So the space shuttle Discovery has flown its last mission; it’s been towed over the nation’s capital like a bruised Chevy after a demolition derby before being deposited at the Udvar-Hazy air and space museum in northern Virginia.
Other space junkers — Atlantis and Endeavour — are being retired like Brett Favre in a pair of Crocs, too, bringing to end an underwhelming three decades of fruitless and tragic exploration of low-earth orbiting patterns.
Let’s face it: Once we beat the Russians to the moon, the national rocket grew limper than Liberace at a speculum convention. NASA has been dining out on a single 1969 hit longer than Zager and Evans.
The good news is that amateur hour is now over and the private space race has begun. Where two Cold War superpowers failed, let a thousand business plans bloom!
April 18, 2012
Reason.tv: The Space Shuttle Era is Over (Thank God!)
Why do we even bother calling them “life sentences”?
According to a recent Globe and Mail article, among the civil service jobs at risk in the government’s cutbacks are 26 convicted murderers who’ve been paroled and are paid to minister to another 2,280 paroled murderers (numbers from the 2010-11 report).
The Globe and Mail has learned that one of the many federal programs that will be cut in its entirety is LifeLine, a program aimed at helping people with life sentences — or “lifers” — successfully re-integrate into society once they’ve been paroled.
At a starting salary of about $38,000, the program hires and trains successfully-paroled lifers to mentor other lifers who are still incarcerated or who have been recently released on parole.
[. . .]
Under the Criminal Code, offenders serving a life sentence for murder may be considered for parole after serving 15 years of their sentences. Offenders serving life sentences for first-degree murder can be eligible for day parole after 22 years and full parole after 25 years.
April 16, 2012
“This sort of investment pays for itself ten-fold over a very short period of time”
You see? This is what’s wrong with private enterprise, especially in California. Those wimps aren’t willing to invest in something that will “pay for itself” ten times over in a “very short period of time”. That’s why all the greatest economic advances have come from over-aged students, business council speechifiers, bureaucrats, and career apparatchiks!
If you believe calling your opponents names is a sign that you have lost the argument, then this new high-speed rail commercial from the California Alliance for Jobs — in which unexpectedly macho proponents of the
$41 billion,$110 billion,$98.5 billion, $68.4 billion high-speed rail project deride skeptics as “wimps” — is pretty much the end of the line […]What reveals the intellectual bankruptcy of the high-speed rail project is not the insults but that what is supposed to be a rousing propaganda piece comes off like an orientation video for new hires at a failing company.
The video’s cast includes
hacksrespected citizens from Operating Engineers Local 3, including Alliance for Jobs Executive Director Jim Earp, along with leaders from what’s usually referred to as the “business community” whose skill sets cluster around serving on business councils rather than doing any actual business. There’s also a career apparatchik and the founder of the “I Will Ride” Student Coalition, who is apparently a UC Merced senior but looks at least a decade too old.[. . .]
Again, why not just claim the Fresno-Bakersfield line will end up carrying 38 million people, the entire population of California, every day? It would be no less accurate than the current claims, which have been made with no data on ticket costs, no comparative studies of existing bullet-train ridership, or anything else that can reasonably pass for due diligence.
Oh, and nobody actually knows where the bullet train will go to or from. (Past, present and possibly future candidates include Corcoran, Borden, Fresno, Anaheim, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and some guy named Dave’s rec room.) You wouldn’t build a patio with the amount of planning that’s gone into the high-speed rail project.
To put the headline into a bit of perspective, note that only one high speed rail line in the world is profitable. This is an old hobby horse of mine and I’ve posted about High Speed Railways a few times before.
Update: And to answer the question about why parts of Europe, Japan, and China have high speed rail systems and neither Canada nor the United States do, here’s a brief overview I wrote last year:
The best place to build a high speed rail system for the US would be the Boston-New York-Washington corridor (aka “Bosnywash”, for the assumed urban agglomeration that would occur as the cities reach toward one another). It has the necessary population density to potentially turn an HSR system into a practical, possibly even profitable, part of the transportation solution. The problem is that without an enormous eminent domain land-grab to cheat every land-owner of the fair value of their property, it just can’t be done. Buying enough contiguous sections of land to connect these cities would be so expensive that scrapping and replacing the entire navy every year would be a bargain in comparison.
