Quotulatiousness

March 8, 2011

“El Neil” goes to town on the United Nations

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:07

L. Neil Smith isn’t fond of the UN. I mean really not fond of them:

The UN was conceived in 1939, a brain-child of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his buddies, who had failed to understand the lesson to be learned from the collapse of its ludicrous predecessor, the League of Nations, that the people of a war-weary planet, fed up to here with self-important bloviating cretins in funny hats ordering them around, were not interested in a world government, or anything even resembling one.

Instead, all the really important people — the equivalents, in 1945, of Barack and Michelle Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank — got together in one meeting after another, and without so much as a nod at voters and taxpayers forced at gunpoint to support this gaggle of worthless preening parasites, established the UN in its now-crumbling headquarters on the Hudson River.

Its single all-important mission? To succeed where Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler had all failed: at the involuntary expense of individuals who actually worked for a living, try to take over the world.

Since the ignominious collapse of the Soviet Union, the new world nerve center for socialism is the UN, which is no less an enemy of everything worthwhile in the western world than Hitler and Stalin were. The UN has been at the very hub of the global warming hoax since the conspiracy began. It has done everything it can to limit American industrial technology and reduce us all to a prehistoric standard of living. It demands the authority to reach into otherwise sovereign countries and extract and punish those who fail to comply with its edicts. The UN admits openly that it wishes to obliterate the American Constitution — especially the Bill of Rights — with an hysterical emphasis on the Second Amendment. And now we’re beginning to have a clearer idea what it wants to substitute in place of those ideas and institutions.

[. . .]

The nearest equivalent to what the UN has in mind for all of us is the infamous Highland Clearances” of the 18th and 19th centuries, when English “landowners” evicted the Scots they had conquered, by the hundreds of thousands, burning whole villages and forcing the Scots to leave their crops rotting in the ground, compelling a people who had been cattlemen for generations to harvest seaweed on the cold and rocky coast — or emigrate to the Americas — so aristocrats could “ride to hounds” and replace their displaced victims on the land with sheep.

March 7, 2011

Your energy consuming future

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:00

Britain is facing a very different future, from the point of energy consumption, according to Steve Holliday, CEO of National Grid:

Because of a six-fold increase in wind generation, which won’t be available when the wind doesn’t blow, “The grid is going to be a very different system in 2020, 2030,” he told BBC’s Radio 4. “We keep thinking that we want it to be there and provide power when we need it. It’s going to be much smarter than that.

“We are going to change our own behaviour and consume it when it is available and available cheaply.”

The more of your electricity that is produced from wind power, the more there will be very noticeable peaks and valleys in available electricity. Not only do you need more sources, you need over-capacity in some areas to generate sufficient power to supply to areas which are becalmed.

Under the so-called “smart grid” that the UK is developing, the government-regulated utility will be able to decide when and where power should be delivered, to ensure that it meets the highest social purpose. Governments may, for example, decide that the needs of key industries take precedence over others, or that the needs of industry trump that of residential consumers. Governments would also be able to price power prohibitively if it is used for non-essential purposes.

Perhaps it’s just the libertarian in me that finds the term “highest social purpose” to be very disturbing: just who the hell is going to be making that determination? And on what basis will the new high priests of the lightnings be making that call?

Smart grids are being developed by utilities worldwide to allow the government to control electricity use in the home, down to the individual appliance. Smart grids would monitor the consumption of each appliance and be capable of turning them off if the power is needed elsewhere.

Like the idea that someone at your local electrical board can decide that you don’t really need to run that TV set or that toaster right now? If the control freaks at the utilities manage to foist this off on us, we’ll be techno-peasants who are only allowed to run electrical devices that meet “social purpose” guidelines.

