Quotulatiousness

August 31, 2023

Disaster response plans? I’m sure they’ve established terms of reference for the to-be-appointed blue-ribbon committees to look into that … eventually

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

In The Line Jen Gerson discovers once again that our federal government is much more interested in making dramatic announcements — usually repeated many, many times — than in actually doing anything. Their response to her inquiry about federal disaster response planning is anything but comforting to worriers among the citizenry:

Front page of the Calgary Sun after major flooding hit downtown Calgary in June, 2013.

The clever and devoted readers of The Line will have already surmised that I am a touch neurotic, prone to catastrophize, and gifted with one of those imaginations that is perfectly capable of picturing in vivid detail every worst-case scenario playing out simultaneously.

And so, dear devotee, you will have no trouble picturing my mental state in recent months, in what will come be known as the Summer of Fire. Until next summer, anyway. Until then, it’s always fun to watch two cities burn (or come close to burning) over the course of a single weekend, eh?

Watching the long lines of cars fleeing Yellowknife, or the beachcombers lining the shores of Lake Okanagan as swathes of West Kelowna disappeared, I have to admit that my mind wandered into its darker wings.

Yellowknife and Kelowna are cities, yes, but relatively small ones: Yellowknife is remote and served by only one road, making it a particular logistical challenge to evacuate. But it’s still only a town of 20,000 people. This ought to be well within the capacity of a wealthy, organized G7 country.

What if wildfires threatened, say, Edmonton? A city of a million. How would we get everyone out? Where would they go? What would they eat?

And this line of internal paranoia brought me to the media landing page of the minister of Public Safety Canada. I have questions — to my mind, basic questions — about this country’s capacity to handle major catastrophes. They were as follows:

  • What are the transportation resources typically available to facilitate an evacuation: in an emergency, how many people could we move by air or land, and how quickly?
  • Does the federal government maintain stores of food or other basic goods? How much? How many people could we feed?
  • Do we have the capacity to establish temporary housing for evacuees displaced by an emergency situation? If so, how many people could it hold, and for how long?

I also had a few more general queries. I am aware that they may not have been fully answerable by the federal government, but I was curious about what the response would be. Specifically:

  • Are we going to rebuild everything that burns down, or do we have to accept that climate change will make some previously inhabited sections of Canada unlivable?
  • What kind of resources will the federal government marshal toward hardening infrastructure to prepare for more serious floods and fires in the future? Is this a priority?

To be clear, none of these questions are “gotchas”. I was not out to catch the federal government by surprise, nor to embarrass it in any way. I don’t think any of these questions is unreasonable; in fact, I expected some fairly stock answers. That is, I expected that a federal government would keep at least a basic running inventory of things like temporary housing or food supplies. Further, I would have been perfectly content with very general answers. Perhaps some of my questions were misguided, and I would have been happy to understand that as well.

What I got was, well, I’m going to show you exactly what I got, offer a little of my own running commentary, and allow you to come to your own conclusions.

QotD: A typical polis

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

Defining the polis (plural: poleis) is remarkably tricky, so tricky in fact that the Polis Center, after spending ten years inventorying every known polis, did not quite manage to settle on a single definition and instead inventoried poleis based on if they are called poleis in the sources or if they show signs of doing the things that a polis usually does (like building walls or minting coins). In Greek usage, a polis was a town, but it was also the political community of that town (which may or may not be an independent state, though the Greeks tended to think that poleis ought to be independent by nature) and the broader territory that political community controlled and also the body of citizens, the politai, who made up the community. These are connected definitions, of course, but there is a lot of give in these joints, yet the idea of a polis as a self-governing community centered on a single, usually fortified, town center is a strong one in Greek thought.

In any case there certainly were a lot of them. The Polis Center’s inventory counts just over a thousand archaic and classical poleis (it does not extend into the Hellenistic period), of which probably around 800-900 existed at one time. Now our vision of these poleis is necessarily a bit skewed: most were very small and leave little evidence, while the two most prominent poleis in our sources by far, Athens and Sparta, were both very unusual in their size and governing structures. That said while most poleis were very small, it doesn’t follow that most Greeks lived in very small poleis; M.H. Hansen notes ((2006), 83) that by his estimates 80% of all of the poleis housed around 35% of the polis-living population, while the top 10% largest poleis housed roughly 40%.

But the smallest poleis could be very small. A touch over 200 poleis in the inventory had territories of less than 100km2. A small polis like that might have a total population of just a few thousand, with an even smaller subset of that population consisting of adult citizen males. On the other hand, very large poleis like Athens or Sparta might have hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, though as M.H. Hansen notes in the inventory these sorts of massive poleis with territories in excess of 1,000km2 were very rare: there are just thirteen such known.

But crucially for this survey, what we’re going to see is that there some fairly common and standard polis institutions, which seem fairly common regardless of size. Indeed, the language and thinking of our Greek sources is often informed by a sort of idea of an ideal or standard polis, from which every real polis deviates in certain ways. These little communities had institutions which resembled each other, to the point that the difference between “oligarchic” or “democratic” or even “tyranical” poleis could be surprisingly slight. So that’s what we’re going to look at here: a basic sense of what a polis notionally was. And we’ll begin by looking at the parts that comprised a polis, which is going to be quite important as we go forward, since the way one structures a government depends on how one imagines the component parts being governed.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Polis, 101: Component Parts”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-03-10.