The American railway system is built around freight: passenger traffic is a tiny sliver of the whole picture. Ordinary passenger trains cause traffic and scheduling difficulties because they travel at higher speeds, but require more frequent stops than freight trains, and their schedules have to be adjusted to passenger needs (passenger traffic peaks early to mid-morning and early to mid-evening). The frequency of passenger trains can “crowd out” the freight traffic the railway actually earns money on.
Most railway companies prefer to avoid having the complications of carrying passengers at all — that’s why Amtrak (and VIA Rail in Canada) was set up in the first place, to take the burden of money-losing passenger services off the shoulders of deeply indebted railways. Even after the new entity lopped off huge numbers of passenger trains from its schedule, it couldn’t turn a profit on the scaled-down services it was offering.
Ordinary passenger trains can, at a stretch, share rail with freight traffic, but high speed trains cannot. At higher speeds, the actual construction of the track has to change to deal with the physical problem of safely guiding the fast passenger trains along the rail. Signalling must also change to suit the far-higher speeds — and the matching far-longer safe braking distances. High speed rail lines cannot be interrupted with grade crossings, for the safety of passengers and bystanders, so additional bridges and tunnels must be built to avoid bringing road vehicles and pedestrians too close to the trains.
In other words, a high speed railway line is far from being just a faster version of what we already have: it would have to be built separately, to much higher standards of construction.
Getting back to the California HSR line; it goes from A to B on this map:
Okay, you think, at least Fresno will get some snazzy slick rail service . . . except this section will be built but not operated until further connecting sections are built . . . at a later date. Maybe. It will be the track, including elevated sections through Fresno, and the physical right-of-way, but no electrical system to power the trains; but that’s fine, because the budget doesn’t include any actual trains.
April 15, 2012
Increasing taxes on the “1%” won’t close the gap — and might make it worse
Joseph Brean in the National Post:
That the rich should contribute more than their current share to the common good is a proposal with popularity. From Paris and London to Nova Scotia and Alberta, “tax the rich” has become a dominant theme in budget debates and elections around the world.
In Ontario, for example, NDP leader Andrea Horwath’s proposal to create a new tax bracket for people who make more than half-a-million dollars a year, illustrates the persistent attraction of such schemes for governments in deficit.
“The issue really is one of perceived fairness,” said Robin Boadway, a taxation expert and professor of economics at Queen’s University, who notes that the income of the highest earners has been increasing much faster than the middle and lower ranks. Taxation, to a great degree, relies on the goodwill and trust of citizens, he said, and inequality in tax codes can violate that trust.
Governments acting like Robin Hood, however, have tended to provoke unforeseen problems, most recently in Britain, where an effort to tax the rich ended up — quite literally — costing the government deeply.
It always seems to be a surprise when people respond to incentives in creative ways … and this applies especially to creative ways to avoid paying higher taxes. People will adjust their behaviour to minimize their tax burden — both legally and not-as-legally. This is after all one of the reasons that there are so many tax provisions: the government wants to encourage certain kinds of behaviour (and so gives a tax credit) and discourage other kinds of behaviour (and so levies a specific tax on it). Flexibility occurs on both the tax-levying and tax-paying sides of the fence.
One of the complaints of middle-class taxpayers is that there are few mechanisms they can use to legally reduce their tax burden, while the wealthy have lots of ways to do this. This isn’t going to change if the government increases the top rate of tax — in fact it will encourage more creative use of the tax-lowering provisions of the law (and lawyers and accountants will benefit by helping their wealthy clients ot take advantage of those provisions).
April 14, 2012
April 13, 2012
April 12, 2012
Reason.tv: Why Democrat vs. Republican is the Wrong Way to Look at the 2012 Election
“We had a non-Obama president recently, his name was George W. Bush, it wasn’t all puppy dogs and rainbows,” says Reason’s Matt Welch. “Being Republican is not enough to counter Obama. Mitt Romney is not offering an alternative to Obama,” adds Reason.tv’s Nick Gillespie.
From Newt Gingrich’s inexplicable campaign chatter about a taxpayer-subsidized colony on the moon to Mitt Romney’s refusal to discuss any specific spending cuts he would implement as president, Republicans continue to offer no real substantive alternative to President Obama’s spendthrift economic policies.