March 5, 2011

Expanding the already expansive interpretation of the “Commerce Clause”

Filed under: Government, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:51

Rich Lowry explains why the recent court decision by Judge Gladys Kessler has such wide-reaching implications:

The easy-to-grasp distinction between an activity and inactivity is one of the most powerful legal arguments of ObamaCare’s opponents. But they hadn’t yet run up against a jurist as ingenious as Judge Kessler. She brushes aside the activity/inactivity distinction because not doing something is a choice and therefore “mental activity.”

Why hadn’t someone thought of this before? The sophists in Eric Holder’s Justice Department must be embarrassed that they didn’t themselves dredge up this killer rejoinder.

[. . .]

Kessler writes, “It is pure semantics to argue that an individual who makes a choice to forgo health insurance is not ‘acting,’ especially given the serious economic and health-related consequences to every individual of that choice. Making a choice is an affirmative action, whether one decides to do something or not do something.”

[. . .]

Under the Kessler principle, there’s no nonconduct that the federal government can’t reach. Every day, most Americans engage in nonactivities that affect interstate commerce. If you decide not to buy a house, not to buy a Chrysler or not to buy a Snuggie, you’ve impacted interstate conduct through affirmative mental actions. We’ve gone from the Constitution giving Congress the power to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes,” to regulating on the basis of the mental activities of individuals deciding not to do something.

If this precedent stands, the Commerce clause has effectively swallowed the bill of rights: there will be no sphere of human activity that the US federal government can’t regulate.

H/T to David Harsanyi for the link.

March 4, 2011

The complicated NFL labour situation

Filed under: Football, Government, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:16

Update: Twitter rumours are now that the CBA will be extended for another week to allow further negotiations. New deadline is Friday March 11 at 5pm Eastern time.

A model of how government pension schemes work

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:04

It’s all so immense that it’s hard to understand, so Karl Denninger reduces it to an easy-to-comprehend model:

Let’s start with the model but take it into the real world. We’ll use you and I.

You set up a business. I’m a “trustworthy guy.” You have employee who you wish to provide a pension.

So every week when you pay them, you take out $100 from their paycheck. You have 10 employees (including yourself) and you come to me with your $1,000 every week and give it to me. I take it.

But instead of sticking it in an account somewhere with your name on it (as a trustee would) I instead give you a piece of paper. It says I owe you $1,000. But it’s not a debt security. You cannot negotiate it like a check, nor can you sell it to anyone else — it’s only valid if you bring it back to me. It says so right on the face. I promise that if you bring it back I’ll give you the $1,000.

Here’s the problem — as soon as you leave I call up my 10 stripper friends and the local liquor store and throw a party. Guess what I use for the money? Your $1,000.

Now here’s the rub — I don’t have any other money. At all.

In fact, I’m in hock up to my neck. I earn $100,000 a year but I spend $170,000. And how do I do this? Well, among other things I have people like you giving me money to “save.” I also have a bunch of credit cards, and everyone thinks I’m a great guy — kind of like an uncle (just call me “Sam”) and so they keep raising my credit limit.

It’s a wonderful life, isn’t it?

Well, maybe for a while.

But there is a problem with this model. First, this isn’t a “Trust.” A Trust can hold funds for someone, and can even invest them in something, but the funds cannot be converted to the trustee’s use. They must be held segregated and not inure to the benefit of the trustee. Further, the trustee must act solely in the best interest of the beneficiaries of the trust, not their own interest. That’s black-letter law.

Then there’s the second problem — I didn’t invest the money. I blew it, and all of the rest of my money.

One day you come and ask me to redeem one of your $1,000 IOUs. I don’t have any money, but I have a cash advance available on the credit card — or at least I think I do. So I go to the local bank and pull a $1,000 cash advance, giving you ten crisp $100 bills.

Notice what just happened: As soon as you showed up, your IOU, which in fact had no legal status as debt, had to be turned into actual debt at that point in time. Now there really is $1,000 in debt out there — it’s on the credit card.

This is exactly what happened with Social Security and Medicare since Reagan’s “reform” of the systems in the 1980s. Every single Administration since has taken all the money and immediately blown it. There is no money.