August 30, 2023

It’s hard to believe, but the big cabinet shuffle didn’t help Trudeau’s poll numbers

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Rather the opposite, as Paul Wells explains:

The good news for Team Trudeau is that sometimes new inertia pushes old inertia off the front pages. In June, the apparent decision to stall on an inquiry into foreign election interference seemed bold to the point of recklessness. Now the conventional wisdom barely notices it’s happened. Perhaps one explanation for Pierre Poilievre’s rise in the polls is that he is now complaining about things more Canadians care about.

From Abacus

Did somebody mention polls! For many more reasons than this, the polls are dire for the Liberals. A cottage industry sprang up over the weekend, consisting of Liberal sympathizers pointing out that polls have often been lousy at predicting the future: Dan Arnold and Tyler Meredith; Gerald Butts; David Herle. They all have this much of a point: polls don’t predict the future, opinions can change, campaigns matter. Neither you nor I know what the future holds.

And yet. If Brian Mulroney managed to overcome John Turner’s polling lead in 1986-88, it’s partly because Mulroney’s government was still new, Mulroney was much less of a known quantity than Turner, and Mulroney was able to turn Turner’s chosen issue, free trade, into a huge advantage. If Trudeau has won three times while his share of the popular vote declines, it’s partly because he was less of a known quantity in earlier elections. There’s a reason why the last leader to win four consecutive elections was Wilfrid Laurier. It’s hard.

What Trudeau used to have was agility. He was a critic of the status quo. Stephen Harper needed to have jets in the air over Iraq; Trudeau didn’t. Harper had a low cap on the number of Syrian refugees he could accept; Trudeau didn’t. Harper and Mulcair were obsessed with balanced budgets. Trudeau was less of a fuddy-duddy. He’d change everything, from the electoral system on up.

This sort of stuff is simply easier for the young leader of a third party than for a prime minister nearing a decade in office. But as their manoeuvring room and novelty wear off, incumbent leaders can usually offer compensating virtues: their experience and wisdom. Sure, he’s less exciting than before, but now he’s a surer hand.

Unfortunately, for that to work you need to be a surer hand.

August 29, 2023

The noble reasons New Jersey banned self-service gas stations

Filed under: Business, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:46

Of course, by “noble reasons” I mean “corrupt crony capitalist reasons“:

“Model A Ford in front of Gilmore’s historic Shell gas station” by Corvair Owner is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

New Jersey’s law, like Oregon’s, ostensibly stemmed from safety concerns. In 1949, the state passed the Retail Gasoline Dispensing Safety Act and Regulations, a law that was updated in 2016, which cited “fire hazards directly associated with dispensing fuel” as justification for its ban.

If the idea that Americans and filling stations would be bursting into flames without state officials protecting us from pumping gas sounds silly to you, it should. In fact, safety was not the actual reason for New Jersey’s ban (any more than Oregon’s ban was, though the state cited “increased risk of crime and the increased risk of personal injury resulting from slipping on slick surfaces” as justification).

To understand the actual reason states banned filling stations, look to the life of Irving Reingold (1921-2017), a maverick entrepreneur and workaholic who liked to fly his collection of vintage World War II planes in his spare time. Reingold created a gasoline crisis in the Garden State, in the words of New Jersey writer Paul Mulshine, “by doing something gas station owners hated: He lowered prices”.

In the late 1940s, gasoline was selling for about 22 cents a gallon in New Jersey. Reingold figured out a way to undercut the local gasoline station owners who had entered into a “gentlemen’s agreement” to maintain the current price. He’d allow customers to pump gas themselves.

“Reingold decided to offer the consumer a choice by opening up a 24-pump gas station on Route 17 in Hackensack,” writes Mulshine. “He offered gas at 18.9 cents a gallon. The only requirement was that drivers pump it themselves. They didn’t mind. They lined up for blocks.”

Consumers loved this bit of creative destruction introduced by Reingold. His competition was less thrilled. They decided to stop him — by shooting up his gas station. Reingold responded by installing bulletproof glass.

“So the retailers looked for a softer target — the Statehouse,” Mulshine writes. “The Gasoline Retailers Association prevailed upon its pals in the Legislature to push through a bill banning self-serve gas. The pretext was safety …”

The true purpose of New Jersey’s law had nothing to do with safety or “the common good”. It was old-fashioned cronyism, protectionism via the age-old bootleggers and Baptists grift.

Politicians helped the Gasoline Retailers Association drive Reingold out of business. He and consumers are the losers of the story, yet it remains a wonderful case study in public choice theory economics.

The economist James M. Buchanan received a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work that demonstrated a simple idea: Public officials tend to arrive at decisions based on self-interest and incentives, just like everyone else.

