (Financial Times); “How the far-right aims to ride farmers’ outrage to power in Europe” (Politico); “Far-right harvests farmers’ anger across Europe” (France 24) etc., etc.

    The EU establishment and its media pals are so out of touch with the reality of people’s lives that they apparently imagine Europe’s naïve farmers are protesting only because they have been “egged on” or “stoked up” by “far-right” agitators. The idea that these farmers might be entirely reasonable, hard-working people who are simply at the end of their collective tether with EU bureaucracy seems beyond the comprehension of those bureaucrats and their media mouthpieces.

“A Silent War on Farming”:

    As the title of a recent report by the think-tank MCC Brussels puts it, Europe’s agricultural communities are facing nothing less than a “Silent War on Farming,” waged from Brussels.

    For decades, EU agricultural policy was about the efficient, cheap, and safe production of food to feed the peoples of Europe and ensure that the continent never suffered famine again. Now, that policy has instead been captured by Green ideology, which demands that farmers use less land and less intensive methods to produce lower emissions. In sum, that must mean less farming—and less food being produced.

    Farmers are bearing the brunt of the ideologically-driven regulations imposed by the EU, with falling incomes and the closure of family farms. The rest of Europe faces a scarcity-driven surge in prices—with shortages being met by food imports from countries with far higher emissions than the EU’s hi-tech farming sector.

    For many Europeans now supporting the farmers, however, this is about even more than the price of food on their table. Farming and rural communities are at the heart of traditional European ideas of community and self-image. People who live far from the countryside can now identify with farmers who are resisting the same sort of threat to their way of life that they see posed by, for example, EU policies on mass migration.

All Brussels seems to be able to do these days is pass laws to micromanage the lives of Europeans, while increasing the contempt that these same people have for them.

QotD: Lockdown rebuttal

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

First, lockdowns were neither prudent nor essential. It’s not as if government officials considered the collateral damage to be inflicted on the economy, society, and health – not all health problems are caused by covid – by the lockdowns and then rationally concluded that the benefits of locking down outweighed these costs. No. The collateral damages were ignored. As the New York Times‘s Joe Nocera and Vanity Fair‘s Bethany McLean – authors of the just-released The Big Fail – write, “But there was never any science behind lockdowns – not a single study had ever been undertaken to measure their efficacy in stopping a pandemic. When you got right down to it, lockdowns were little more than a giant experiment.”1 In no universe is such a policy prudent.

Nor were lockdowns “essential”. As Nocera and McLean note,

    … the weight of the evidence seems to be with those who say that lockdowns did not save many lives. By our count, there are at least 50 studies that come to the same conclusion. After The Big Fail went to press, The Lancet published a study comparing the COVID infection rate and death rate in the 50 states. It concluded that “SARS-CoV-2 infections and COVID-19 deaths disproportionately clustered in U.S. states with lower mean years of education, higher poverty rates, limited access to quality health care, and less interpersonal trust – the trust that people report having in one another.” These sociological factors appear to have made a bigger difference than lockdowns (which were “associated with a statistically significant and meaningfully large reduction in the cumulative infection rate, but not the cumulative death rate”.)

Second, the lockdowns were, contra Mr. Orrell’s claim, utterly unprecedented. Isolating individuals known to be infected, such as Typhoid Mary, is a categorically different measure than locking down whole societies. Such lockdowns were never used until China locked Wuhan down in early 2020. Here again are Nocera and McLean: “On April 8, 2020, the Chinese government lifted its lockdown of Wuhan. It had lasted 76 days – two and a half months during which no one was allowed to leave this industrial city of 11 million people, or even leave their homes. Until the Chinese government deployed this tactic, a strict batten-down-the-hatches approach had never been used before to combat a pandemic. Yes, for centuries infected people had been quarantined in their homes, where they would either recover or die. But that was very different from locking down an entire city; the World Health Organization called it ‘unprecedented in public health history’.”

It’s jarring to encounter in an essay that features many excellent arguments – as Mr. Orrell’s does – such irrational and utterly uninformed claims as Mr. Orrell offers about lockdowns.

Donald J. Boudreaux, responding to an article by Brent Orrell in Law & Liberty, 2023-10-31.

