Quotulatiousness

August 21, 2011

Obama has to fight reductions in government spending

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:02

Christopher Taylor explains why (in addition to the mere philosophical issues) Obama will have to resist any cuts to government spending:

In other words, to fix the debt, we have to lose jobs. To trim the debt down and reduce government spending to a sane and survivable level lots of federal jobs are going to be lost. That’s an inevitable consequence of the federal government bloat over the last few decades; lots of new jobs added, each costing money. When you cut the spending, jobs will be lost. And because a lot of that debt was created by adding new jobs, the direct and obvious solution is to snip those jobs away.

And it gets worse. Blacks are disproportionately represented in government jobs. In fact, hiring blacks in federal jobs is so out of norm with the general population that NASA has the smallest over representation by only hiring 49% more blacks than are in the general population. Blacks make up about 10% of the United States population, but make up about 20% of the federal government jobs according to a 2010 study by the Office of Personnel Management.

So we’re faced with a brutal dilemma: in order to lighten the pressure of the federal government on the economy and businesses so both can breathe and prosper, we’re going to have to slash the government down in size which will result in many people losing jobs in a time of dire unemployment. And many of those lost jobs will be black jobs.

Now, which politician wants to stand up and actually do that? Which politician will vote and fight to slash jobs and fire lots of black people? And if that actually somehow takes place, what exactly do you think will happen in the press and in black America? How do you think that will be portrayed by a media which already is incredibly hostile to the idea of cutting anything in the federal government?

H/T to Gerard Vanderleun for the link.

August 19, 2011

Cage match: Jason Kenney against Amnesty International

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

Paul Wells on the ongoing war of words between Canada’s immigration minister and the earnest folks at Amnesty International:

Some stories are so odd nobody knows how to handle them. I don’t know how else to explain why Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s extraordinary public feud with Amnesty International has attracted so little coverage.

Here’s a senior Conservative minister departing from the Conservatives’ normal bland talking points and unleashing a written broadside against a critic. And Kenney’s sparring partner wasn’t a predictable target. It was the Canadian branch of Amnesty, one of the most revered human rights organizations in the world. But that didn’t stop the minister from calling Amnesty’s concerns “poppycock,” “sloppy and irresponsible” and “self-congratulatory moral preening.”

Here’s what the fuss was about: last month, Kenney and Public Safety Minister Vic Toews released the names and photos of 30 fugitives who’d evaded immigration authorities since being found inadmissible because they’re believed to be complicit in genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes. In short, the ministers were asking the public to help track down fleeing war crimes suspects. The public has stepped up: since the ministers’ announcements, six of the 30 men have been apprehended and three of those six deported.

August 15, 2011

Navy and Air Force to be “Royal” again?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 14:12

Andrew Coyne linked to this article at the Huffington Post:

Canada’s navy and air force will get a royal name change Tuesday, The Huffington Post Canada has learned.

The Conservative government plans to announce that Maritime Command and Air Command, the official names of the two Canadian Forces’ units, will be returned to Royal Canadian Navy and Royal Canadian Air Force, monikers last used in 1968. Simultaneous announcements on the name change are planned for Tuesday in Halifax, Kingston, Valcartier, Que., Cold Lake, Alta., and Esquimalt, B.C.

The Canadian army, which is officially called Land Command, will also be renamed simply Canadian Army.

The change is mostly symbolic and won’t affect how the Canadian Forces are run.

It may be “mostly symbolic”, but symbols matter.

Up yours, Mr. Hellyer.

QotD: Trying to look tough once the fight is over

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:05

It’s hard to know which is more pathetic: the short-lived cheap bravado of those looters (which sometimes turned to weeping and wailing in court); or the belated show of phoney toughness from government ministers and police chiefs. The authorities have put on a hardman act in the days since the riot — from staging theatrical police raids to sending chumps to jail for months for stealing chewing gum or bottled water — to try to cover up the institutional impotence they displayed when it mattered, in the middle of the trouble that began in London last week.

