. . . all players in the game have revealed themselves to be interventionists. (Okay, we knew this already but confirmation is nice.) Regardless of party, they see the economy as something to fix by turning a knob here, pulling a lever there, and stepping on a pedal over yonder in order to get the desired performance: higher consumer spending, lower unemployment, increased investment, and so on. It’s as though the economy were a machine in need of adjustments and a few quarts of oil. But an economy is not a machine. It’s a network of people engaged in myriad exchanges of goods and services — pursuing end-oriented activities informed by subjective values and expectations. Such information is largely unavailable to politicians, bureaucrats, and their economic advisers.
With unemployment officially at 9.8 percent, the economy indeed remains in the doldrums. None of the palliatives that George W. Bush or Obama tried has worked, but instead of realizing that government and its corporate-state policies are the obstacles to a flourishing economy, the ruling elite remains committed to the managed economy. So it’s decided not to raise taxes — for two years — and to reduce the employee payroll tax — for one year. These expiration dates are signs of political management. Understanding the necessity of a freed market would lead one to call for permanent — not temporary — government retrenchment.
Some questions were apparently overlooked. If tax rates may go up in two years, why make tax-sensitive long-term plans? If the payroll tax is to be two points lower in 2011, that implies it will most likely be two points higher in 2012. Will people spend the extra money next year or save it in anticipation of the tax increase to come? At any rate, they will need to make an unpleasant adjustment in their household economies on January 1, 2012. People do think long term, even if politicians don’t.
Something worth noting about the debate is that there was scarcely an acknowledgment that money subject to taxation belongs to someone and not the State. You’d think it magically appears in a common pot and the government’s job is to ladle it out effectively and fairly. I can recall hearing only one member of Congress say, “It’s their money,” during a television interview about why tax rates shouldn’t go up on high-income people.
Sheldon Richman, “A Boost for the Managed Economy: What did you expect?”, The Freeman, 2010-12-17
December 17, 2010
QotD: “all players in the game have revealed themselves to be interventionists”
December 7, 2010
Never mind the scientists
The British government is finding that scientific evidence is getting in the way of what they want to do, so they’re scrapping the requirement to have scientists provide input:
Ministers will not be required to seek the advice of scientists when making drug classification policy in future, under new government proposals.
The police reform and social responsibility bill, published last week, contains an amendment to the constitution of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) that would remove the requirement on the home secretary to appoint at least six scientists to the committee.
A further amendment to the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 would allow the home secretary to place temporary controls on substances for a year by statutory instrument.
The proposals will be of concern to the many doctors and scientists who have criticised the government’s treatment of scientific evidence in the wake of the sacking, last year, of ACMD chairman David Nutt. The then home secretary, Alan Johnson, removed Nutt from the post after the scientist criticised politicians for distorting research evidence and claiming alcohol and tobacco were more harmful than some illegal drugs, including LSD, ecstasy and cannabis.
Why waste a great opportunity to get up in front of the media and sound all “tough on crime” just because the scientists say it’s a load of bollocks?
December 5, 2010
November 27, 2010
Anyone remember when Homeland Security got the right to shut down websites?
In addition to their role in defending the homeland, apparently they’re also now copyright enforcers:
The investigative arm of the Homeland Security Department appears to be shutting down websites that facilitate copyright infringement.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has seized dozens of domain names over the past few days, according to TorrentFreak.
ICE appears to be targeting sites that help Internet users download copyrighted music, as well as sites that sell bootleg goods, such as fake designer handbags.
The sites are replaced with a note from the government: “This domain named has been seized by ICE, Homeland Security Investigations.”
H/T to Ace of Spades HQ for the link.
It would be nice to know what part of the act of Congress that set up the Department of Homeland Security permits this kind of action. So that I can know whether to thank George Bush or Barack Obama.
[. . .]
First they were grabbing crotches in airports…
This overrreach by the DHS is breathtaking and clearly violates the spirit of the act of Congress that created it and the public’s understanding of the rationale for the creation of DHS. I’m not saying the domains were not involved in copyright infringement. I’m saying the DHS involvement is odd and the method — seizure of the domains — lacks a certain due process.
