Confession: ever since I began to study economics as an 18-year old, I’ve always had difficulty understanding the thought processes of people who fancy themselves fit to intervene into the affairs of other adults in ways that will improve the lives of other adults as judged by these other adults. I understand the desire to help others, and I also understand that individuals often err in the pursuit of their own best interests. What I don’t understand is Jones’s presumption that he, who is a stranger to Smith, can know enough to force Smith to modify his behavior in ways that will improve Smith’s long-term well-being. Honestly, such a presumption has struck me for all of my adult life as being so preposterous as to be inexplicable. I cannot begin to get my head around it.
I cannot get my head around Jones’s presumption that he knows enough to forcibly prohibit Smith from working for an hourly wage lower than one that Jones divines is best for Smith. I cannot understand Jones’s presumption that he ‘knows’ that Smith meant, but somehow failed, to bargain for family leave in her employment contract. I am utterly befuddled by Jones’s presumption to know that the pleasure that Smith gets from smoking cigarettes is worth less to Smith than is the cost that Smith pays to smoke cigarettes. I cannot fathom why Jones presumes that he knows better than does Smith how Smith should educate her children.
Yet this presumption is possessed by many, perhaps even most, people. Why?
Don Boudreaux, “A Pitch for Humility”, Café Hayek, 2016-08-05.
May 5, 2018
QotD: Making decisions for other people’s “best interests”
May 4, 2018
QotD: The EU and democracy
The EU is quite clear however that it stands as the champion of democracy, just not the kind of democracy that involves people voting. No, for the EU democracy means compliance with the EU’s standards and rules – any departure indicates a drift towards un-democracy that must be checked by sanctions and punishments, even if people voted for it. The EU’s democratic principles, you understand, trump stuff like elections and voting; they are a purer form of democracy, crafted by unelected officials and demagogues free from popular approval. And yes, there are many in Brussels who actually believe all that.
Raedwald, “Sorry Herr Juncker your woes are just starting”, Raedwald, 2018-04-09.
May 1, 2018
Sikh separatists (and even terrorists) are being protected by the federal government
There’s no reason that Canadian Sikhs can’t agitate for their fellow Sikhs in India to create a separate country in the Punjab, but that freedom must not include active support for terrorists. The Canadian government is looking particularly bad on this front, and it isn’t just because of Justin Trudeau’s farcical adventures on his recent trip to India. None of the major federal parties want to appear to be anti-Sikh, as Sikh voters cluster in several key swing ridings around the country, and any criticism of the terrorists is spun as an attack on all Sikhs. At Quillette Terry Milewski details the government’s unwillingness to deal with the problem:
The Sikh faith, created in what is now northern India by the 15th-century Guru Nanak, remains obscure to many in the West. Turbaned Sikh men are sometimes confused with Muslims, and some have been assaulted by confused thugs following Islamist terrorist attacks. Like the United States, Britain and other Western countries, Canada has been home to emigrant Sikhs for generations—the vast majority of them living peaceably in their adopted homeland.
In the 1980s, however, a powerful spasm of separatist militancy shook India and spread to the Sikh diaspora. In June, 1984, two months before the Madison Square Garden convention, Prime Minister Gandhi and her government set out to end a killing spree by Sikh militants who had turned the Sikhs’ holiest site — the Golden Temple at Amritsar — into an armed camp. The Indian army wrecked the temple complex and took many lives. Revenge came on October 31, 1984, when Gandhi was gunned down in her garden by two of her Sikh bodyguards. Hindu mobs immediately took revenge for the revenge, slaughtering thousands of Sikhs in hellish reprisals that were aggravated by official complicity. The police looked the other way. The horrors of 1984 won’t be forgotten by either side.