QotD: Private versus public decision-making

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

Those who wish to turn ever-more decision-making power over to government – and, hence, to take such power from individuals operating in their private spheres (including, but not limited to, private markets) – believe this bizarre notion: when Jones has the power to spend Smith’s money and to order Smith about, Smith’s welfare is improved compared to when the power to spend Smith’s money and to determine how Smith will act is reserved to Smith, with Jones’s authority confined to his – Jones’s – own business.

In private-property markets each individual has the power to say “no”, and when each individual says “yes”, that individual spends only his or her own money. Also, in private-property markets each individual’s choices are significant: if Smith chooses to buy a new car, Smith gets the new car that he chooses; if Smith chooses not to buy a new car, Smith gets no new car.

These basic features of private-property markets, along with a handful of other features that are embodied in the common law, ensure not that markets operate “perfectly”, but that the market process is always in action to generally improve the operation and outcomes of markets.

The political marketplace is nearly the exact opposite. In the political marketplace, Jones spends Smith’s money, and Smith has no real power to say no. Nor [are] Smith’s choices ever genuinely significant (unless, of course, Smith becomes one of the relatively small percentage of people who succeed in grabbing hold of political power).

If a malevolent all-powerful being were intent on designing a market that is destined to abuse the vast bulk of people, that devil could do no better than to impose on his victims majoritarian politics largely unconstrained by constitutional rules. This devil – being, of course, ill-mannered, and evilly-intentioned – would seek to destroy private-property markets.

Don Boudreaux, “Bonus Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2019-07-31.

August 28, 2023

Charter school students do better academically, yet are funded at a lower level than other students

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

Jack Elbaum on recent studies that show charter schools in the United States have higher academic success rates than ordinary state-funded schools, despite a significantly lower funding rate:

If you thought charter schools received anywhere near the same amount of funding as traditional public schools, then think again.

A new, massive study from the University of Arkansas finds that “On average, charter schools across 18 cities in 16 states (…) receive about 30 percent or $7,147 (2020 dollars) less funding per pupil than traditional public schools.” Over the past two decades, this funding disparity has remained relatively stable.

The gaps are, predictably, more severe in some places than others. The study notes that “Atlanta has the largest percentage-based charter funding disparity (about 53 percent), while Camden has the largest disparity in dollars ($19,711). Houston has the smallest disparity in terms of percent (three percent) and dollars ($417).”

Importantly, the regression analysis run by the authors did not suggest differences in the proportion of students in poverty or English Language Learners are the reason for the disparity. However, it did find that after taking into account differences in the number of special needs students, the disparity dropped considerably — although it remained significant ($1,707).

[…]

Based on these data alone, it would not be unreasonable for one to expect that these charter schools had worse educational outcomes than their traditional public school counterparts.

The only issue is that this is not the case.

A recent study from Stanford University, for example, found that charter school students gain 16 days’ worth of reading and six days of math per year relative to those in traditional public schools. These benefits were particularly pronounced among minority students who were also in poverty. Education Week reported that “Black charter students in poverty gained 37 days of learning in reading and 36 days in math over their counterparts in traditional public schools, and Hispanic students in poverty gained 36 days of reading and 30 days of math over their traditional public school peers.”

Economist Thomas Sowell’s 2020 book Charter Schools and Their Enemies also offers compelling data suggesting the efficacy of charter schools. He studied a set of charters and traditional public schools in New York City that served essentially identical populations. In many cases in the study, a charter school and traditional public school would even occupy the same building.

August 26, 2023

The United Banana Republics of America and their efforts to “get” Trump

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

Chris Bray points out an interesting historical precedent for the US government’s determination to pin something on former President Donald Trump:

There’s a whole lot of this sentiment on social media this morning, and I agree with it entirely:

But also read this. It’s important, and it’ll take you three minutes. Click on that link and read. You’ll see the point with every paragraph.

There are American precedents for the shameful acts of disgusting political lawfare being directed against Donald Trump (and his lawyers and political staff), and the most obvious and extremely telling precedent is the behaviour of Federalists during the Adams administration. The Sedition Act of 1798 made criticism of the federal government a crime, on a comparable construction of the idea of “disinformation” that’s now used as a repressive tool: the law forbade “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government, subjective terms that in practice opened the prison doors to mere disagreement and ordinary political criticism. Federalists arrested and prosecuted newspaper editors and a congressman. Representative Matthew Lyon was imprisoned for criticizing the Adams administration.

But the effects of the Sedition Act are extremely important. Here’s a description from archives.gov — from a site run by the federal government:

    The laws were directed against Democratic-Republicans, the party typically favoured by new citizens. The only journalists prosecuted under the Sedition Act were editors of Democratic-Republican newspapers.

    Sedition Act trials, along with the Senate’s use of its contempt powers to suppress dissent, set off a firestorm of criticism against the Federalists and contributed to their defeat in the election of 1800, after which the acts were repealed or allowed to expire.