February 25, 2024

Canadian publishing “has been decimated since Ottawa took an active interest in it and while federal policies haven’t been the whole problem, they’ve been vigorous contributors”

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

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte contrasts the wholesome intentions of the Canadian federal government on cultural issues with the gruesome reality over which they’ve presided:

Even James Moore, [Liberal cabinet minister Melanie] Joly’s Conservative predecessor in the heritage department, applauded her initiative as good and necessary, although he warned it wouldn’t be easy. Moore had wanted to do the job himself, but his boss, Stephen Harper, didn’t want to waste political capital on fights with the arts community. He told Moore his job in the heritage department was to sit on the lid.

Joly got off to a promising start, only to have her entire initiative scuppered by a rump of reactionary Quebec cultural commentators outraged at her willingness to deal with a global platform like Netflix without imposing on it the same Canadian content rules that Ottawa has traditionally applied to radio and television networks. Liberal governments live and die by their support in Quebec and can’t afford to be offside with its cultural community. Joly was shuffled down the hall to the ministry of tourism.

She has been succeeded by four Liberal heritage ministers in five years: Pablo Rodriquez, Steven Guilbeault, Pablo Rodriguez II, and Pascale St-Onge. Each has been from Quebec and each has been paid upwards of $250,000 a year to do nothing but sit on the lid.

The system remains broken. We’ve discussed many times here how federal support was supposed to foster a Canadian-owned book publishing sector yet led instead to one in which Canadian-owned publishers represent less than 5 percent of book sales in Canada. The industry has been decimated since Ottawa took an active interest in it and while federal policies haven’t been the whole problem, they’ve been vigorous contributors.

Canada’s flagship cultural institution, the CBC, is floundering. It spends the biggest chunk of its budget on its English-language television service, which has seen its share of prime-time viewing drop from 7.6 percent to 4.4 percent since 2018. In other words, CBC TV has dropped almost 40 percent of its audience since the Trudeau government topped up its budget by $150 million back in the Joly era. If Pierre Poilievre gets elected and is serious about doing the CBC harm, as he’s threatened since winning the Conservative leadership two years ago, his best move would be to give it another $150 million.

The Canadian magazine industry is kaput. Despite prodigious spending to prop up legacy newspaper companies, the number of jobs in Canadian journalism continues to plummet. The Canadian feature film industry has been moribund for the last decade. Private broadcast radio and television are in decline. There are more jobs in Canadian film and TV, but only because our cheap dollar and generous public subsidies have convinced US and international creators to outsource production work up here. It’s certainly not because we’re producing good Canadian shows.

[…]

When the Trudeau government was elected in 2015, it posed as a saviour of the arts after years of Harper’s neglect and budget cuts. It did spend on arts and culture during the pandemic — it spent on everything during the pandemic — but it will be leaving the cultural sector in worse shape than it found it, presuming the Trudeau Liberals are voted out in 2025. By the government’s own projections, Heritage Canada will spend $1.5 billion in 2025-26, exactly what it spent in Harper’s last year, when the population of Canada was 10 percent smaller than it is now.

That might have been enough money if the Liberals had cleaned up the system. Instead, they’ve passed legislation that promises more breakage than ever. Rather than accept Joly’s challenge and update arts-and-culture funding and regulations for the twenty-first century, the Trudeau government did the opposite. Cheered on by the regressive lobby in Quebec, it passed an online news act (C-18) and an online streaming act (C-11) that apply old-fashioned protectionist policies to the whole damn Internet.

This comes on top of the Liberals transforming major cultural entities, including the CBC and our main granting bodies, The Canada Council and the Canada Book Fund, into Quebec vote-farming operations. The CBC spends $99.5 per capita on its French-language services (there are 8.2 million Franco-Canadians) and $38 per capita on Canadians who speak English as the first official language. The Canada Council spends $16 per capita in Quebec; it spends $10.50 per capita in the rest of Canada. The Canada Book Fund distributes $2 per capita in Quebec compared to $.50 per capita in the rest of the country. Even if one believes that a minority language is due more consideration than a majority language, these numbers are ridiculous. They’re not supporting a language group; they’re protecting the Liberal party.

February 24, 2024

Never mind the unfunded liability … money printer go brrrr!