Soon, Canada and its Sikh community were dragged into the thick of the struggle. In June of 1985, Parmar’s Babbar Khalsa placed suitcase bombs on two planes leaving Vancouver. One brought down Flight 182, a massacre that remained, until 9/11, the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of aviation. The second bomb, intended to destroy another Air India plane simultaneously, exploded on the ground at Narita Airport in Japan, killing two baggage handlers. The reverberations from the attack were so profound in Canada that even today, 33 years later, a striking emblem of the Khalistani dream survives: a large “martyr” poster honouring Talwinder Parmar, sword in hand, permanently fixed to the exterior of an important Sikh gurdwara in Surrey, British Columbia. Tens of thousands gather beneath it each spring for an annual Sikh parade. In American terms, the poster is equivalent to a public veneration of Osama Bin Laden.
[…]
Today, the parents who lost their children [on Air India Flight 182] are old, the orphaned children have their own children and the Sikh struggle for independence is moribund in India. Last year, in fact, Sikh voters overwhelmingly supported a united India and were key to the election of the Congress Party — the party of Indira Gandhi — to govern the Sikh homeland of Punjab. Support for Congress was especially strong in majority-Sikh districts. And Punjab’s Chief Minister is a strongly pro-unity Sikh, Amarinder Singh, who has alleged separatist influence in the Canadian government.
Harjit Sajjan, a Sikh who is Canada’s Minister of National Defence, firmly denied the claim. And on Justin Trudeau’s visit to India this year, Singh agreed to a photo-op including Sajjan. But the Chief Minister let it be known that he’d handed over a list of Canadians he suspects of fundraising for Punjab’s few remaining separatist Sikh militants.
The listed suspects amount to a tiny subculture among Canada’s 450,000 Sikhs, the vast bulk of whom seek no return to the bloody 1980s and 1990s, when the battle for Khalistan took some 20,000 lives in India, most of them Sikh. But the hardliners are a well-organized political force, still raising the cry of “Khalistan Zindabad!” — long live Khalistan — in some Canadian gurdwaras where “martyred” Sikh assassins are memorialized as models for the young. These include the two bodyguards who machine-gunned Indira Gandhi. Khalistani fervour is alive on social media and a 2018 tweet from “George” (@PCPO_Brampton) declared: “Indira’s assassins are HEROES. Sikhs should glorify them.”
The endurance of such attitudes in Canada reflects the weak record of its justice system in deterring violence. For years, it seemed, Canadian courts were where terrorism cases went to die.
April 25, 2018
April 24, 2018
Canada suffers a bad case of Grey Owl nostalgia
Jonathan Kay on the odd ways that the “noble savage” imaginary model is holding back actual First Nations people in Canada:
A few months ago, I spoke at a small academic conference in Toronto about the future of Canada. As with many events of this type in my country, it began with sacred rituals. An Ojibway elder, described to us as a “keeper of sacred pipes,” took to the podium and showed us a jar of medicine water. In her private rituals, the elder explained, she would pray with this water, and talk to it as she smoked her pipes. After this, she instructed us to join her in “paying respect to the four directions” — which required that we stand up and face the indicated compass point, moving clockwise from north to west as she performed her rituals. “With this sacred water, we smudge this space,” she said. “Let us live the lesson of being in harmony with all creatures.”
Then the elder instructed us to bend down, touch the floor, and say migwetch — thank you, in her Ojibway language — to signal our gratitude. The room was full of middle-aged former politicians who, like me, did not want to seem impolite. But after turning in place on command, this floor-touching business seemed a little much. Nevertheless, the men and women around me began hunching downward, extending palms toward the floorboards, until the whole room resembled a congregation at prayer. There were only perhaps a half-dozen of us who hesitated slightly, and were now anxiously casting eyes about the room for co-conspirators.
I tried to look nonchalant as I remained upright. But I wondered whether some conference official would call me out for this act of defiance. Or perhaps someone would snap a picture and put it on Twitter. I felt like Cosmo Kramer from Seinfeld, when confronted by a pair of strangers after refusing to wear a ribbon during an AIDS walk.
But there also was something more serious at play — for the whole scene was a microcosm of a larger cultural phenomenon that’s been playing out in Canadian society for generations. How did it come to be, I wondered, that this room full of intellectuals and policy-makers, plucked from among one of the most secular nations on earth, should be called upon to genuflect en masse to animist spirits?