The criminalization of dissent by Federalists destroyed the Federalists. The party went into a hard decline; John Adams became the only Federalist president in our history (because Washington, sentimentally a federalist, declined to identify as a Federalist), though the party continued to be regionally important in New England until it finally destroyed itself at the Hartford Convention. The event that historians call the Revolution of 1800, the election of the Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson to the presidency, was in significant part a result of American disgust over the political repression of dissent1. See this point clearly:

Federalists jailed their political opposition, so America loathed the Federalists and turned against them.

    1. See also the High Federalist response to the Fries Rebellion, which treated a careful act of resistance as a dangerous insurrection. If you’ve never read about this one, I strongly recommend this book.

“Email jobs”, as defined by Freddie deBoer

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Freddie deBoer offers some notes on what he calls “a book I’ll probably never write”:

When I talk to people about college-educated workers, even informed people, there’s a constant tendency to immediately think of doctors, lawyers, engineers, data scientists … Reflexively, people seem to think of educated labor in terms of college graduates who a) tend to go on to some sort of graduate study, b) work in fields that directly utilize domain-specific knowledge from their majors or graduate education, and c) are generally high-income relative to the economy writ large. These professions, combined, are a healthy slice of our labor force, and there’s nothing wrong with paying an appropriate amount of attention to them. But I think the amount of attention they’re given in the educational and economic discourse is in fact disproportionate. And I also think that there’s a kind of profession that is intuitively very understandable but which (despite considerable effort on my part) remains very difficult to classify and thus to quantify. Though it has many names, I think my preferred term is “email job”.

[…]

To me, prototypical email jobs

  • Depend, naturally, on email and other digital communicative tools like video conferencing, online calendars, and networked workspaces for the large majority of their actual productive capability
  • Are staffed almost entirely by people with college degrees, but while they do take advantage of time management and organizational skills that can be developed in college, almost never call on domain-specific knowledge related to a particular major
  • Dedicate a considerable amount of time not to the named productive goals of the job themselves but to meta-tasks that are meant to facilitate those goals (scheduling, coordinating, assigning responsibility, “touching base”, enhancing productivity, ensuring compliance with various HR-mediated job requirements and odd whims of the boss)
  • Have no immediate observable impact on the material world; an email job might involve coordinating or supporting or assessing a project that will eventually move some atoms around, but the email job itself results only in the manipulation of bits
  • Cannot be considered creative in any meaningful sense — they do not entail the production of new stories, scripts, code, images, video, blueprints, patents, research papers, etc — but may involve the creation of materials that are subsidiary to larger administrative goals, such as PowerPoint presentations, reports, postmortems, or white papers
  • May or may not be partially or fully remote but could likely be performed fully remotely/on a “work from home” basis without issue
  • Can involve supervising lower-level workers, even teams, but these positions are not themselves fundamentally supervisory and the holder of an email job is rarely the only “report” for anyone; these positions, in other words, are not executive or executive-track, though some may escape the email job track and gain entry to the executive track
  • Tend to top out at middle management, and often have a salary range (with a great deal of wiggle) between $50,000 and $200,000/year.

Doctors do not have email jobs because the human bodies they treat exist in the world of atoms, not the world of bits, and their work involves domain-specific knowledge. There are some lawyers who are effectively in email jobs, as their law credentials are used for hiring purposes but their actual task is handling particular kinds of paperwork that a non-lawyer could complete, but most lawyers are not in email jobs as their work involves various functions at courthouses and otherwise away from the computer, and anyway their work too involves domain-specific knowledge. Most accountants and actuaries are not in email jobs as their jobs require domain-specific knowledge that they acquired in formal education. Architects create new things that will someday exist in the world of atoms and utilize domain-specific knowledge they learned in college. Programmers take advantage of skills gained in college to create new things that exist for their own purpose, rather than to satisfy other administrative functions. Professors don’t have email jobs, even those who work at online colleges, as working with students takes place in the world of atoms and they are constantly accessing domain-specific knowledge they learned in formal education. Screenwriters create something new; engineers move atoms and usually get graduate degrees; CEOs don’t have email jobs because they’re on the executive track and enjoy the ability to delegate most of the email work to subordinates. I could go on.

So who does have an email job? Take someone who works in accreditation at a college in a large public university system. He or she didn’t get a major in accreditation (there is no such major) and is unlikely to have majored in education, and even if they did they would have learned about pedagogy and “theory” and assessment rather than anything having to do with their daily work lives. Essentially everything they do for work takes place within the confines of their laptop screen, and the exception is various in-person meetings that accomplish nothing beyond delegating various tasks, defining roles, critiquing past performance, and otherwise reflecting on how to do a better job of supporting the tasks that other people do. A person in this job might have a secretary or lower-level administrative functionary that reports to them, but they are not on a track that makes advancement likely — becoming a VP somewhere will likely require many years of service and going on the job market to get a job at another school. A person in this position will never interact with students in any real capacity, demonstrating the psychic distance between email jobs and the actual function of their institutions. Though they have a clear and defined set of responsibilities written into their job description, their overall impact on the day-to-day functioning of their college is nebulous, and far more time is spent on administrivia than their “real” duties. They live between the 50th and 75th percentile for individual income in their state.