The more canny looters wore face masks to hide their true identities. The authorities have now donned an iron mask in a desperate bid to conceal the confusion, fear and moral cowardice in high places that was exposed at the time. Everybody is up in arms about the way that rioters allegedly exploited BBM (Blackberry Messenger) and other social media to promote their illegitimate ‘cause’. The government meanwhile has been busy exploiting the weakness of the MSM (Mainstream Media) to get the dubious message of their ‘fightback’ across to their target audience.

Those braggartly idiots who posed for grinning Facebook photos with their hoard of stolen loot have naturally attracted ridicule and contempt. There has been little or no criticism of the way that the authorities have contrived swaggering media coverage of small armies of riot cops raiding suspected looters’ homes, supposedly to show that they are in control and did not really panic when faced with a few hundred barely organised looters and arsonists.

Mick Hume, “Theatrical ‘fightback’ turns to farce”, Spiked, 2011-08-15

August 12, 2011

Gunter: Government is the problem

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:18

Not much to disagree with Lorne Gunter here, at least in the main outline:

What do Obamacare, the London riots and a possible French debt crisis have in common? They are all proof that Western governments have grown beyond all reasonable, sensible limits. All these examples, and many more, demonstrate that we have grown utterly dependent on a ubiquitous state. Without one, we are at a loss about what to do.

[. . .]

And I am not talking solely of lifelong welfare recipient or habitual EI claimants. I am talking about middle-class voters who screech at the mere suggestion that they pay a portion of their “free” health care, education or pensions. I’m referring to cause-pleaders who run to government commissions claiming infringement of their rights every time fate deals them a less-than-ideal hand. Even people who think there is a social good in bicycle paths or parks or waterfront boardwalks, and therefore a common obligation to fund them through tax dollars.

And I also mean executives who want the state to use its coercive power to limit competition or to tax money away from working people to fund massive business-stimulus programs. A CEO demanding a bailout to mitigate bad business decisions they’ve made is every bit as guilty of this as a welfare advocate who claims it is the state’s duty to provide everyone with cable television, high-speed Internet, sports for their kids and hobby supplies so no one feels isolated from mainstream society.

Governments can do some things (relatively) well — courts, policing, national defence — but the more they attempt to do, the less well they do any of the tasks they’ve taken on. Western governments have vastly extended the range of human activities they now attempt to control, regulate, or foster. As with any organization that tries to do too much, it increases the chance of failure over a larger area.

August 10, 2011

Contrasting the London police response now to the 1980s

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

Back in the bad old days, Mick Hume was active with the Revolutionary Communist Party. He contrasts the muscular (and, to be frank, horrifyingly racist and inhumane) police response to rioting in the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985 with the diffident, hyper-restrained actions of the London police this week:

Back then the police acted as the frontline of a state at war with sections of its own population, determined to hold the line at all costs in an all-out battle for control. By contrast, this week the police have more often looked as if they don’t even know where the line might be and are fearful of crossing it. They have allowed people to run riot. Even when they confronted looters, the abiding images were of officers waving their sticks around in the air like boys trying to appear tough without risking a real confrontation. As the man said, they looked ‘impotent’.

[. . .]

Recent events look less like an Eighties-style ‘uprising’ from below than a collapse of authority from the top down. The authorities have left a power vacuum that invited anybody with a brick or a shopping trolley to come and have a go. On Saturday police left people free to loot shopping centres in north London, supposedly while the Force focused on dealing with the riot in Tottenham. Yet as residents pointed out, they did nothing to stop the burning down of shops and flats there, either. Over the days that followed there were many complaints from angry shopkeepers of the Met standing back while their premises were robbed and fired.

So what did the police think they were doing while this was going on? One Met commander gave a revealing interview to Sky News, explaining that the policing of communities had changed a lot since the riots of 25 or 30 years ago. This time, he said, ‘we’re standing next to these people watching them cry because their businesses have been destroyed. We’re going to work with the partners in that local community to make sure we help them rebuild Tottenham. That’s what policing is all about.’ Call me old-fashioned, but that sounds more like a professional therapist or town planner than a police chief faced with civil disorder.

