Quotulatiousness

October 25, 2010

In praise of Sir Wilfrid Laurier

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, History, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:04

One of the few Canadian prime ministers I can admit a genuine fondness for, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, gets a bit of recognition:

Last May in a casual dinner conversation with Canadian libertarians in Vancouver, I named the better presidents and prime ministers, respectively, of the United States and Great Britain. It suddenly occurred to me that I couldn’t name a single Canadian counterpart.

So I asked my dinner friends, “Among Canada’s political leaders, did you ever have a Grover Cleveland or a William Ewert Gladstone, a prime minister who believed in liberty and defended it?”

One name emerged, almost in unison: Sir Wilfrid Laurier. Embarrassed by my ignorance, I had to admit I had never heard of him. Never mind that he’s the guy with the bushy hair on the Canadian five-dollar bill; I just never noticed. Now that I’ve done a little research, I’m a fan.

Laurier’s political resume is impressive: fourth-longest-serving prime minister in Canada’s history (1896–1911, the longest unbroken term of office of all 22 PMs). Forty-five years in the House of Commons, an all-time record. Longest-serving leader of any Canadian political party (almost 32 years). Across Canada to this day, he is widely regarded as one of the country’s greatest statesmen.

It’s not his tenure in government that makes Laurier an admirable figure. It’s what he stood for while he was there. He really meant it when he declared, “Canada is free and freedom is its nationality” and “Nothing will prevent me from continuing my task of preserving at all cost our civil liberty.”

Laurier was the last Liberal leader who actually believed in “classic” liberalism, not the warmed-over socialism of later and current Liberal thought. We could use another Laurier today.

Studying bureaucratic bias

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:56

I’ve always thought that behaviour patterns of bureaucrats are fairly easy to predict: it all hinges on risk/reward. A bureaucrat with expectation of retiring at the peak of pension eligibility will have a very high aversion to risk — but not quite what most people refer to as risk. A bureaucrat has a built-in bias to “stay the course”, to avoid “rocking the boat”, and to prevent the kind of change that will introduce exceptions to normal process.

Expecting a bureaucrat to react like an entrepreneur is unrealistic, because the bureaucrat’s risks (loss of promotion opportunities, loss of status, but not usually loss of job) do not scale well against the possible rewards — except in particularly corrupt jurisdictions, bureaucrats do not directly benefit from making risky decisions.

Given that, is it any surprise that bureaucrats, as a whole, are quite unwilling to step outside “normal practice” or to allow variances, exceptions, or (sometimes) even common sense solutions?

I should be careful (except that I’m a blogger, where “careful” really just means “avoiding lawsuits”), because there’s a risk I’m suffering from one of the traits identified in behavioural economics, the illusion of competence in my preceding horseback judgement:

There is a fashionable new science — behavioral economics, they call it — which applies the insights of psychology to how people make economic decisions. It tries to explain, for instance, the herd instinct that led people during the recent bubble to override common sense and believe things about asset values because others did: the “bandwagon effect.” And it labels as “hindsight bias” the all-too-common tendency during the recent bust to imagine that past events were more predictable than they were. Behavioral economics has also brought us notions like “loss aversion”: how we hate giving up a dollar we have far more than forgoing a dollar we have not yet got.

But while there is a lot of interest in the psychology and neuroscience of markets, there is much less in the psychology and neuroscience of government. Slavisa Tasic, of the University of Kiev, wrote a paper recently for the Istituto Bruno Leoni in Italy about this omission. He argues that market participants are not the only ones who make mistakes, yet he notes drily that “in the mainstream economic literature there is a near complete absence of concern that regulatory design might suffer from lack of competence.” Public servants are human, too.

Mr. Tasic identifies five mistakes that government regulators often make: action bias, motivated reasoning, the focusing illusion, the affect heuristic and illusions of competence.

In the last case, psychologists have shown that we systematically overestimate how much we understand about the causes and mechanisms of things we half understand.

October 18, 2010

QotD: The primary achievement of modern schools

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:56

They were right — although I had to see it for myself before I fully grasped the magnitude of the phenomenon — children are learning machines, more or less in the same sense that sharks are eating machines.