Welch and Gillespie, the co-authors of “The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America,” hosted the discussion “Why Democrat vs. Republican is the Wrong Way to Look at the 2012 Election” at Reason Weekend, the annual donor event held by Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes this website).
April 10, 2012
The 7 rules of bureaucracy
A long post by Loyd S. Pettegrew and Carol A. Vance at the LvMI blog explains the seven rules (and many sub-rules) of modern bureaucracy:
In order to understand the foundation of America’s morass, we must examine bureaucracy. At the root of this growing evil is the very nature of bureaucracy, especially political bureaucracy. French economist Frédéric Bastiat offered an early warning in 1850 that laws, institutions, and acts — the stuff of political bureaucracy — produce economic effects that can be seen immediately, but that other, unforeseen effects happen much later. He claimed that bad economists look only at the immediate, seeable effects and ignore effects that come later, while good economists are able to look at the immediate effects and foresee effects, both good and bad, that come later.
Both the seen and the unseen have become a necessary condition of modern bureaucracy. Max Weber, considered the father of modern bureaucracy largely in response to the Industrial Revolution, is credited with formalizing the elements of bureaucracy as a fundamental principle of organization. He was also painfully aware of the arbitrariness of bureaucratic decision processes.
[. . .]
One of the truisms of bureaucracies, be they government or private sector, is that if left to their own devices, they will grow bigger, bolder, and less manageable over time. Teasley has seen this happen over and over again and put his considerable intellect to how its apparatus works. John Baden has offered us one of the most promising, yet ignored, solutions to the bureaucratic leviathan. Baden (1993) puts the problem at the feet of politicians concentrating benefits and dispersing costs and believes “predatory bureaucracies” would allow bureaucracies to feed on themselves with the most effective and efficient bureaucracy taking money and responsibility away from those that are less efficient and effective. While a provocative theory, the problem lies in the very rules that underpin bureaucracies. Despite the concept being nearly 20 years old, it has not been attempted, let alone enacted in any meaningful or widespread way.
[. . .]
Rule #1: Maintain the problem at all costs! The problem is the basis of power, perks, privileges, and security. [. . .]
Rule #2: Use crisis and perceived crisis to increase your power and control. [. . .]
Rule 2a: Force 11th-hour decisions, threaten the loss of options and opportunities, and limit the opposition’s opportunity to review and critique. [. . .]
Rule #3: If there are not enough crises, manufacture them, even from nature, where none exist.
Bureaucracies are always on the lookout for a new crisis. In his “Guiding Principles of Politicians, Bureaucrats, and Bureaucracies,” Harry Teasley points to three examples:
- The Gulf of Tonkin incident, where an alleged attack took place on two US naval destroyers by a North Vietnamese torpedo boat, allowing President Johnson to deploy conventional military forces to Vietnam without congressional approval.
- The attribution of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) to Saddam Hussein permitted President George Bush to invade Iraq (again, without the need of congressional approval), after which no WMDs were found.
- Man-made global warming. The first two resulted in loss of life and a terrible toll of people maimed and injured. We are still in the throes of discovering the effects of the third crisis.
[. . .]
Rule #4: Control the flow and release of information while feigning openness. [. . .]
Rule 4a: Deny, delay, obfuscate, spin, and lie. [. . .]
Rule #5: Maximize public-relations exposure by creating a cover story that appeals to the universal need to help people. [. . .]
Rule #6: Create vested support groups by distributing concentrated benefits and/or entitlements to these special interests, while distributing the costs broadly to one’s political opponents. [. . .]
Rule #7: Demonize the truth tellers who have the temerity to say, “The emperor has no clothes.” [. . .]
Rule 7a: Accuse the truth teller of one’s own defects, deficiencies, crimes, and misdemeanors. [. . .]
April 9, 2012
“Teacher tenure is one of those ideas” [that] “do real damage to the public education system”
If I told you that an article in support of ending tenure for public school teachers appeared in The New Republic, would you believe it? I wouldn’t have done, until today:
Like the abortion measures, this bill was also pushed by Republicans — but here’s the strange part: It was actually a halfway decent idea. The subject of the bill was an important one: tenure for public school teachers. And, while the proposal wasn’t perfect, it was at least an attempt to rectify what is perhaps the least sane element of our country’s approach to education.