It’s ugly and ham-fisted. And it is difficult to see how it could be aimed at drawing the public’s attention away from the travails of the TSA. Rather, it looks like another run-of-the-mill stupid move on the part of Obama and Napolitano. It will be interesting next week to see the reaction of Representatives and Senators.
November 26, 2010
British Columbia: Canada’s Banana Republic
A story in the Globe and Mail on how Elections BC rigged the rules after the fact to reject a petition:
Elections BC rejected a Fight HST recall application as too lengthy — but did so using rules that were drafted after it received the application.
The rejection has led recall organizers to suggest the province’s chief electoral officer deliberately thwarted their attempt to get approval to launch a petition to oust a Liberal MLA who supported the harmonized sales tax, and should step down.
While Elections BC has defended its new rules — which pushed the Fight HST application over a 200-word limit by counting the acronyms MLA and HST as eight words instead of two — recall organizers expressed concern that they were not included in the application form when they downloaded it from Elections BC’s website.
“It’s a total joke. This is the kind of thing they do in banana republics … when they don’t want to have elections or they don’t want people to win. And we’re doing it right here in Canada,” said Chris Delaney, an organizer of the Fight HST campaign.
H/T to Steve Muhlberger for the link.
November 17, 2010
Nuclear ghouls unmasked
Tabloid headline is in this case completely justified:
Organs of nuclear workers secretly harvested for 40 years, report finds
The families of scores of nuclear power station workers whose hearts, lungs and other organs were secretly stored and tested over a period of almost 40 years were let down by the authorities, a report said yesterday.Relatives were seldom told that their loved ones’ organs were to be removed, and as a result families buried or cremated incomplete bodies.
In many cases the truth that their organs had been illegally removed and then destroyed in the testing process emerged only many years later.
The three-and-a-half year investigation conducted by Michael Redfern, QC, covered events spread over almost four decades.
This is the sort of thing that retroactively justifies some of the weird paranoias of the last fifty years. It becomes more difficult to dismiss worries that “they” are doing shady and unethical stuff when it turns out that that’s exactly what they’ve been doing.
November 14, 2010
QotD: The lost election
I think we lost the election on November 2. Every race was won by a politician. True, we elected some angry nuts. These are preferable to common politicians. Their anger provokes honesty, and their mental illness prevents honesty from being obscured by charm. [. . .] We also elected some amateur politicians. However, politics is like vivisection — disturbing as a career, alarming as a hobby. And we may have elected a few reluctant politicians. But not reluctant enough.
We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren’t there.
In a free country government is a dull and onerous responsibility. It is a parent-teacher conference. The teacher is a pompous twit. Our child is a lazy pain in the ass. We undertake this social obligation with weary reluctance. And we only do it at all because the teacher (political authority) deserves cold stares, hard questions, and maybe firing, and the pupil (that portion of society which, alas, needs governing) deserves to be grounded without TV and have its Internet access screened and its allowance docked.
America’s elected and appointed officials ought to be longing to return to their personal lives and private interests. They should feel burdened by their powers, irked with their responsibilities, and embarrassed at their prominence in the public eye. When they say they want to spend more time with their families, they should mean it.
P.J. O’Rourke, “I Think We Lost the Election: How about politics without politicians?”, Weekly Standard, 2010-11-13
November 8, 2010
We’d love to talk about this First Amendment case, but we’re not allowed to
I sometimes wonder if there was ever any point in the US founding fathers putting that pesky Bill of Rights in place, when it’s so easy for those rights to be circumvented:
Liptak, who has seen part of the secret 10th Circuit order that keeps the amicus brief sealed, says one reason the appeals court gave for its decision is that allowing distribution of the brief would help I.J. and Reason publicly make their case that Reynolds is being persecuted for exercising her First Amendment rights. One of their goals, the Court said, “is clearly to discuss in public amici’s agenda.” Obviously, we can’t have that.
It bears emphasizing that the I.J./Reason brief is based entirely on publicly available information. It does not divulge any confidential grand jury information, protection of which is the rationale for sealing the documents related to Reynolds’ case. The only purpose served by sealing it is to make talking about the case harder.