The only phenomenon more astonishing than that is the way the public school system manages to kick, stomp, and crush a child’s inherent curiosity and love of learning, often destroying it altogether by the third or fourth grade. Yes, children are learning machines. The fact that government schools have managed to condition them against learning is an astonishing — if wholly negative — feat, achieved at the unspeakable cost of countless hundreds of billions of dollars.

Nobody has any choices in the matter. The government’s schools are underwritten by the kind of theft we call taxation, and nothing good can ever come of that. Their little desks are filled by a kind of conscription. The entire institution is administered and operated by unionized net tax consumers, who savagely resist any attempt to objectively assess their work and reward (or punish) them on that basis.

I’d like to have a nickel for every time I’ve had to listen to school administrators inviting parents to participate in the education of their own children — and then complaining when parents actually do it.

They want you to participate, all right, but only on their terms. They don’t want you questioning their policies and practices. They want you to validate whatever they do to your kids, to provide them with what Ayn Rand called “the sanction of the victim”. And if you won’t do that, or if you won’t sit down and shut up — or better yet, just go away — then they identify you as “problem parents” and “trouble-makers”.

L. Neil Smith, “Salt on the Ruins: A Chapter from the Forthcoming Where We Stand“, Libertarian Enterprise, 2010-10-16

October 14, 2010

British government takes chainsaw to Quango jungle

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:30

To my surprise, the British government appears to be quite serious about reducing the number of quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations (Quangos):

The government has announced that 192 quangos are to be scrapped.

Some will be abolished altogether others will see their functions carried out by government or other bodies, the Cabinet Office says.

A further 118 will be merged. Some are still under consideration but 380 will be retained, according to the list.

Minister Francis Maude said they did not know how many jobs would go. Labour’s Liam Byrne said the cull could end up costing more than it saved.

Quangos — “quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations” — are arm’s-length bodies funded by Whitehall departments but not run by them.

Sounds like a worthwhile effort. I rather expected the study would “discover” that almost all of the Quangos were performing “essential services” and therefore would be continued. I’m delighted to find that I was being too cynical.

October 13, 2010

Bernier calls for an end to transfer payments

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

If there’s one member of the federal Conservatives that can be said to both have ideas and be willing to express them publicly, it would have to be Maxime Bernier:

Maxime Bernier is carving out a pronounced niche for himself as the one-man Libertarian wing of the Conservative Party.

He appears also to have made a conscious decision to say what he thinks, and risk the consequences. Having been kicked out of Cabinet and survived, he may have discovered a way to turn lemons into lemonade. The most that can happen to him now is that he gets ejected from caucus as well, but given his stature as a high-profile MP in a prized riding in Quebec, would the Tory high command risk anything so self-defeating?

So what does our one-man Libertarian wing call for now?

Mr. Bernier wants Ottawa to get out of the business of subsidizing provincial programs that aren’t federal responsibility. Rather than send $40 billion a year to the provinces to pay for health and social programs, Ottawa should just chop its taxes and let the provinces take up the slack, paying for their own programs.

Yeah, I somehow don’t see Messrs. Harper, Ignatieff, or Layton coming on board with this notion. Give up taxing power to the provinces who are constitutionally responsible for the services? What do you think we are, some sort of confederation?

Other interesting snippets from his speech to the Albany Club in Toronto:

Wilfrid Laurier was another of our greatest prime ministers. He was a classical liberal, not a liberal in the modern sense. He was a supporter of individual freedom, free trade and free markets. I think if he were alive today, he would probably be a Conservative!

Yes, except he’d be in the same outsider/pariah position as Mr. Bernier finds himself in the Harper version of Conservatism.

In a speech before the Quebec Legislative Assembly in 1871, Laurier said:

“If the federal system is to avoid becoming a hollow concept, if it is to produce the results called for, the legislatures must be independent, not just in the law, but also in fact. The local legislature must especially be completely sheltered from control by the federal legislature.

If in any way the federal legislature exercises the slightest control over the local legislature, then the reality is no longer a federal union, but rather a legislative union in federal form.”

Now, it’s obvious that what Laurier feared has unfortunately come true. Ottawa exercises a lot more than “the slightest control” over local legislatures. The federal government today intervenes massively in provincial jurisdictions, and in particular in health and education, two areas where it has no constitutional legitimacy whatsoever.