The vast majority of states have long granted public school teachers tenure. The way it works is simple: After a certain number of years, teachers qualify — “virtually automatically” in most states, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality — for a form of job protection that makes it extremely difficult to fire them for the rest of their careers.
[. . .]
So what is the case for K–12 teacher tenure? The truth is, there isn’t a good one. One argument typically offered by tenure defenders is that teaching is a notoriously difficult profession in which to measure success. But this is true for lots of jobs — yet, in all other professions, efforts are still made, however imperfect, to evaluate whether an employee is succeeding and to remove those who are not. Why should teaching be different? In fact, given that teaching is arguably the most important job in our society, it would be difficult to name a profession, save maybe the military, for which these sorts of heightened job protections would be less logical. If a job is truly important to the nation’s future, then you want to make sure that the most able, talented people are doing it — and doing their best work at all times.
That goal is simply incompatible with tenure. Indeed, tenure is so illogical that it’s impossible to see why it shouldn’t be abolished. And that is exactly what the Virginia bill sought to do. Predictably, however, Democrats — who remain far too beholden to teachers’ unions — scuttled the measure. As a result, tenure lives on in Virginia for now.
An illustrated summary of David Friedman’s “Machinery of Freedom”
April 8, 2012
Sexual humiliation as a tool of political control
Writing in the Guardian, Naomi Wolf discusses the ways the US government has incorporated sexual humiliation into their toolkit for dealing with both prisoners and innocent people:
In a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the “trespass bill”, which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. These criminalizations of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement.
Is American strip-searching benign? The man who had brought the initial suit, Albert Florence, described having been told to “turn around. Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks.” He said he felt humiliated: “It made me feel like less of a man.”
[. . .]
Believe me: you don’t want the state having the power to strip your clothes off. History shows that the use of forced nudity by a state that is descending into fascism is powerfully effective in controlling and subduing populations.
The political use of forced nudity by anti-democratic regimes is long established. Forcing people to undress is the first step in breaking down their sense of individuality and dignity and reinforcing their powerlessness. Enslaved women were sold naked on the blocks in the American south, and adolescent male slaves served young white ladies at table in the south, while they themselves were naked: their invisible humiliation was a trope for their emasculation. Jewish prisoners herded into concentration camps were stripped of clothing and photographed naked, as iconic images of that Holocaust reiterated.
[. . .]
The most terrifying phrase of all in the decision is justice Kennedy’s striking use of the term “detainees” for “United States citizens under arrest”. Some members of Occupy who were arrested in Los Angeles also reported having been referred to by police as such. Justice Kennedy’s new use of what looks like a deliberate activation of that phrase is illuminating.
Ten years of association have given “detainee” the synonymous meaning in America as those to whom no rights apply — especially in prison. It has been long in use in America, habituating us to link it with a condition in which random Muslims far away may be stripped by the American state of any rights. Now the term — with its associations of “those to whom anything may be done” — is being deployed systematically in the direction of … any old American citizen.
April 7, 2012
“[Dalton] McGuinty … has led Ontario from the commanding heights almost to the low-rent district of the Canadian economy”
Conrad Black, on the dangers of regional politics played out at the national and international level:
One of the points I was trying to make in last week’s column, in general support of Pierre Trudeau’s efforts to make both official languages present in all parts of the country, was that in any federal state, some concessions to particular regional concerns are necessary or the country will fall apart, or even atomize. In a little over a century, this fate has split Norway from Sweden, Singapore from Malaysia, Bangladesh from Pakistan, the Czechs from the Slovaks and, most painfully, the Sudanese and South Sudanese.
This was what made the Quebec separatist threat so dangerous; though there was never much prospect of heavy violence, there was a danger of the permanent diminution of the country after a prolonged and immobilizing constitutional crisis. Of course, the separatist leaders greatly and treacherously underestimated the complexities and problems of any such step, and aggravated the problem with trick referendum questions about seeking authority to negotiate sovereignty and association with Canada: Simultaneously to eat and retain the same rich cake.
[. . .]