Ask this question on social media, and culture warriors on both sides will provide plenty of snappy answers. But to answer properly, and constructively, requires at least some understanding of the distorted way in which white Canadians — and Westerners, more generally — have come to conceive of Indigenous peoples. And these distortions are producing disastrous effects on the very Indigenous societies that we’re all trying to help.
If you’re not familiar with the Grey Owl referenced in the headline:
Both Canada and the United States eventually imposed policies aimed at annihilating Indigenous cultural practices and languages. Yet, paradoxically, these same white-dominated societies would also lionize individual Indigenous chiefs, warriors, spiritual leaders, artists and writers. In Canada, none would become more famous than the self-proclaimed “Wa-Sha-Quon-Asin, Grey Owl, North American Indian, champion of the Little People of the Forests.” During the 1930s, in fact, Grey Owl would become the most famous Indigenous writer in the world — despite the fact that (as the world learned after his death) he was actually a British immigrant from Hastings, England named Archibald Stanfield Belaney.
Grey Owl was a gifted, if somewhat didactic, middlebrow writer who produced sentimental narratives about the Canadian wilderness he roamed throughout his adult life. Even if he’d been honest about his identity as a white man, he might well have made a successful living from his books. But the ingredient that made him a true literary star — both in Canada and internationally — was his allegedly Indigenous bloodline, which editors and readers alike believed gave him special insight into the secrets of nature and the animal kingdom. Having grown up as an English schoolboy fascinated by First Nations and their habitats, Grey Owl knew exactly what his readers wanted: gauzy sketches of a simpler, more noble, more sacred world than the smog-choked cities they inhabited. Sadly, the simplistic and infantilizing stereotypes he peddled persist to this day.
Canadians now take for granted the portrayal of Indigenous peoples as conscientious, pacifistic stewards of the earth. But as University of Alberta literature professor Albert Braz has noted, this conception of Indigenous life didn’t become popularized until the early twentieth century. Prior to that, it was just as common to hear tales of Indigenous hunters (and fighters) performing wanton slaughter, annihilating other tribes, or whole species of animals. It was Grey Owl, a white man, who led the campaign to rebrand Indigenous peoples as innocent children of the forest. He even went so far as to suggest that it would be preferable for Indigenous peoples to disappear from the planet rather than be “thrown into the grinding wheels of the mill of modernity, to be spewed out a nondescript, undistinguishable from the mediocrity that surrounds him, a reproach to the memory of a noble race.”
The Windrush scandal in Britain
Brendan O’Neill discusses the bureaucratic idiocy that lead to thousands of people who’d been living and working in Britain are threatened with loss of jobs, loss of healthcare rights, and even deportation:
The Windrush scandal and its fallout might have exposed the incompetence of Theresa May and her political set. But it has done something far worse to Remainers. It has laid to waste their entire worldview. It has shattered their defining myth: that where they brave few are nice and pro-immigrant, the rest of the country, especially those little-educated inhabitants of ‘Brexitland’, are a seething pit of 1930s-style racism. In the palpable public discomfort with how the Windrush migrants have been treated, we see yet again what a libel this Remainer depiction of Brexit Britain has been.
For nearly two years, the liberal intelligentsia has talked about vast swathes of the electorate as a hateful throng whose prime motor is disgust with foreigners. These people yearn for a time when ‘faces were white’, says Vince Cable. The vote for Brexit was a ‘whitelash’, said Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, which was quite the slur against the one in three ethnic-minority voters who chose Brexit. These mad voters just want ‘less foreign-looking people on their streets’, said Diane Abbott. The police churned out ridiculous hate-crime stats, using entirely subjective criteria to declare there had been an outpouring of violent hate after the referendum, and columnists lapped it up. Brexit Britain was divided between an enlightened elite that doesn’t care about skin colour or national origins and the fever-minded masses who apparently think about little else.