August 25, 2023

The German Democratic Republic, aka East Germany

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

Ed West visited East Berlin as a child and came away unimpressed with the grey, impoverished half of Berlin compared to “the gigantic toy shop that was West Berlin”. The East German state was controlled by the few survivors of the pre-WW2 Communist leaders who fled to the Soviet Union:

Occupation zone borders in Germany, 1947. The territories east of the Oder-Neisse line, under Polish and Soviet administration/annexation, are shown in cream as is the likewise detached Saar protectorate. Berlin is the multinational area within the Soviet zone.
Image based on map data of the IEG-Maps project (Andreas Kunz, B. Johnen and Joachim Robert Moeschl: University of Mainz) – www.ieg-maps.uni-mainz.de, via Wikimedia Commons.

In my childish mind there was perhaps a sense that East Germany, the evil side, was in some way the spiritual successor both to Prussia and the Third Reich – authoritarian, militaristic and hostile. Even the film Top Secret, one of the many Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker comedies we used to enjoy as children, deliberately confused the two, the American rock star stuck in communist East Germany then getting caught up with the French resistance. The film showed a land of Olympic female shot put winners with six o’clock shadows, crappy little cars you had to wait a decade for, and a terrifying wall to keep the prisoners in – and compared to the gigantic toy shop that was West Berlin, I was not sold.

I suppose that’s how the country is largely remembered in the British imagination, a land of border fences and spying, The Lives of Others and Goodbye Lenin. When the British aren’t comparing everything to Nazi Germany, they occasionally stray out into other historic analogies by comparing things to East Germany, not surprising in a surveillance state such as ours (these rather dubious comparisons obviously intensified under lockdown).

This is no doubt grating to East Germans themselves, but perhaps more grating is the sense of disdain often felt in the western half of Germany; for East Germans, their country simply ceased to exist in 1990 as it was gobbled up by its larger, richer, more glamorous neighbour, and has been regarded as a failure ever since. For that reason, [Katja] Hoyer’s book [Beyond the Wall] is both enjoyable holiday reading and an important historical record for an ageing cohort of people who lived under the old system. To have one’s story told, in a sense, is to avoid annihilation.

Despite the similarities between the two totalitarian systems, East Germany almost defined itself as the anti-fascist state, and its origins lie in a group of communist exiles who fled from Hitler to seek safety in the Soviet Union. Inevitably, their story was almost comically bleak; 17 senior German Marxists in Russia ended up being executed by Stalin, suspected by the paranoid dictator of secretly working for Germany. Even some Jewish communists were accused of spying for the Nazis — which seems to a rational observer unlikely. As Hoyer writes, “More members of the KPD’s executive committee died at Stalin’s hands than at Hitler’s”.

Only two of the nine-strong German politburo survived life in Russia, one of these being Walter Ulbricht, the goatee-bearded veteran of the failed 1919 German revolution and communist party chairman in Berlin in the years before the Nazis came to power.

The war had brutalised the eastern part of Germany far more than the West. It suffered the revenge of the Red Army, including the then largest mass rape in history, and the forced expulsion of millions of Germans from further east (including Hoyer’s grandfather, who had walked from East Prussia). The country was utterly shattered.

From the start the Soviet section had huge disadvantages, not just in terms of raw materials or industry – western Germany has historically always been richer — but in having a patron in Russia. While the Americans boosted their allies through the Marshall Plan, the Soviets continued to plunder Germany; when they learned of uranium in Thuringia they simply turned up and took it, using locals as forced labour.

“In total, 60 per cent of ongoing East German production was taken out of the young state’s efforts to get on its feet between 1945 and 1953,” Hoyer writes: “Yet its people battled on. As early as 1950, the production levels of 1938 had been reached again despite the fact that the GDR had paid three times as much in reparations as its Western counterpart.”

After the war, so-called “Antifa Committees” formed across the Soviet zone, “made up of a wild mix of individuals, among them socialists, communists, liberals, Christians and other opponents of Nazism”. Inevitably, a broad and eclectic left front was taken over by communists who soon crushed all opposition.

And as with many regimes, state oppression grew worse over time. “By May 1953, 66,000 people languished in East German prisons, twice as many as the year before, and a huge figure compared to West Germany’s 40,000. The General Secretary’s revival of the ‘class struggle’, officially announced in the summer of 1952 as part of the state’s ‘building socialism’ programme, had escalated into a struggle against the population, including the working classes.” The party was also becoming dominated by an educated elite, as happened in pretty much all revolutionary regimes.

Protests began at the Stalinallee in Berlin on 16 June 1953, where builders marched towards the House of Ministries and “stood there in their work boots, the dirt and sweat of their labour still on their faces; many held their tools in their hands or slung over their shoulders. There could not have been a more fitting snapshot of what had become of Ulbricht’s dictatorship of the proletariat. The angry crowd chanted, ‘Das hat alles keinen Zweck, der Spitzbart muss weg!’ – ‘No point in reform until Goatee is gone!'”