Discouraging public dissent, of course, is how this case got started. Tanya Treadway, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted Stephen and Linda Schneider, was so irked by Reynolds’ public defenses of the couple that she unsuccessfully sought a gag order telling Reynolds to shut up. Later Treadway initiated a grand jury investigation that resulted in subpoenas demanding documents related to Reynolds’ activism as head if the Pain Relief Network (PRN), including a Wichita billboard defending the Schneiders and a PRN documentary about the conflict between drug control and pain control. Those subpoenas, supposedly aimed at finding evidence of obstruction of justice, are the subject of Reynolds’ First Amendment challenge.
First there were those secret laws in the wake of 9/11, now you’ve got courts ordering information on First Amendment cases to be kept from the public. One fears to ask “what’s next” for fear that they’ll already have an authoritarian answer teed up and ready to go.
November 4, 2010
Globe editorial: “Mr. Clement has much to explain”
I keep wondering if there are any actual conservatives left in Stephen Harper’s merry band of economic nationalists:
Tony Clement, the federal Minister of Industry, has much to explain after his laconic rejection of BHP Billiton Ltd.’s application for permission to proceed with its offer to buy Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc.
Canadians and investors around the world — not least Potash Corp.’s own shareholders — are entitled to learn what Mr. Clement thinks is the meaning of “net benefit” to Canada, in the words of the Investment Canada Act. Evidently, in his and his colleagues’ minds, free markets and the free flow of investment are not sufficient.
Canada, as an exporting nation, has far more to lose by kicking off this kind of protectionist move than any imaginable gains. We might as well write off any economic growth from exports if this is the new modus operandi of the federal government.
November 3, 2010
Liberty: consistency matters
James Delingpole, after suddenly discovering a man-crush on Marco Rubio, outlines how the Tea Party can still succeed:
[. . .] I’d suggest that the key lesson of yesterday’s mid-terms is this: it is simply not enough to stick a Tea Party label on any old candidate and hope that the US electorate’s growing antipathy towards Big Government will take care of the rest. Christine O’Donnell was more than proof enough of that. Not only did her candidacy allow the liberal MSM to tar the entire Tea Party movement as the natural home of anti-masturbation ex-witches and other fruit loops. But it demonstrated a worrying complacency and ignorance within the Tea Party movement about what it stands for and what it ought to stand for.
Christine O’Donnell puzzled me . . . if she’d actually been a witch, then her anti-masturbation activities made no sense. I’ve met lots of witches, and it’s hard to imagine any of them being anti-sexual in that kind of dogmatic manner. I didn’t follow the story, but I assume that she lost on the basis of both accusations influencing different voting groups.
So, if O’Donnell and other marginal candidates can’t depend on just wearing the “Tea Party” label to get elected, what do they need to do?
The Tea Party does not stand for: banning lesbian or sexually active single women from teaching at schools; discouraging onanism; banning abortion; keeping drugs illegal; God; organised religion generally; guns; or, indeed, Sarah Palin.
The Tea Party stands, very simply, for small government. So long as it understands this, a presidential victory in 2012 is guaranteed. If it forgets this — or doesn’t understand it in the first place — then hello, a second term for President Obama, and bye bye Western Civilisation.
In other words, Delingpole is calling for the Tea Party to be true to a minarchist vision: the least possible government to get the job done.
If you are against Big Government, you are for liberty. If you are for liberty you are also for free citizens’ right to choose whether or not they get out of their trees on cannabis, or indeed whether or not they have the freedom to terminate unwanted pregnancies or never, ever, go to church and in fact worship Satan instead.
Liberty is not a pick and mix free-for-all in which you think government should ban the things you don’t like and encourage you things you do like: that’s how Libtards think. Libertarianism — and the Tea Party is nothing if its principles are not, at root, libertarian ones — is about recognising that having to put up with behaviour you don’t necessarily disapprove of is a far lesser evil than having the government messily and expensively intervene to regulate it.
November 2, 2010
James Delingpole: “Thank God for the Tea Party!”
James Delingpole clearly wishes he could vote in today’s American elections:
Arriving back at Heathrow late on Sunday night I felt — as you do on returning to Britain these days — as if I were entering a failed state. It’s not just the Third World shabbiness which is so dispiriting. It’s the knowledge that from its surveillance cameras to its tax regime, from its (mostly) EU-inspired regulations to its whole attitude to the role of government, Britain is a country which has forgotten what it means to be free.