It was a lie, of course, as many of us argued, and as many more should now see in the wake of the Windrush scandal. With every revelation of the Home Office’s mistreatment of Caribbean migrants, public displeasure grows. People can see the grave injustice of treating as criminals people who have been here since the 1940s and 50s and who were given leave to remain by an act of law in 1971. The way these Britons have been thrown out of their jobs or deprived of NHS care or in some cases deported — because rules introduced when Theresa May was home secretary stipulate that all migrants must now have official documentation — has grated with the populace. This was reflected in a poll published by iMix and the Runnymede Trust last week, which found that 60 per cent of Britons, rising to 71 per cent for over-65s, are opposed to what the government has done to the Windrush people. Those same over-65s who for the past two years have been talked about as racist scum by the Remainer chattering classes.
The Remainer elites’ religious conviction that huge parts of Britain are little more than racist-mobs-in-waiting is falling apart, fast. Even before the public concern with the mistreatment of the Windrush generations, there was the survey carried out by Open Europe at the end of last year which challenged the idea that the vote for Brexit was a ‘mandate to pull up the drawbridge’. On the contrary, many Britons still see the value in migration — they simply want some say over it, they want it to be a democratic concern. Open Europe found ‘little evidence’ that this ‘desire to control immigration’ was driven by ‘racism or xenophobia’. Even the EU now accepts Britons are not horrible racists. Its attitudes survey found the proportion of Brits who are ‘very positive’ or ‘fairly positive’ about migrants rose from 43 per cent to 63 per cent over the past four years, which includes the post-Brexit period when we were supposedly taking to the streets to bash a foreigner.
Sweden’s free speech problem
Hugo Brundin explains why the social unrest Sweden is experiencing over immigration issues today is made much worse by restrictions on free speech:
Few in Sweden have escaped the circus of its migration politics. During the migration crisis of 2015, we had the somewhat dubious claim to fame of receiving record-breaking numbers of asylum-seekers. A year later, in Spring 2016, the ruling Social Democrats closed the borders. For a while, calling attention to problems in Sweden’s immigrant-dominated suburbs would have you branded an alarmist or a racist. Then in January 2018, the Swedish PM Stefan Löfven said he would consider using the military to curb gang violence in those same suburbs (a comment he later retracted). More recently, the Social Democrats have proposed a ban on all religious schools, clearly aimed at those of the Muslim faith. No party in the Swedish parliament supported such a ban a couple of years ago.
Those concerned with immigration have held Sweden up as a warning of the consequences of open-door migration. But the deeper problem in Sweden is one of public discourse, debate and freedom of speech. You see, Sweden has a consensus culture. The Overton Window is so notoriously narrow that it has been termed the ‘opinion corridor’. And when you’re hurtling down the corridor, unable to see what is around the next corner, much less the one after that, you never know where its twists and turns will take you. Opinions that would have had you vilified a few years ago are now part of the political mainstream, and frankly this can feel downright creepy. Sweden should not be a warning of how not to handle migration – it should be a warning of how not to handle public discussion.
Proposals such as the one to ban religious schools, a deeply intolerant and authoritarian idea, are exactly the sort of thing you get when public opinion changes on a dime, when conflicts have not been properly hashed out in public debate. It used to be said that open-door migration would save the economy and welfare state (rather than put strain on them) and that talk of cultural differences between the Middle East and Sweden was just racist myth-making. Yet now, Islamism is the issue du jour, and the political class is desperate to signal that it is doing something about it, with little thought paid to civil liberties.
April 23, 2018
April 22, 2018
How to begin solving the common problems of big cities
Vladimir “Zeev” Vinokurov is writing about Australian cities in particular, but the same general analysis applies to many Canadian, American, and British urban areas as well:
… our economy and population are growing, and the resulting congestion is costing us thousands of dollars per year individually, and billions to the economy. It isolates us from family, friends and work. But cities can still grow without getting us stuck in traffic, missing increasingly overcrowded and delayed trains, or left unable to afford property. All this is happening because workplaces are too far from residents living in the suburbs, which effectively funnels residents into the inner city for work. It must change.