As I’ve said before, I don’t know how long Bernier will be tolerated in the tightly controlled and PMO-stage-managed Conservative party, but I do enjoy the spectacle of someone actually pushing these ideas. I hope he continues to do so.

Update: Don Martin also seems to think that “Mad Max” is a breath of fresh air:

They share a party label, but Deficit Jim and Mad Max sit in polar opposite corners of the big blue tent.

The day after Finance Minister Jim Flaherty released an update which would make a left-lurching Liberal blush at the historic high tide in a red fiscal sea, Maxime Bernier delivered a jolt of hard-right policy to remind true blue Conservatives they have at least one voice on the government’s backbenches.

Flaherty is my local MP. He ran for parliament with the Conservatives, but appears to be operating in office as a Liberal.

Maverick Max went rogue again in a Toronto speech on Wednesday by advocating Ottawa get out of transfer payments to provinces while giving legislatures more tax room to finance the health, social welfare and education services they are constitutionally obliged to deliver.

For Jim Flaherty, who rolled out a blueprint on Tuesday showing continued growth in the social transfer envelope well into the next government’s mandate, the notion of surrendering $40 billion worth of fiscal clout over the provinces is a severely alien concept.

Martin has a nice article here, even if he incorrectly refers to Laurier as our first Liberal PM . . . unless he means our first (and only) “classic liberal” PM. Perhaps Bernier will be our second?

October 6, 2010

Follow up: burning the free market for government failure

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 17:06

The story about the fire department letting the house burn down has been used to “prove” that it’s a case of market failure and that free markets can’t provide public goods. Given that it wasn’t actually a “free market” entity, that argument doesn’t hold much promise:

National Review’s Daniel Foster jumps in to say that this is why conservatives need to curb their enthusiasm for the market economy. A colleague in the “anarcho-capitalist” camp stuck his head into Daniel’s office to explain that fire protection is not a human right, so it makes sense that the house was allowed to burn. Paul Krugman (he never goes away) adds that this is a case against the market in general. “Do you want to live in the kind of society in which this happens?”

I don’t get this debate at all. It is not even a real debate. The fire-protection services were government services. The fee in question was a government-mandated fee. The county lines in which the fee was applicable is a government-drawn line that is completely arbitrary. The policy of not putting out the fire was a government policy enforced by the mayor. As he said, in the words of a good bureaucrat, “Anybody that’s not in the city of South Fulton, it’s a service we offer, either they accept it or they don’t.”

So why is the market being criticized here? This was not a real market. Instead, this is precisely what we would expect from government. In a real market, there is no way that a free-enterprise fire service would have refused to provide the homeowner service. They would be in business to provide that service. The fire would have been put out and he would have been charged for the service. It is as simple as that. It is the same as lawn-mowing services or plumbing services or any other type of service. Can we know for sure that the market would provide such services? Well, if insurance companies have anything to say about it, such services would certainly be everywhere.

As it was, the fire burned down as a result of government policy, a refusal of service because the homeowners did not pay what amounted to a tax! The poor homeowner begged for help and offered to pay. He had paid the year before and the year before, so his credit was good. Even so, the bureaucracy refused!

October 5, 2010

I thought this only happened in the bad old days

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:49

One of the arguments that used to appear regularly whenever anyone proposed privatizing public services is that “in the bad old days”, when fire departments were run by insurance firms, they’d only put out fires that endangered paying customers. Apparently that sort of thing still happens today:

Imagine your home catches fire but the local fire department won’t respond, then watches it burn. That’s exactly what happened to a local family tonight.

A local neighborhood is furious after firefighters watched as an Obion County, Tennessee, home burned to the ground.

The homeowner, Gene Cranick, said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late. They wouldn’t do anything to stop his house from burning.

Terrible, isn’t it? A strong refutation to that whole crazy libertarian notion of privatizing essential services. So which greedy corporation runs the fire service?

Each year, Obion County residents must pay $75 if they want fire protection from the city of South Fulton. But the Cranicks did not pay.

The mayor said if homeowners don’t pay, they’re out of luck.

Interesting.