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

Kulak at Anarchonomicon points out that the US government’s debt situation — which was alarming 20 years ago — has continued to get worse every year:

Libertarian Economists have been predicting this collapse of the federal system would happen “By About 2030” since before 2008. I remember in high school in the early 2010s listening to Ron Paul lectures and visiting USDebtClock.com, this was a hot button issue after 2008 … (then of course there was no political will to do anything and everyone just stopped talking about it)

I honestly forget that everyone around me doesn’t already know this, this is so common and accepted in libertarian and economic circles, and everyone who knows it got bored of eyes glossing over when they tried to explain it (in an autistic panic) decades ago.

US Unfunded liabilities:

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, US Debt, and Federal employee benefits and pensions, are all basically intergenerational ponzi schemes that require constant 1950s level population growth amongst the productive tax paying middle-class to maintain. By 2000 it was obvious this population growth was not happening, that population was beginning to age and collapse, and NO, the illegals at the border weren’t adequate replacements … (they weren’t adequate to prop up federal expenses in 2000 when they were still Mexican, now that they’re Guatemalan, Haitian, and Senegalese they’re almost certainly a net drain).

The Specter of Mass Boomer retirements with few to no children and grandchildren to replace them and pay for all the costs of their retirements and healthcare was maybe the slowest but most assured crisis ever to be seen in human history … Demographics is destiny.

This was a foreseen problem in 2000 when US Debt to GDP (just the portion that’s already been spent and interest has to be paid on) was 59% of GDP. Today the US Debt to GDP ratio is 122% of GDP whilst just in the past 24 years. Absolute US Federal Debt (not including state or local) has grown from 5.6 trillion dollars to 34 trillion dollars (102k per citizen: man, woman, and child). just the interest that has to be paid out of your tax dollars on that debt is set to eclipse ALL US Military spending sometime this year … And by 2028 Debt to GDP will be 150% (46.4 Trillion, 132k per citizen, 12 trillion more in 4 years, with no additional spending bills) and the Interest (at current estimates) will be over 2.5 trillion dollars, over a third of all Tax Dollars brought in will be spent on just interest, because dollar confidence has collapsed and the only way to keep inflation from destroying the dollar has been to radically raise the interest rates the Federal Reserve offers.

Now all that, That catastrophic state of things, is just the debt, the money that’s been spent … The real crisis is the Unfunded liabilities, all the promises the US has made to Boomers (who dominate the vote) and others about money they’re GOING to spend.

As of now total Unfunded liabilities stand at 213 trillion dollars, $633,000 per US Citizen (Man woman, and newborn babe)… These are all dollars the US has promised to pay to someone somewhere at some point: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Federal pensions, VA Benefits, etc. And cannot in any politically feasible way restructure or get out of.

If no one ever contributed another dime to social security, and in so doing was promised in turn significantly more than that dime (it’s a Ponzi scheme, it loses money in proportion to and at a greater rate than the money being contributed to it (every dollar you contribute you’re promised multiple dollars in return, and your dollar is not invested, it just pays off previous contributors)) … If everything froze and every young person was locked out of ever receiving Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid, the Unfunded Liability would be $633k per every man, woman, and child … that’d be the debt a newborn American would be born with.

However because it is NOT frozen and it will not be, by 2028 that number will Rise to $837k and an ordinary household of 4 will have seen their, politically unavoidable, family obligation in future tax payments to the federal government increase by $804,000 in just 4 years.

If your response is that your family doesn’t even make 804k in 4 years and there’s no way you could ever pay that much in 4 years given its just going to increase at a faster rate the next 4 years … CONGRATULATIONS! 90% of families don’t make that much, and less than 1% of families could ever afford to pay that much in taxes in a 4 year time.

This has been slowly growing for decades, and in the late 2000s and 2010s Ron Paul types were screaming that those Benefits needed to be reformed NOW (in 2008) or they’d drown America. But of course, cutting benefits is political Anathema to boomers, so nothing was done …

The Course of Empire – Destruction by Thomas Cole, 1836.
From the New York Historical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.

Times might be tough right now, America, but at least you’re not Canada

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

You may be feeling the pinch from Bidenflation, election year stresses, and political lawfare, but at least you’re not up in America’s hat:

It’s late February, a time of year when many Americans contemplate stacks of documents and receipts, dreading the moment when they’ll have to square accounts with government extortionists. That this comes as the state grows increasingly intrusive and coercive adds insult to injury, since we pay the bill for this mistreatment. But it could be worse; we could be Canadian!