First, we must unwind planning laws that prevent offices, homes and apartments from being constructed alongside each other and throughout the city. These laws also raise housing prices by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Second, instead of banning cars, charge commuters for using congested roads and trains. Third, stop supporting taxpayer funded ‘road to nowhere’ infrastructure projects. These reforms will cut congestion, grow the economy, cut living costs and reconnect us to family, friends and local communities.
Planning laws cause congestion and social isolation by preventing people from building apartments and commercial offices throughout our city. As a result, rents and property prices become dearer because not enough housing is built to accommodate demand from population growth. Indeed, Reserve Bank economists estimate that planning laws increase average property prices by hundreds of thousands of dollars. This drives residents into the outer suburbs to look for cheaper housing, even as they commute into the inner city for work. If more people lived close-by to their workplaces, commutes would be shorter.
We need multiple CBDs, not just one. Unwinding planning laws that prevent commercial growth outside the CBD will cut housing costs and rents, cut congestion and promote tightly knit, thriving urban communities.
Congestion also occurs because we pay for using roads and public transport with thousands of dollars of time every year, rather than money. Congested public roads or trains cost us no more money to use in peak times, and busier routes cost no more to use than empty ones. As a result, the Grattan Institute think tank estimates that the average Melbournian’s commute to the city is twice as long in peak time. By contrast, Sydney’s trains are less congested, but are used more widely compared to Melbourne’s because its tickets are dearer in rush hour. Congestion charges that reflect market demand for infrastructure will also encourage businesses to open in commercial districts outside the CBD. Reconnecting local commuters with local workplaces will save us time and money overall.
Congestion charges are also a fairer and cheaper way of funding infrastructure projects compared to taxes like fuel tax or stamp duty. Scrapping these two taxes could save property purchasers tens of thousands of dollars or more, and reduce petrol bills by at least a third. If we pay for congested roads and trains with money rather than time and taxes, we may end up paying less.
The balance-of-trade hobbyhorse
Don Boudreaux doesn’t have much sympathy with people who agonize over or — worse — set their national economic policies based on the balance of trade:
No concept in economics is responsible for more confusion and policy mischief than is the so-called “balance of trade.” The many fallacious beliefs about a trade deficit include the notion that –
– aggregate demand drains from each economy that runs a trade (or current-account) deficit, thus causing overall employment to fall in each country that runs a trade deficit;
– the GDP of a country that runs a trade deficit is lowered by that trade deficit;
– the denizens of a country that runs a trade deficit spend too much on consumption and save too little;
– a trade deficit is evidence of poor policy in any country that runs such a deficit;
– a country’s trade deficit would be ‘cured’ if only the people of that country were to save more or to buy fewer imports;
– a trade deficit in the home economy is evidence of ‘unfair’ trade practices by that country’s trading partners;
– a trade deficit means that each country that runs one is “losing,” and that to “win” at trade means running a trade surplus (or, at least, to not run a trade deficit);
– a trade deficit run by the home economy means that that economy’s trading partners who have trade surpluses are being enriched at the expense of the people in the home economy;
– a trade deficit necessarily makes the citizens of any country that runs one more indebted to foreigners;
– a trade deficit involves a net transfer of capital or asset ownership from citizens of each country that runs a trade deficit to citizens of countries that run trade surpluses;
– each dollar (or each yen, or each euro, or each peso, or each pound, or each you-name-the-currency) of a country’s trade deficit today means that the people of that country must sacrifice that much consumption sometime in the future;
– bilateral trade deficits have economic meaning and relevance;
– a trade deficit is something that should be “fixed” – that is, reduced or eliminated – through government policy, including especially through trade restrictions.
None of the above-listed beliefs about trade deficits is supportable. None. Not one. Not in the least. Each and every one of these beliefs is easily refuted with either basic economics or, in many cases, with simply a clarification of the definitions of terms and concepts used in national-income accounting. And yet these – and no doubt other – false beliefs about trade deficits (and about the so-called “balance-of-payments” generally) are widespread and spill daily from the mouths and keyboards of politicians, pundits, professors, and propagandists.