The Copenhagen Environmental Conference of 2009 was probably the most inane and redundant international conference in all history, as every climate alarmist capable of crawling to a television studio or buttonholing a journalist (except perhaps for Canada’s inimitable Gwyn Dyer), competed in foreseeing the imminence, almost literally, of the fall of the sky. But more demeaning by far at Copenhagen was the spectacle of the premiers of Canada’s two most populous provinces, Dalton McGuinty and Jean Charest, attacking Alberta’s oil sands in that over-suggestible ideological environment infested by kooks and charlatans.
The oil sands must be developed, and a pipeline built either into the U.S. or to the West Coast to transport the oil to market. These projects must be managed with great care for the environment. But Canada’s manifest destiny as an energy exporter cannot be held hostage by eco-terrorists, nor by the economic growth of one Canadian region being stunted by the slovenly dependence of other regions on an artificially depreciated Canadian dollar. Intra-Canadian partisanship and regional rivalries must end at the border and the water’s edge.
The antics of McGuinty, who has led Ontario from the commanding heights almost to the low-rent district of the Canadian economy, blaming the prosperity of Alberta for raising the value of the Canadian dollar and inconveniencing Ontario, is an outrage. The new federal NDP leader, Thomas Mulcair, has been uttering something perilously close to the same inexcusable flimflam. Alberta, per capita, has done more than any other province to carry the cost of federalism, including oceanic largesse to Quebec. And all Canadians should rejoice at the prospect of Canada becoming a world energy giant, especially as it entails the prosperity of Newfoundland after centuries of economic struggle, and also the flowering of the hydroelectric wealth and technical sophistication of Quebec.
April 5, 2012
Why government stimulus is usually a bad idea
Mike Milke of the Fraser Institute:
Frum’s praise for Ottawa’s go-slow approach on balanced books is premised on the perception that if Ottawa actually cut spending (as opposed to slowing the rate of growth) such actions would endanger our prosperity: “If you reduce spending too fast, you crimp your economy,” wrote Frum.
But that’s a mistaken notion.
To use just one example from a large body of research, in 2009, leading fiscal policy expert and Harvard University professor Alberto Alesina and his colleague Silvia Ardagna reviewed stimulus initiatives in Canada and 20 other industrialized countries from 1970 to 2007. In the 91 instances where governments tried to stimulate the economy, it turned out the unsuccessful attempts generally were the ones based on increased government spending. Alesina noted that “a one percentage point higher increase in the current [government] spending-to-GDP ratio is associated with a 0.75 percentage point lower growth.”
In other words, stimulus spending doesn’t increase economic growth; it harms it.
To see how Ottawa’s own stimulus spending was unnecessary, consider how Canada emerged from the last recession and how government stimulus spending had nothing to do with it. Our recession ended in mid-2009; it was only about then that federal and provincial governments started spending extra (borrowed) stimulus cash.
To credit stimulus spending for the end to Canada’s recession, one must argue that extra (borrowed) dollars mostly spent after June 2009 somehow magically rescued the Canadian economy before June 2009.
All the borrowing did have one effect: It added to the existing large federal debt mountain, forecast to hit $614-billion in 2015, up from $457-billion in 2008.
The government’s stimulus spending was demanded by the opposition, but evidence since then indicates that the minority Tories would probably have passed a stimulus budget even if the opposition didn’t give them political cover.
A useful idiot wants even more state surveillance, more Big Brother
Dan Hodges on his love affair with the surveillance state, and his overwhelming desire for even more government snooping:
I want to live in a surveillance state. Big Brother, come cast your watchful eye over me and mine. I love you, bro.
Seriously, when I saw the outcry over Government plans to gain access to telephone, email and internet, my initial reaction was: “You mean they can’t do that already?”
I assumed, somewhat stupidly, that everything we said, typed or viewed was routinely monitored, and then filtered by some giant, super-secret computer tucked away in a heavily guarded subterranean basement of GCHQ: “Hodges has just said he wants to shoot another Liverpool player, sir.” “Oh, he’s always saying that, Jones. Ignore him.”
I don’t want less surveillance, I want more of the stuff. My idea of the perfect society is one where every street corner has a CCTV camera, everyone has a nice shiny ID card tucked in their wallet and no extremist can even think of logging onto a dodgy website without an SAS squad abseiling swiftly through their window.