March 1, 2011

American high speed rail plans an expensive mirage

Filed under: Economics, Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:35

Philip Klein looks at the faulty notions behind the Obama administration’s push for high speed railways:

To most Americans, the passing reference to California was likely an afterthought, lost amid all the dreamy rhetoric of rebuilding the nation. But upon closer inspection, the state’s proposed high-speed rail system serves as a perfect example of the gap between the promise of transformational liberalism and the reality of big government. Taxpayers everywhere should pay attention, because the project has already been granted $3.2 billion in federal funds, mostly through Obama’s economic stimulus package — and its backers hope to gobble up billions more over the next decade.

The $43 billion transportation project to link Los Angeles to San Francisco with a bullet train by 2020 would be considered grandiose during the plushest of times, yet it’s being pursued during an era when governments at all levels are mired in deep fiscal crises. The plan has been subject to a series of scathing reports by independent analysts, raising concerns about everything from its cost estimates to its business model. The University of California at Berkeley has questioned its lofty ridership projections. And even the Washington Post has editorialized against it.

It’s a huge wodge of cash from a government that’s already struggling with record deficits, handed to state governments who are in many cases even worse off financially, yet must match the federal funds or lose the subsidy.

Calling it a “system” is misleading, as none of the currently imagined lines would inter-connect. Nobody seems to be worried that there will not be enough passenger traffic to justify the enormous acquisition, construction, and operational costs for these train services.

“The cost projections are overly optimistic,” Wendell Cox, a public policy consultant and co-author of a critical report for the libertarian Reason Foundation, says. “The ridership projections are absolutely crazy. The thing will have no impact on highway traffic and will have little or no impact on the amount of planes in the air. This project really defines the term ‘boondoggle.'”

[. . .]

BRINGING HIGH-SPEED RAIL to America has been a decades-long dream for liberals, who have long envied Europe’s extensive rail system. Building a high-speed rail network, they hope, would move the nation away from automobiles and reduce pollution. It has the added bonus of being a massive, centrally planned public works project. The problem is just because rail has worked elsewhere, that doesn’t mean it makes sense here.

“We’re not like Spain or France, where the population densities are a lot higher, and the cities are not as spread out,” Ken Orski, a former transportation official in the Nixon and Ford administrations and publisher of the newsletter Innovation Briefs, says. “So you can connect cities like Barcelona and Madrid or Paris and Marseilles easily.”

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.

Of course, this is an old hobby horse of mine and I’ve posted about High Speed Railways a few times before.

CBC posts G20 mini-documentary

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:48

I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, but Cory Doctorow says “This video makes me ashamed to be a Canadian”. You Should Have Stayed At Home:

It’s been eight months since the G20 and the iconic images are still with us — burning police cars, rampaging mobs, the massive security presence that according to the official story is all that stood between Canada’s largest city and chaos. But that’s not the whole story of Toronto’s G20. Astonishing new images caught on camera are now emerging and they expose a troubling new picture of what happened to hundreds of ordinary citizens caught in the huge police dragnet during those three highly-charged days last June.

Gillian Findlay presents a revealing new street-level perspective of what happened when thousands of police were deployed in downtown Toronto and instructed to do what was necessary to ensure the wall around the G20 Conference Centre was never breached. Exclusive eyewitness video obtained by the fifth estate brings to light startling images captured on cellphones and minicams by the innocent bystanders who found themselves on the wrong side of all that G20 “order.” In a rare television interview, Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair explains why police took the actions they did.

I was critical of the G20 even before things went off the rails. It was a stupid idea to hold it in the middle of Canada’s biggest city, and the police reaction to provocation was worthy of any rag-tag third world dictatorship.