The belief that trade deficits cause economic problems in countries that run them – and that trade deficits necessarily reflect poor policies or profligacy by the people of those countries – is the economic equivalent of, say, the belief that the world is ruled by sorcerers who ride fire-breathing dragons and who marry their daughters off to centaurs. Both sets of beliefs are pure madness, yet one of them serves as the basis for real-world policies.
April 20, 2018
Food for thought on those “second US civil war” comments
Tom Kratman, Mil-SF author and former US Army officer responds to a Quora article titled “Why does the 2nd Amendment bother Europeans so much?” and shared some of his answer on Facebook:
More fun on Quora:
https://www.quora.com/Why-does-the-2nd-Amendment-bother-Europeans-so-much/answer/Pietro-Del-Buono#
A Sample: And here; since you’re not apparently ambitious enough to read it, I’ll copy you what I sent Stafford on just this question:
The Viet Cong, the Taliban, and the Iraqi resistance would all, at this point in time, be terribly surprised to learn of the omnipotence of the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps (retired lieutenant colonel, Infantry, former faculty of the war college, to boot; yes, I’ve had a varied and fun life). It isn’t, remember, a million citizens with arms, it’s probably over 80 million, just to begin with, most of us armed to deck out the wives, children, grandchildren, and no small number of the neighbors. I can, personally, outfit at least one short platoon while my former law firm, when I was in practice, could have fielded a company, less mortars and anti-tank, yes, to include with automatic weapons (machine guns, which are also legal here, though pricey).
How they would do this is perhaps more detailed and more bloody minded than you want, but, basically, tanks do not move when small arms dominating the roads mean they don’t get fuel delivered (no, aerial resupply is highly problematic). Neither do aircraft fly when no trucks or rail bring aviation fuel. Police, who are actually the decisive arm of counter-insurgency (see your own Sir Robert Thompson), pretty much require a disarmed citizenry to exercise control. Facing an armed citizenry willing to kill them, their risks and losses are too great for effectiveness. And then there’s sheer terror: “Nice family you have, Officer Quigley; be a damned shame if, say, you didn’t look the other way when we tell you to and they all ended up dead, don’t you think?”
Most of the US military preponderance is technological. Martin van Creveld has an interesting observation on that, which goes to the effect that high tech really only works well in very simple environments, air, open desert, at sea, and that a) it tends to fail badly when the environment gets more complex, while b) the human heart is the most complex environment of all. In other words, the forces of government would rarely know just who their enemies were in order to bring that tech to bear.
And then there’s the last aspect, an aspect, I think, Euros have the greatest difficulty understanding. Our police and armed forces are simply not reliable, over most of the country (remember, too, we have no real national police force or gendarmerie, not of any size and power, anyway) to the federal government. No, I don’t mean only the state based National Guards; the _regular_ forces actually draw most of their personnel from areas where folk revere the country and the constitution, but tend to detest the federal government. Called on to suppress a rebellion with which they by and large agreed, they’d defect in droves.Indeed, they might be at the forefront of rebellion. You may recall Obama talking about a civilian force, equal in size, budget, and power to DoD? I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that he had Pinochet and Allende in mind when he spoke those words, because he knew, deep down, that he and the left (our left, which is, of course, to the right, generally, of the Euro left) could not rule out a coup in the event of their pushing their agenda just that little bit too far.
April 17, 2018
The trap Trudeau carefully laid for himself
Andrew Coyne on the interminable “negotiations” for the Kinder Morgan pipeline:
Whatever anyone’s concerns — economic, environmental, Aboriginal or other — that is the process by which those concerns are adjudicated. And that is the process that approved the pipeline: the NEB, the cabinet and the courts, all ruling in its favour (though not every legal appeal has been exhausted: a case is still before the Federal Court of Appeal on behalf of seven First Nations arguing they were not adequately consulted).
Why, then, do so many feel entitled, not merely to disagree, or to protest, as is their democratic right, but to substitute their own authority for that prescribed by law: to defy the courts, to threaten disorder, and to deny federal jurisdiction?