“It is effectively an invitation to riot”

Filed under: Britain, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:33

Brendan O’Neill is disgusted with the official response to the rioters in London:

For a Londoner like me, the saddest sight of the past four days has been the extraordinary levels of central institutional capitulation to the rioters. The police have been deployed to vast swathes of London at around lunchtime every day, where they have advised shops, restaurants, pubs and cinemas to shut up, board up, hide their valuables, and send home their staff, ‘out of harm’s way’. From Harrow in the extreme north of London, best known for its posh school, to Camberwell in the south, police have effectively been calling on what they view as decent society to retreat, to go into hiding, to insulate themselves and their property from any possible interaction with The Thugs. Their thinking seems to be that if we close down normal life, if we evacuate the streets of shoppers and socialisers, then maybe the rioters will look around, scratch their heads, give up, and go home. Of course, it has had exactly the opposite effect.

Because when you shut down normalcy in response to a bit of recreational rioting, you actually give the rioters an extraordinary feeling of power over society. You endow their relatively small-scale and completely pointless violence with disproportionate strength and influence. You effectively say to them: ‘By burning bus-stops and smashing Santanders in Hackney, you can bring all of London to a standstill!’ And when it comes to youth who seem pretty determined to display a bit of swagger and cock-of-the-walk violence, that is like waving a red rag to a bull. It is effectively an invitation to riot. By publicly advertising its fears and weaknesses, by demonstrating its abjectness and its willingness to retreat in the face of small numbers of misguided youth, society actually empowers anti-social elements and inflames their desire to have a pop. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that if you skulk away from your post, then others will feel tempted to tiptoe towards it.

Indeed, it seems largely to have been this institutional cowardice, this political wretchedness, the bizarre police-and-mayoral strategy of shutting down London in response to historically quite minor disturbances, which sustained the rioting over four days and nights and allowed it to spread around the country. Certainly the rioting is not being sustained by its pursuit of a political agenda (it has none) or by public backing (it has none. And no, sympathetic columns in the Guardian written by people who live nowhere near Hackney or Salford do not count as public backing.) Rather, it was the initially startled, hands-off attitude taken by the police, followed by the strategy of capitulation, which, in the words of one academic observer, probably filled the youths with an ‘adrenalin-fuelled euphoria’. The real story of these riots, if we look at them coolly, is not so much the fury of those on the outskirts of society, but rather the cowardice of those who are supposed to guard and uphold the centre of society. The riots are a product of the interplay between this institutional incoherence and the self-pitying politics of victimhood amongst the welfare state-raised kids ‘out there’.

August 9, 2011

We have a saying in Britain … we call it ‘shitting on your own doorstep’

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:11

Brendan O’Neill refutes some of the theories on what underlying causes are motivating the London riots:

Many commentators are on a mission to contextualise the riots that have swept parts of urban London and other British cities. ‘It’s very naive to look at these riots without the context’, says one journalist, who says the reason the violence kicked off in the London suburb of Tottenham is because ‘that area is getting 75% cuts [in public services]’. Others have said that the political context for the rioting is youth unemployment or working-class anger at David Cameron’s cuts agenda. ‘There is a context to London’s riots that can’t be ignored’, said a writer for the Guardian, and it is the ‘backdrop of brutal cuts and enforced austerity measures’. The ‘mass unrest’ is a protest against unhinged capitalism, apparently.

These observers are right that there is a political context to the riots. They are right to argue that while the police shooting of young black man Mark Duggan may ostensibly have been the trigger for the street violence, there is a broader context to the disturbances. But they are wrong about what the political context is. Painting these riots as some kind of action replay of historic political streetfights against capitalist bosses or racist cops might allow armchair radicals to get their intellectual rocks off, as they lift their noses from dusty tomes about the Levellers or the Suffragettes and fantasise that a political upheaval of equal worth is now occurring outside their windows. But such shameless projection misses what is new and peculiar and deeply worrying about these riots. The political context is not the cuts agenda or racist policing — it is the welfare state, which, it is now clear, has nurtured a new generation that has absolutely no sense of community spirit or social solidarity.