H/T to BoingBoing, where many of the comments seem to be from folks who didn’t read that it wasn’t a private fire service.

October 4, 2010

Reason TV’s “Fiscal House of Horrors”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 16:26

The war heckler’s latest book

Filed under: Books, Economics, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:39

P.J. O’Rourke has a new book coming out soon:

O’Rourke, the reformed ex-radical, editor of National Lampoon during the “Animal House” era, war correspondent and, lately, target of what he calls “ass cancer,” continues the anti-statist argument in his new book, “Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards” (Atlantic Monthly Press). References to Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and Adam Smith (to whose “Wealth of Nations” he once devoted an entire volume) prove O’Rourke can do the philosophical heavy lifting — yet make it all float on a fluffy cloud of wit. Among his best one-liners:

* “The free market is a bathroom scale. We may not like what we see when we step on the bathroom scale, but we can’t pass a law making ourselves weigh 165. Liberals and leftists think we can.”

* “We’re individuals — unique, disparate, and willful, as anyone raising a household of little individuals knows. And not one of those children has ever written a letter to Santa Claus saying, ‘Please bring me and a bunch of kids I don’t know a pony and we’ll share.’ “

* “The most sensible request of government we make is not, ‘Do something!’ But ‘Quit it!’ “

* “Conservatism is a flight from ideas. As in, ‘Don’t get any ideas,’ ‘What’s the big idea?’ and ‘Whose idea was that?’ “

O’Rourke, 62, is a cool Republican. It’s a lonely job. What can the rest of the party do to join him?

“I don’t think Republicans have ever been cool,” he says. “Abraham Lincoln tried growing a beard.”

Yes, and look what happened to him.

“It’s always going to be cooler to have wild visionary ideas for society and the future. All we can really do is see that we’ve got a society where as many people grow out of cool as fast as they possibly can.”

H/T to Paul Davis for the link.

September 22, 2010

QotD: Gun registry math

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Law, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:45

If the Globe is right, it seems only a bit of sloppily written verbiage in the new report on the registry — interpreted by dissimulators with badges, and faithfully broadcast by writers with poor financial instincts — could possibly have led anyone to believe the gun registry is a bargain. (The Firearms Centre in Miramichi has 240 federal employees, guys! $4 million wouldn’t cover 12 weeks of payroll expenses, right?) And maybe I’m just some Western flake, but in retrospect it does seem as though the propagation of $4 million figure was possible only because the RCMP played undisguised politics with the report, dawdling over a “translation” (a tactic that the Conservatives somehow ended up taking most of the blame for) and making sure to pass it around to friendly, gullible media outlets in a timely way before the vote on C-391. All of which, now, can serve only the electoral interests of the Conservatives themselves — keeping alive the hated totem and allowing them to exploit the real financial numbers in their search for a Commons majority.

Colby Cosh, “Junius explains that gun-registry math”, Macleans.ca, 2010-09-21

September 16, 2010

QotD: Trial By Jury

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 17:03

In 1850 Spooner published A Defence for Fugitive Slaves, Against the Acts of Congress on February 12, 1793 and September 18, 1850, where he argued that juries “are judges of the law, as well as the fact” and are therefore justified in nullifying federal fugitive slave laws. “No man can be punished for resisting the execution of any law,” Spooner wrote, “unless the law be so clearly constitutional, as that a jury, taken promiscuously from the mass of the people, will all agree that it is constitutional.” Today we call this radical approach “jury nullification.”

Two years later, in Trial by Jury, Spooner developed his argument in full, expertly tracing the right of jury nullification back to the Magna Carta. “It is indispensable that the people, or ‘the country,’ judge of and determine their own liberties against the government,” he wrote. “How is it possible that juries can do anything to protect the liberties of the people against the government; if they are not allowed to determine what those liberties are?” According to Spooner, it was essential to distinguish between trial by jury, which meant trial by the people, chosen by lot, and trial by government, which was an illegal usurpation of the people’s power. “If the government may decide who may, and who may not, be jurors,” he wrote, “it will of course select only its partisans, and those friendly to its measures.” Furthermore, he said, if the government had its way, it “may also question each person drawn as a juror, as to his sentiments in regard to the particular law involved in each trial…and exclude him if he be found unfavorable to the maintenance of such a law.”