The 1953 protests were crushed, the workers smeared as fascists, but three years later came Khrushchev’s famous denunciation of Stalin, which caused huge trauma to communists everywhere. “The shaken German delegation went back to their rooms to ponder the implications of what they had just learned.” By breakfast time, “Ulbricht had pulled himself together”, and decreed the new party line. Stalin, it was announced “cannot be counted as a classic of Marxism”.

August 24, 2023

QotD: Apparatchiks of the perma-bureaucracy

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

… in Tocqueville’s day the American government was almost inconceivably weak by our standards. For “magistrate”, then, read “bureaucrat”. Though of course American congress-critters do have “a vast deal of arbitrary power”, most of the real damage is done by unelected, unaccountable, indeed unknown bureaucrats. It’s the perma-bureaucracy, the Apparat, as the Soviets called it, who really run things. If you need examples, just google “Hawaiian judge meme”. That’s the Apparat, in all its glory, and exactly the kind of thing Tocqueville was discussing as the precursor of tyranny.

Being unelected, and therefore unaccountable, the Apparat works solely for the benefit of apparatchiks – and, obviously, vice versa. This is the mechanism by which Conquest’s famous “second law” operates: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing”. This has nothing to do with “philosophical” orientation, since as we’ve discussed, the terms “left” and “right” are essentially meaningless when it comes to modern politics. Rather, Conquest’s law works because bureaucrats always prioritize the bureaucracy’s continued existence over its ostensible mission, whatever that happens to be. Pick any do-gooder organization: The “end hunger” bureaucrats of the Feed-the-World NGO would be out of a job if the world actually got fed; ergo, you’ll soon enough find the world-feeders disinterested in, and eventually openly sabotaging, the organization’s efforts to feed anyone.

Severian, “Anticipations and Objections (I)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-16.

August 23, 2023

QotD: “Megacorporations” of the Roman era

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

The definition of a megacorp differs a bit, work to work. They are, of course, megacorporations in the literal sense; massive, vertically integrated companies that often have monopolistic control over multiple markets. But more fundamental to the definition of the megacorp is that they typically employ their own armed forces and either enforce their own law or are at least able to ignore the law more generally. It is not enough for a company to be big, it has to generate the sort of wealth to which M. Licinius Crassus famously quipped “no one was truly rich who could not support an army at his own expense” (Plut. Cras. 2.7).

Which is to say that what really defines a megacorporation is that it trespasses into domains usually occupied by the state: military, police and judicial functions – the use of force. A megacorporation is, simply put, a corporation so large and powerful that it begins to act as a state, be that in the form of the private armies of Cyberpunk 2077, the privatized police force of the Robocop franchise, or the straight-up corporate governments of Stellaris (which in turn channel things like the Spacer’s Guild or the Ferengi Alliance) And that is core to the generally dystopian leaning of megacorporations – they are meant to reflect capitalism and corporate empire building taken to an extreme, to the point where it has swallowed the entire rest of the society.

Taking that definition to history, we can actually see a fair number of megacorporations; they are by no means common, but they do exist. Going very far back, the Roman societates (lit: “fellowships”, but “business association” or “company” is an accurate enough rendering) of the publicani (businessmen who filled public contracts) exercised close to this sort of power in some of Rome’s early provinces. During the Middle and Late Roman Republic, the job of extracting tax revenue from the provinces was too administratively complex for the limited machinery of the Republic, so instead the senate directed the censors to auction the right to collect taxes. Groups of Roman businessmen (and often silent patrician partners) would group resources together to bid for the right to collect taxes from a province – any taxes they took in excess of that figure would be their profit.

These companies could be very large indeed. For instance, parts of the lex portorii Asiae (the customs laws for the Roman province of Asia) survive and include regulations for the relevant company including a slew of customs houses and guard posts (the law is incomplete, but mentions more than 30 collection points – all major ports – to which would also need to be added posts along the land routes into the province). From other evidence we know that the staff at customs posts included armed guards along with the expected tax collectors and bookkeepers. And we know that publicani were sometimes delegated local or Roman forces to do their work (e.g. Cic. Ad Att. 114, using Shackleton Bailey’s numbering). They also maintained the closest thing the Roman Republic had to a postal service (Cic. Ad Att. 108). It’s not clear exactly how many employees one of the larger tax collection companies might have had (and those for the province of Asia – equivalent to the west coast of Anatolia – would have been some of the largest), but it was clearly considerable, as were the sums of money involved.

To the cities and towns of a province, such Roman companies must have seemed like megacorporations, especially if they were in with the governor (which they generally were) and thus could call down the forces of Rome on recalcitrant taxpayers. And we certainly know that these publicani often collected substantially far more than was due to them under the law (the reason why “tax collector” and “sinner” seem to be nearly synonymous in the New Testament, a fact that gave Ernst Badian’s study of them, Publicans and Sinners, its title). At the same time, we see the clear limitations too: such companies were clearly subservient to the governor and to the Roman state. Administrative changes beginning under Julius Caesar and brought to completion under Augustus did away with some of the largest tax contracts and the influence of the societates publicanorum with them.

Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: January 1, 2021”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-01-01.