What we have on the streets of London and elsewhere are welfare-state mobs. The youth who are ‘rising up’ — actually they are simply shattering their own communities — represent a generation that has been more suckled by the state than any generation before it. They live in those urban territories where the sharp-elbowed intrusion of the welfare state over the past 30 years has pushed aside older ideals of self-reliance and community spirit. The march of the welfare state into every aspect of less well-off urban people’s existences, from their financial wellbeing to their childrearing habits and even into their emotional lives, with the rise of therapeutic welfarism designed to ensure that the poor remain ‘mentally fit’, has helped to undermine such things as individual resourcefulness and social bonding. The anti-social youthful rioters look to me like the end product of such an anti-social system of state intervention.

August 8, 2011

“Canada has become the snotty kid at the front of the class that gets every answer right”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 15:39

Kelly McParland reads the fine print:

Near the bottom of the Standard & Poor’s report that downgraded U.S. debt last week is a tribute to the Canadian economy that could contribute to what’s becoming a serious case of swollen-headedness.

In comparing the U.S. situation to “relevant peers”, i.e. other western economies, it notes that Canada has become the snotty kid at the front of the class that gets every answer right. Of five countries — Canada, the U.S., Germany, France and Britain — Canada has the lowest government debt burden (net debt to gross domestic product), at 34%.

It adds: “By 2015, we project that … net public debt to GDP ratios will range between 30% (lowest, Canada) and 83% (highest, France), with the U.S. debt burden at 79%.”

And while the other four are all expected to see their debt declining, in the U.S. it could still be on the rise. So nya-nya to you, rest of western world.

Subsidized flights from remote locations

Filed under: Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:57

Steve Chapman knows where to get the “best” deal in government subsidy of domestic flights:

As a resident of Illinois, I’d never had any particular desire to fly from McCook, Nebraska, to Denver. But lately, I’ve been looking for an opportunity. Turns out the federal government is willing to pay me a handsome fee to do it.

Oh, I wouldn’t get the cash directly. But the Department of Transportation provides more than $2 million to subsidize that particular route, which works out to about $1,000 for every passenger. My fare, meanwhile, would be less than $150.

I could get an even bigger hand on the hop from Lewistown, Montana, to Billings—$1,343. But if I’m feeling the need for indulgence, there is nothing to beat the flight from Ely, Nevada, to Denver, for which Washington will kick in $3,720. For that sum, of course, it could buy me a perfectly functional used car.

These extravagances are part of the Essential Air Service initiative, which is part of the reason for the recent congressional impasse over a bill to keep the Federal Aviation Administration operating.

China discovers that “You can’t stop the signal” again

Filed under: China, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:32

Strategy Page looks at the way news was disseminated about the high speed rail crash despite the Chinese government’s attempts to quash the story:

Since July 27th, China got another reminder that it no longer can control the news. On July 27th, China’s high-speed “bullet train” had a fatal accident, leaving over 30 dead and many more injured. The cause was inadequate safety and communications systems. In this case, one train was halted by a flaw in the signalling system and another came up from behind and there was the collision that sent four train cars off the tracks, and a bridge. The government immediately tried to keep the accident out of the news. This effort failed because of the ingenuity of Chinese Internet users, despite the government ban on Twitter in China. The ban was meant to impede the rapid spread of news the government wanted to control. Given enough time, the state controlled media could get out a story the government could live with. But blog, RSS and other Internet tools have been tweaked to do the same thing Twitter does. This was especially true of “micro-blogs” that quickly distribute the same 140 character messages Twitter does. Not as well, but good enough, and the news the government wanted to control spread uncontrollably. This included pictures and video of the accident, which the government planned to keep out of the news.