God how I wish I were American right now. In the US they may not have the Cairngorms, the River Wye, cream teas, University Challenge, Cotswold villages or decent curries. But they do still understand the principles of “don’t tread on me” and “live free or die.” Not all of them, obviously — otherwise a socialist like Barack Obama would never have got into power. But enough of them to understand that in the last 80 or more years — and not just in the US but throughout the Western world — government has forgotten its purpose. It has now grown so arrogant and swollen as to believe its job is to shape and improve and generally interfere with our lives. And it’s not. Government’s job is to act as our humble servant.
What’s terrifying is how few of us there are left anywhere in the supposedly free world who properly appreciate this. Sure, we may feel in our hearts that — as Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe put it in their Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party manifesto — “We just want to be free. Free to lead our lives as we please, so long as we do not infringe on the same freedom of others”. And we may even confide it to our friends after a few drinks. But look at Australia; look at Canada; look at New Zealand; look at anywhere in the EUSSR; look at America — at least until things begin to be improved by today’s glorious revolution. Wherever you go, even if it’s somewhere run by a notionally “conservative” administration, the malaise you will encounter is much the same: a system of governance predicated on the notion that the state’s function is not merely to uphold property rights, maintain equality before the law and defend borders, but perpetually to meddle with its citizens’ lives in order supposedly to make their existence more fair, more safe, more eco-friendly, more healthy. And always the result is the same: more taxation, more regulation, less freedom. Less “fairness” too, of course.
November 1, 2010
QotD: The emergence of the Tea Party movement
There’s something else that’s been making me very happy lately, and frankly I don’t give a chipmunk’s cheeks who knows or what they may think about it. After years, decades, what even seems like centuries of unremittingly putrescent political news, we are suddenly all witnesses to the spectacular emergence of the so-called Tea Party movement.
The Tea Parties are just one of a number of historically pivotal developments (including the Internet, conservative talk radio, and perhaps even on-demand publishing) that became necessary to get over, under, around, and through the Great Wall of the Northeastern Liberal Establishment and its numberless, faceless hordes of duly appointed gatekeepers.
In that sense, the Tea Parties are exactly what the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left always aspired to be and never really were.
Just like each of those other developments, the Tea Parties are essentially a medium of communications. So far, they are leaderless and centerless (and at all costs, must remain that way). They have no founders, and no headquarters. They have no constitution, no by-laws, and no platform to argue over endlessly. More conventionally-minded politicrats might view all of these qualities as weaknesses, but they would be mistaken. As presently (un)constituted, Tea Parties can’t be taken over by high school student government types or mercenaries from the major political parties, who have nothing better to do with their lives.
I would point out, especially in the light of the recent Bob Barr embarrassment, that this arrangement is inexpressibly better suited to libertarians and to libertarianism than any formal, hierarchical structure copied from the other political parties (and I have been doing exactly that for almost thirty years) but that would be a digression.
L. Neil Smith, “My Tea Party”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2010-10-31
October 28, 2010
October 27, 2010
Why can’t Chuck get his business off the ground?
October 26, 2010
Cost overruns are typical, but this is excessive
Canada’s parliament buildings have been sporadically under repair since 1992. The original estimate for all required work was $460 million. It has, of course, gone well past that budget:
The cost of renovating Parliament Hill is expected to hit $5 billion by the time the 25-year project wraps up, CBC reported Monday.
According to documents released by the Department of Public Works, the repairs to almost every building on Parliament Hill, originally pegged to be $460 million in 1992, will have ballooned to more than 10 times that amount upon completion.
Renovations started on the aging buildings in 1992, when builders began renewing Parliament’s West Block. The project was shelved in 1998, then restarted in 2005, with an estimated budget of $769 million. That total has since risen to more than $1 billion, according to CBC.
As Ezra Levant points out, “Burj Dubai, world’s tallest building, only cost $4.1B”.
Update: Ezra also pointed out that the “Bank of China tower in Hong Kong was $1.66B. Taipei 101 was $2B. “.