August 22, 2023

With Bill C-18 about to come into effect, there is zero sense for the “tech giants” to start negotiating

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

Michael Geist explains why there are no incentives for Google and Meta to begin any kind of negotiations with the Canadian government over the ruthlessly self-destructive Online News Act:

The rhetoric around Bill C-18 has escalated in recent days in light of the awful wildfires in NWT and British Columbia. In my view, the issues associated with these tragic events have little to do with Meta blocking news links and the attempt to bring it into the conversation is a transparent attempt to score political points (the connectivity issues with some NWT communities completely taken offline for days is somehow never mentioned). The reality is that Meta was asked about just this scenario at committee and it made it clear that it would not block any non-news outlet links. That is precisely what has been happening and the government’s legislative choices should be the starting point for understanding why compliance with the law involves blocking a very broad range of news links that extend beyond even those sources that are defined as “eligible news outlets”.

The government and supporters of Bill C-18 talking points now emphasize two things in relation to Meta blocking news links: the law has yet to take effect and there is room to address their concerns in the regulation-making process. Both of these claims are incredibly deceptive, relying on the assumption that most won’t bother to read the actual legislation. If they did, they would see that (1) the law has received royal assent and can take effect anytime and (2) the regulation making process addresses only a small subset of Bill C-18 issues with most of the core issues finalized. In other words, the time to shape the law and address many of the key concerns was before the government repeatedly cut off debate in order to ensure it that received royal assent before the summer break.

Start with when the law takes effect. As noted above, the law has been passed and received royal assent. It is the law of the land and there is no scope for changes or amendments without a new bill that must be passed by Parliament. Section 93 establishes when the provisions come into force. The law initially envisioned a staged approach whereby certain sections would be proclaimed in effect by the government in stage one, followed by four additional stages, some of which were contingent on certain regulations coming into force. Yet at the last minute the government approved a Senate amendment that basically discarded the entire approach. Section 93(6) states:

    (6) Despite subsections (1) to (5), any provision of this Act that does not come into force by order before the 180th day following the day on which this Act receives royal assent comes into force 180 days after the day on which this Act receives royal assent.

The entire law therefore takes effect no later than 180 days after royal assent, which is December 19, 2023. This change was included at the urging of the Canadian media sector (specifically Quebecor) which lobbied to have it take effect as soon as possible. Under this approach, the law can take effect at any time as the government need only issue the relevant Orders-in-Council. There is now little wiggle room. As of today’s post, the latest the law will take effect is in 120 days but it could happen well before that.

Once the law takes effect, the clock on negotiations and potential mediation and arbitration begins. The timelines are fixed in Section 19(1) of the law: 90 days to negotiate and 120 days for mediation. If there is no agreement and no request to the CRTC to extend the deadlines, the issue can go to final offer arbitration. To be clear, none of these timelines are subject to the regulation making process. They are fixed and they create obvious urgency for anyone facing compliance requirements.

The government threatened Meta and Google with mandated payment to Canadian news sources if their online services merely linked to articles or videos from those news sources. Meta and Google rationally decided that the tiny little Canadian market wasn’t worth the cost of paying CBC and other Canadian news outlets for the privilege of sending them readers and are in the process of obeying the letter of the new law and blocking such links on their respective platforms. They told the Canadian government that this is what they’d do if the law was passed in its current form, yet the government is pretending to be shocked and surprised that Meta and Google are going to obey the law.

After all, there’s no real risk that lives might be endangered because so many Canadians are used to getting their news by way of Facebook or Google, is there?

August 13, 2023

Don’t worry about losing all your news links, citizen! The Liberal government’s Ministry of Propaganda will tell you everything you need to know!

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

The federal government still seems shocked and a little bit hurt that the “tech giants” are carefully obeying the letter of their new Online News Act instead of pumping millions of dollars into government-favoured media outlets. How dare Alphabet and Meta obey the law we wrote? We wanted to soak them for bribes subsidies to give to legacy corporations who can be depended upon to cheerlead our agenda!

Blocking of news links on Facebook and Instagram in Canada has becomes increasingly widespread in recent days, leading to a growing number of public comments from media outlets and reporters expressing surprise or shock about the scope of the link blocking. Indeed, outlets with blocked links include university student newspapers, radio stations, and foreign news outlets. While there may have been some errors (Facebook has a page to seek review of any blocked link decision), the inclusion of a very wide range of Canadian and foreign news outlets is no accident. Rather, it reflects the government’s Bill C-18 approach, which effectively covers all news outlets worldwide whose links are accessed in Canada. The Canadian government could have adopted a more targeted approach – for example, limiting the scope to news links from those news outlets eligible to negotiate agreements with Internet platforms under the law – but it instead went for the broadest possible approach that includes foreign news outlets with little or no connection to Canada.