February 27, 2011

Reason.TV: State budget battle showdowns

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:10

QotD: Big government and big unions

Filed under: Government, Greece, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:00

The Times managed to get the salient feature of the story entirely wrong. They were not an “anti-government” mob, but a government mob, a mob of “public servants” objecting to austerity measures that would end, for example, the tradition of 14 monthly paychecks per annum. You read that right: the Greek public sector cannot be bound by anything so humdrum as temporal reality. So, when it was mooted that the “workers” might henceforth receive a mere 12 monthly paychecks per annum, they rioted. Their hapless victims — a man and two women — were a trio of clerks trapped in a bank when the mob set it alight and then obstructed emergency crews attempting to rescue them.

You don’t have to go to Athens to find “public servants” happy to take it out on the public. In Madison, politicized doctors provide fake sick notes for politicized teachers to skip class. In New York’s Christmas snowstorm, Sanitation Department plough drivers are unable to clear the streets, with fatal consequences for some residents. On the other hand, they did manage to clear the snow from outside the Staten Island home of Sanitation Dept head honcho John Doherty, while leaving all surrounding streets pristinely clogged. Three hundred Sanitation Department workers have salaries of over $100,000 per year. In retirement, you get a pension of 66 grand per annum plus excellent health benefits, all inflation proofed.

That’s what “collective bargaining” is about: It enables unions rather than citizens to set the price of government. It is, thus, a direct assault on republican democracy, and it needs to be destroyed. Unlovely as they are, the Greek rioters and the snarling thugs of Madison are the logical end point of the advanced social democratic state: not an oppressed underclass, but a spoiled overclass, rioting in defense of its privileges and insisting on more subsidy, more benefits, more featherbedding, more government.

Mark Steyn, “States of the Unions”, SteynOnline, 2011-02-26

February 26, 2011

The increasing length of freight trains in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:22

Some eye-opening statistics on the length of freight trains being run by Canadian National (CN) and Canadian Pacific (CP) these days:

Transport Canada launched a six-part study into the long-train strategies at the country’s largest railways this month with an eye on developing policies for how these longer, heavier trains are assembled and run. The goal of the two-year study is to develop science-based regulations that will hopefully reduce the number of derailments in the country.

Despite the concern from regulators, these longer, heavier trains in recent years have been a godsend for North American railways, which swear by their safety. Not only do they improve the efficiency of the rails by reducing the number of trains required to transport goods, but they in turn reduce the crews needed and the fuel used to move their shipments.

If properly built, they can also reduce wear and tear on the trains and the tracks themselves by cutting down on in-train forces, lowering maintenance costs substantially over time.

The cynic in my asks why, if CN (for example) actually managed to reduce the number of rail accidents to an all-time low last year, the regulators are now launching the investigation. Fewer accidents now equals a point of serious concern on the part of the regulators? Why?

Up until the 1990s, the average freight train in Canada was about 5,000 feet (1.54 kilometres) long and weighed 7,000 tons. But it is now not uncommon to see these trains stretch to 12,000 feet, sometimes as much as 14,000 feet (more than four kilometres), weighing up to 18,000 tons.

While CN is comfortable sticking with the size of its longest trains now, about 12,000 feet, CP continues to push the boundaries of how long it can build its trains by developing some of the industry’s most cutting-edge technology in recent years to help it do so.

The benefits are clear. CP estimates, for example, that the labour costs alone on a typical transcontinental train are now 30% lower than they would be if it was using smaller trains.

So, the trains are longer, carry far more freight, cost less to run, and customers are happy. The government must act!

February 24, 2011

They’re called “factoids”, not “facts”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:46

There’s a factoid in common circulation at the moment that, measured by SAT scores, the states that ban collective bargaining for teachers rank almost dead last, while Wisconsin ranks 2nd. Neal McCluskey explains that this is not particularly true:

Now, aside from the factoid, if true, providing no real insight into whether collective bargaining is good or bad for education — there are myriad variables at work other than collective bargaining, none of which does this control for — but the factoid itself is highly dubious. Again, it is hard to find the original source for this, but I looked up 2009 ACT and SAT state rankings, and at the very least it seems highly unlikely that Virginia ranks 44th out of all states. According to the ACT ranking, for instance, Virginia places 22nd, and on the SAT (assuming the linked to list is accurate — I’m doing this fast), it ranked 33rd. It’s hard to see how those would be combined for a 44th place overall finish.