Same Inquisition, Different Dollar

“As tax season ramps into high gear in Canada, the average citizen is facing an unholy ream of paperwork so daunting that even the Canada Revenue Agency isn’t entirely sure how it all works,” Tristin Hopper wrote this week for the National Post. “An infamous 2017 Auditor General report found that CRA call centres ‘gave wrong information to callers almost 30 per cent of the time’.”

Oh, OK. That doesn’t sound much different from the experience here in the U.S., where the IRS hands out the wrong information maybe a quarter of the time. (Or more. Who knows?) But Canadians pay a high price tag for the privilege of spelling “call centre” with the “r” in front of the “e”.

But a Higher Tax Bill North of the Border

“In December 2015, Canada’s new Liberal government introduced changes to Canada’s personal income tax system,” Canada’s Fraser Institute, a free-market think tank, noted in 2020. “Even before the changes, the country’s combined federal and provincial top marginal tax rates compared unfavourably to those in the United States and other industrialized countries. … Nine Canadian provinces occupy the list of 10 jurisdictions with the highest top combined marginal income tax rates and all provinces are in the top 13 [across the U.S. and Canada].”

Umm. Ouch.

In truth, comparing tax burdens requires a deep dive because of differences in how taxes are applied, income brackets, deductions, and the like. Fans of big government always want to balance costs against “benefits” of government services, as if being mugged to support a state monopoly should be welcomed by those who’d rather shop among competitors or entirely forgo some services. Suffice it to say that comparisons of provincial and state tax burdens generally reveal a lighter touch south of the border.

Worse, though, the think tank finds overall economic freedom slipping across Canada.

Higher Taxes Reflect Less Freedom

“For the first time, every Canadian province ranks in the bottom half of jurisdictions in our annual rankings of economic freedom in North America,” Fraser announced of its Economic Freedom of North America 2023 report. “Alberta in the all-government index is once again the highest-ranking Canadian province but it has declined substantially. In the all-government index, Alberta is now tied for 31st place out of 50 U.S. states, 32 Mexican states, 10 Canadian provinces, and the US territory of Puerto Rico.”

Economic freedom is defined as you’d expect, with economic activity involving “minimal government interference”. As the report adds, “an index of economic freedom should measure the extent to which rightly acquired property is protected and individuals are engaged in voluntary transactions”.

Fraser compares the states and provinces to each other within their countries, and also across Canada, Mexico, and the United States. For the purpose of comparing jurisdictions across three nations, the report looks at six areas of economic activity: government spending; taxes; labor market freedom; legal systems and property rights; sound money; and freedom to trade internationally.

The highest ranked jurisdiction is New Hampshire, followed in the first quartile by Florida and 20 other U.S. states. Alberta ranks at 31, between Missouri and Connecticut. British Columbia comes in at 45, with Ontario at 50 and Manitoba at 54. The last-ranked U.S. state is Delaware, at 53, though the territory of Puerto Rico ranks at 61. Quebec brings up the rear for Canada, at 56.

QotD: Big government

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

I’m Canadian and have a romantic fondness for the famous motto of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the one about the Mounties always getting their man. But the bigger you make the government, the more you entrust to it, the more powers you give it to nose around the country’s bank accounts, and phone calls, and e-mails, and favourite Internet porn sites, the more you’ll enfeeble it with the siren song of the soft target. The Mounties will no longer get their man, they’ll get you instead. Frankly, it’s a lot easier.

[…]

What should have died on September 11th is the liberal myth that you can regulate the world to your will. The reduction of a free-born citizenry to neutered sheep upon arrival at the airport was the most advanced expression of this delusion. So how’s the FAA reacting to September 11th? With more of the same kind of obtrusive, bullying, useless regulations that give you the comforting illusion that if they’re regulating you they must be regulating all the bad guys as well. We don’t need big government, we need lean government — government that’s stripped of its distractions and forced to concentrate on the essentials. If Hillary and Co want to argue for big government, conservatives could at least make the case for what’s really needed — grown-up government.

Mark Steyn, “Big Shift”, National Review, 2001-11-19.

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