August 7, 2011

Mitchell: Obama bears only 15% of the blame for the downgrade

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 17:57

In a blog post guaranteed to tick off members of both parties, Daniel Mitchell tries a first approximation of where the blame should be assigned:

Well, it turns out that Social Security is a relatively minor part of the problem, so even though President Roosevelt’s policies exacerbated and extended the Great Depression, the program he created is only responsible for a small share of the fiscal crisis. To give the illusion of scientific exactitude, let’s assign FDR 13.2 percent of the blame.

The health care numbers are much harder to disentangle because it’s not apparent how much of the increase is due to Medicare, Medicaid, Bush’s prescription drug entitlement, and Obamacare. A healthcare policy wonk may know these numbers, but the CBO long-run forecast didn’t provide much detail.

So with a big caveat that these are just wild estimations, I feel reasonably comfortable in saying that both Bush and Obama made matters worse with their reckless entitlement expansions, but that they merely deepened a fiscal hole that was created when President Johnson imposed Medicare and Medicaid.

July 26, 2011

ATF sting turns into arms pipeline for drug gang

Filed under: Americas, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:51

Operation Fast and Furious may have been intended to work as a trap for gun smugglers but appears to have become a reliable source of guns for Mexican gangsters:

Congressional investigators examining a gun-trafficking sting investigation known as Operation Fast and Furious have identified 122 weapons linked to the operation that have been recovered at crime scenes in Mexico, according to a report they are expected to release Tuesday.

The report, which offers new details about the operation, lists 48 occasions between November 2009 and February 2011 in which Mexican authorities found one or more such weapons, based on internal e-mails of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, whose Phoenix office set up the operation. It was compiled by the staffs of Representative Darrell Issa of California and Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the two Republicans leading the investigation.

“The faulty design of Operation Fast and Furious led to tragic consequences,” the report concludes. “Countless United States and Mexican citizens suffered as a result.”

July 25, 2011

More on that Chinese rail crash

Filed under: China, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:49

The official story has changed a few times since the accident, and at least some Chinese feel they are entitled to the truth about the accident:

Internet users attacked the government’s response to the disaster after authorities muzzled media coverage and urged reporters to focus on rescue efforts. “We have the right to know the truth!” wrote one microblogger called kangfu xiaodingdang. “That’s our basic right!”

Leaked propaganda directives ordered journalists not to investigate the causes and footage emerged of bulldozers shovelling dirt over carriages.

Wang, the railways spokesman, said no one could or would bury the story. He said a colleague told him the wreckage was needed to fill in a muddy ditch to make rescue efforts easier.

But Hong Kong University’s China Media Project said propaganda authorities have ordered media not to send reporters to the scene, not to report too frequently and not to link the story to high-speed rail development. “There must be no seeking after the causes [of the accident], rather, statements from authoritative departments must be followed,” said one directive. Another ordered: “No calling into doubt, no development [of further issues], no speculation, and no dissemination [of such things] on personal microblogs!”

July 24, 2011

Amartya Sen’s “no universal justice” notion

Filed under: Books, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:11

Eric Falkenstein is reading Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice and pulls out this example from the book:

Take three kids and a flute. Anne says the flute should be given to her because she is the only one who knows how to play it. Bob says the flute should be handed to him as he is so poor he has no toys to play with. Carla says the flute is hers because she made it.

Sen argues that who gets the flute depends on your philosophy of justice. Bob, the poorest, will have the support of the economic egalitarian. The libertarian would opt for Carla. The utilitarian will argue for Anne because she will get the maximum pleasure, as she can actually play the instrument. Sen states there are no institutional arrangements that can help us resolve this dispute in a universally accepted just manner.

This supposedly shows that there is no single theory of justice, rather one should look at enhancing the redistribution of life-saving goods and removing ‘injustice’.

I haven’t read Sen’s book (and have no immediate intention to do so), so perhaps I’m getting the wrong notion from the example here, but let me rephrase it a tiny bit to clarify why the example didn’t work for me:

Clara makes a flute, which is then taken from her because it might be “awarded” to someone who knows how to play it, or to someone who has no toys. Clara might, under some notions of “justice” be given back the flute she made.

I don’t see this as an example of “justice” so much as a form of theft.

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