Understanding why Bill C-18 covers news links from outlets who are not “eligible news businesses” under the law requires unpacking several provisions. First, start with the definition of a “digital news intermediary”, which states:

    digital news intermediary means an online communications platform, including a search engine or social media service, that is subject to the legislative authority of Parliament and that makes news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada. It does not include an online communications platform that is a messaging service the primary purpose of which is to allow persons to communicate with each other privately.‍ 

This definition is critical since the only companies that are subject to Bill C-18’s requirement to negotiate agreements with news outlets are (1) those that qualify as DNIs under this definition and (2) meet the requirements found in Section 6 on a significant bargaining power imbalance. The absence of significant bargaining power imbalance is why companies such as Twitter, Microsoft or Apple are not subject to the law. That leaves Google and Meta, provided that they qualify as DNIs. The key phrase in the qualification requirement is that the companies “make news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada”. If the companies do not make news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada they are not DNIs and are not subject to the law.

[…]

… the government’s choice was to try to bring Meta and Google into the scope of the law by virtue of any news links to any news outlet anywhere in the world, even if those outlets have nothing to do with Canada or with the Bill C-18 system. Given Meta’s stated goal of complying with Bill C-18 by removing links to news content that would render it a DNI, the government’s legislative choice of covering all news links from all news outlets therefore effectively requires it to block all of those news links.

It takes a lot to make Google, of all companies, a sympathetic victim … yet Canada’s awesomely awful Liberal government aced it. Bananada strikes again!

“It makes [Canada] look like some cheap, politically petty little kleptocracy run by a collection of self-serving narcissists”

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

Canada became a parody of itself so slowly that the legacy media barely even noticed:

There was a time when politicians steered very carefully around saying anything that could be construed as an attempt to influence a decision by one of Canada’s independent agencies.

Honest, there was.

There was also a time when, should a politician so much as nod or wink publicly to indicate a preferred outcome by, say, the office of the Commissioner for Competition, the nation’s leading media organizations would see this as a big story. Sixteen dollar orange juice big. Heads would roll.

Seriously, there was.

The reasons people like Francois-Phillipe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development are supposed to keep their yaps shut are pretty straightforward. Businesses, citizens, consumers, and investors need to know the processes at law enforcement agencies and regulators — such as the Competition Bureau and the CRTC respectively — are independent of the sordid manipulations of partisanship. They need to be able to trust that the rules are clear, their application is consistent and that they can have faith that the institution involved views matters before it in an objective fashion.

It’s Rule of Law 101 stuff and messing with it makes Canada look like something less than a first world country. It makes us look like some cheap, politically petty little kleptocracy run by a collection of self-serving narcissists.

Shortly after the CBC, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters and News Media Canada filed a complaint with the Competition Bureau over Meta’s decision to no longer carry news in Canada, Champagne seized the opportunity to show Big Tech who their daddy is.

“I am determined to use every tool at our disposal to ensure that Canadians can have access to reliable news — across all platforms,” Champagne posted on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter). “I fully support the complaint made to the Competition Bureau by Cnd media groups against Meta in their effort to promote a free & independent press.”

I don’t expect that many readers have hung around with cabinet appointees. But I have, and I’ve been one. And I can tell you that most of them — particularly the ones whose conditions of appointment mean they serve “at pleasure” as Competition Commissioner Matthew Boswell does — pay attention when the minister through whom their agency reports to Parliament, says anything, let alone things like that.

August 12, 2023

QotD: Scientific management and the work-to-rule reaction

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

Scientific management, a.k.a. “Taylorism”, was all the rage around the turn of the 20th century. At its crudest (and I’m only exaggerating a little), you’ve got some dork with a stopwatch and a camera standing behind you while you do your job, and after some observations and a little math, the dork tells you you’re pulling the lever wrong. There’s a scientifically optimized way to pull that lever, one that shaves 0.6 seconds off each of your work “processes”, and henceforth you shall be required to do this exact sequence of steps, every time … and if you disagree, too bad, why do you hate science? Similar regulations follow, until the whole plant is “scientifically” optimized.

And since this is the great age of “Progress”, you’ve got umpteen government regulations to deal with now, too. And then as now, the august personages in Congress wouldn’t dream of soiling even their shoes, let alone their hands, by going anywhere near anyplace labor is actually performed, so all these regulations have been promulgated ex cathedra. Suddenly the straightforward, mindless job of lever-pulling — the one that was already so insulting to the human spirit, so “alienating”, as Marx put it, something to be endured because one has no choice — is bound up with reams of regulations, too. If you don’t like it, build your own factory.

But in this, the workers saw opportunity. You’re going to tell me how to do my job? Fine, but you’d better tell me how to do all of it. Is there anything the Policies and Procedures manual leaves unexplained? Where to place my feet as I stand in front of the lever, for example? I’d better not do anything until the manager tells me exactly what to do, in writing, in a fully-vetted update to the P&P, and have you run that by Compliance, sir? Perhaps the lawyers in the Environmental Division should take a gander, too, since who knows what might contribute to Global Warm … errrrr, whatever, you get the point. It turns out that even back then, when there was no such thing as OSHA or the EPA or the rest of the Federal alphabet soup, the “scientific managers”, let alone Congress, simply weren’t able to envision the nuances of everyone’s day-to-day job. Or, for that matter, the very basics of everyone’s job. Work ground to a halt because everyone was following the rules.

Severian, “A History Lesson”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-14.

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