Much of the blame should be attached to the current custodians of lawful authority, the governments of Canada and British Columbia. It was Justin Trudeau who, campaigning for office, gave his imprimatur to the extralegal, anti-democratic doctrine of “social licence,” telling pipeline opponents that “governments might grant permits, but only communities can grant permission.”
It was Trudeau, too, who lent support to the notion that Aboriginal communities have, not merely a constitutional right to be consulted on projects affecting lands to which they have title, as the courts have found they have, but an absolute veto. And it was Trudeau who legitimized those who, because they did not like the NEB’s decision, had dismissed it as biased or negligent, with his promise of a special panel to review the project.
Likewise it was John Horgan who, campaigning for office, famously promised to “use every tool in the toolbox” to stop the pipeline from being built. We know now that his government has known since at least the time it took office that it had no constitutional authority to do so. But if Horgan had hoped to walk back the promise, in the grand tradition of Canadian politics, after he was elected, he finds his way blocked by his partners in power, the Green Party.
So he has instead opted to stall for time, delaying permits, threatening legislation, and — someday, maybe — referring the whole business to the courts, hoping the project’s sponsor, Kinder Morgan, will give up in frustration. As, at length, it has declared it will do if Horgan’s government is not brought to heel, with spectacular effect: it has spurred the Trudeau government to state, in terms that allow no retreat, that “the pipeline will be built.”
But reasserting lawful authority, after so many years of disuse, will not be as easy as all that. It is not only the Trudeau or Horgan governments, after all, that have played this game: before Horgan, there was Christy Clark and her constitutionally odious “five conditions” for “approving” the Northern Gateway pipeline, and before Trudeau there were decades of federal governments that allowed the provinces to run the jurisdictional table against them, in the name of “co-operative federalism.”
April 14, 2018
Andrew Coyne asks “Why do we need a Senate?”
And the answer for anyone who’s lived through previous constitutional mud-wrestling is almost certainly going to be a variant of “We don’t, but to change it in any way means re-opening the entire constitution for revision and re-negotiation … thanks, but no thanks … we’ll put up with the Red Chamber of Irrelevance”:
More than two years after the Trudeau government introduced its system of “independent, merit-based” appointments to the Senate, transforming — so it was said — the Other Place from a house of patronage and partisanship to a house of virtue, the government’s “representative” in the Senate has given some thought to how it will all work.
In a 51-page discussion paper, Peter Harder offers his views on what role the Senate should play, as one of the last remaining appointed legislatures among the world’s democracies — and the most powerful, on paper — particularly in light of its changed circumstances. It makes for a fascinating, not to say hallucinatory read.
In Harder’s estimation, the past two-and-a-bit years have been something of a golden age of Senate legitimacy, a period in which it has rebuilt its credibility after what he plainly views as the dark age of partisanship that preceded it: a dark age that precisely coincides with the period of Conservative government.
The expense scandals, the epic confusion that followed the government’s half-considered reforms, the repeated episodes of brinksmanship as the newly envirtued Senate threatened to defeat this or that bill, these rate barely a mention, in Harder’s account, beside the Senate’s “robust bicameralism,” its “positive track record” and contributions that have been “effective, policy-oriented and always respectful of the role of the representative House of Commons.”
Ah yes. About that: if the Senate were so “always respectful” of their respective roles, it’s curious Harder should feel the need to spend 51 pages explaining what those roles are. But then, that is because it is so exquisitely complicated, so delicately subtle, requiring such a delicate balance.
April 13, 2018
QotD: Reynolds’ Law
The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.
Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit.com, 2010-09-23.
April 9, 2018
QotD: Democracy and the scope of government
That the increasing discredit into which democratic government has fallen is due to democracy having been burdened with tasks for which it is not suited is a fact of the greatest importance which has not yet received adequate recognition. Yet the fundamental position is simply that the probability of agreement of a substantial portion of the population upon a particular course of action decreases as the scope of State activity expands.
F.A. Hayek, “Freedom and the Economic System”, 1938.