How about the Wisconsin second place-finish? Well, that is accurate for the SAT, but notably only 5 percent of Wisconsin students took the SAT — a negligible rate. On the ACT, which is the main test taken in the Badger State, Wisconsin finished 13th — not bad, but hardly great.

So what does this tell you? Not that collective bargaining is educationally good or bad — like I said, you just can’t get there from here — but that you have to be very careful about your sources of information. Unfortunately, that seems especially true when you’re dealing with education.

The core of the Irish financial crisis

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:13

Theodore Dalrymple explains the underlying reason for Ireland’s financial woes:

If you want to study the economic crisis of the last few years, go to Ireland, where you will find it in its purest form. Ireland is a small country, with a population of just 4.4 million, and the connection between clientelistic politics, bankers’ cupidity, and the mass psychology of bubble markets is easiest to comprehend there.

Dotted around the country, outside of almost every town and sometimes in the middle of nowhere, are housing estates — completed, half-completed, and never-to-be-completed — which are unsaleable, will almost certainly never be inhabited, and are destined to fall into graceless ruins. Some 300,000 new dwellings now stand empty in the Irish Republic, a number whose equivalent in the United States would be approximately 21 million.

[. . .]

A house in Shrewsbury Road, Dublin, sold for $80 million in 2005 but, now standing empty, is on the way to dereliction, and no house on the road — a millionaires’ row — has sold for the last two years, despite a fall in prices of at least 66 percent. During the boom, taxi drivers and shop assistants would tell you about the third or fourth house they had bought — on borrowed money, of course — and of their apartments in Europe, from Malaga to Budapest to the Black Sea Coast of Bulgaria. It was not so much a boom as a gold rush, or a modern reenactment of the Tulipomania.

Wisconsin’s proposed labour laws not uncommon

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:07

To read all the huffing and puffing, you might get the impression that if the proposed labour law changes be enacted, Wisconsin public workers would be uniquely disenfranchised. As Josh Barro points out, however, that’s not very accurate:

The truth, as laid out in a GAO report from 2002, is that there are already 12 states with no public employee collective bargaining law at all. In these states, state workers have no right to collective bargaining; local employees have collective bargaining only if local elected officials choose to grant it. (And in a few states, notably Virginia and North Carolina, state law forbids localities to allow collective bargaining.) Another 12 states grant collective bargaining rights only to certain classes of employees, such as only state workers or only teachers. Only 26 states have a collective bargaining law covering nearly all public workers.

So that means that the model from which Walker proposes to break, much to the horror and outrage of public worker unions and their backers, is a model only actually followed by 25 other states. And indeed, by retaining limited bargaining rights for most workers (and fuller rights for a few classes, including police and firefighters) Walker is going less far in restricting public-sector collective bargaining than a substantial number of states already do.

H/T to Walter Olson for the link.

February 23, 2011

Ontario actually considers liberalizing (some) liquor laws

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:00

It’s a rare, rare thing for the Ontario government to consider any kind of liberalization, but especially one involving booze:

Could Ontario be saying good-bye to beer tents? The province’s government announced on Wednesday that it would be asking for public input on a series of possible liquor law changes.

Some of the changes considered would include relaxing the liquor laws at events and festivals, meaning drinkers would no longer be sequestered in beer tents, but could wander with a drink in hand.

It would also allow one-off event permit holders — weddings, parties and fundraisers, for example — to serve booze until 2 a.m., bringing their serving hours into line with bars. Current laws require special occasion permit holders stop serving alcohol at 1 a.m., with the exception of New Year’s Eve, when it’s 2 a.m.

Don’t hold your breath — this is still bluestockinged Ontario — but just the idea that they’re willing to discuss changes is heartening.

Poll question: how would you vote if a federal election is called

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:42

[poll id=”2″]

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