Of course, that’s exactly what happens today when potential jurors who oppose the death penalty are prevented from serving on death penalty cases or when those who oppose drug prohibition are excluded from drug cases, thereby stacking the jury in the government’s favor. As Spooner presciently observed, “if the government may dictate to the jury what laws they are to enforce, it is no longer a ‘trial by the country,’ but a trial by the government.”

Damon W. Root, “Clarence Thomas’ Favorite Anarchist: The radical anti-statism of Lysander Spooner”, Reason, 2010-09-16

No wonder the government wants to control this information

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Media, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:10

It’s obvious why: it contradicts the deeply held religious convictions of certain members of cabinet . . . that the Earth is just over 6,000 years old:

This week, we learned more details of how the federal government systemically muzzles its scientists on controversial issues such as climate change and the oilsands. The revelations reinforced complaints contained in an Environment Canada document leaked last March pointing out how senior scientists had to seek permission from their political bosses before speaking to reporters. “Our scientists are very frustrated with the new process,” said the document. “They feel the intent of the policy is to prevent them from speaking to the media.”

In one recent example, a scientist wasn’t allowed to talk to reporters until after the request had been funnelled through communications managers, policy advisers, political staff and senior advisers. And that was for a non-controversial report dealing with a flood that swept across Canada 13,000 years ago.

Andrew Weaver, an outspoken climate scientist at the University of Victoria, has called the Canadian government cone-of-silence policy “Orwellian.”

See, it couldn’t possibly have happened, because the Earth hadn’t been created yet, dummy!

H/T to Colby Cosh.

September 15, 2010

The real results of Turkey’s referendum

Filed under: Europe, Government, History, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:50

Austin Bay is still hopeful for a secular Turkish government, but the results of the recent referendum don’t encourage quite as much hope:

Turkey’s leading political organizations both portray the choice between them as “either us or darkness.” This rhetorical demonization is typical of successful democracies. Ataturk deserves credit for establishing a democratic structure that survived his death in 1938 by 72 years.

Turkey’s actual circumstances, however, are much more complex and murky. Start with the referendum’s irony. The constitution had many undemocratic articles and was in fact imposed by the military after a coup in 1980. The European Union ruled that many of these elements did not meet EU membership standards. Thus the ironic situation of an Islamist political party promoting constitutional changes in order to meet Western European democratic standards. Aligning Turkey with Europe was one of Kemal Ataturk’s long-term goals.

Yet the judicial reforms approved this week may be an anti-democratic trap door, for they give the AKP the ability to limit systemic checks and balances on executive power. The AKP can pack the courts. The judiciary has protected the Turkish military. The AKP distrusts the military because it fears a coup, and with good reason. The military sees itself as the protector of the secular state and a bulwark against Muslim fundamentalist usurpation.

September 13, 2010

QotD: An alternate history we might have suffered

Filed under: Government, History, Liberty, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 17:19

Thought experiment: imagine an Internet in which email and web addresses were centrally issued by government agencies, with heavy procedural requirements and no mobility — even, at a plausible extreme, political patronage footballs. What kind of society do you suppose eventually issues from that?

I was there in 1983 when a tiny group called the IETF prevented this from happening. I had a personal hand in preventing it and yes, I knew what the stakes were. Even then. So did everyone else in the room.

Thought experiment: imagine a future in which everybody takes for granted that all software outside a few toy projects in academia will be closed source controlled by managerial elites, computers are unhackable sealed boxes, communications protocols are opaque and locked down, and any use of computer-assisted technology requires layers of permissions that (in effect) mean digital information flow is utterly controlled by those with political and legal master keys. What kind of society do you suppose eventually issues from that?

Remember Trusted Computing and Palladium and crypto-export restrictions? RMS and Linus Torvalds and John Gilmore and I and a few score other hackers aborted that future before it was born, by using our leverage as engineers and mentors of engineers to change the ground of debate.

[. . .]

Did we bend the trajectory of society? Yes. Yes, I think we did. It wasn’t a given that we’d get a future in which any random person could have a website and a blog, you know. It wasn’t even given that we’d have an Internet that anyone could hook up to without permission. And I’m pretty sure that if the political class had understood the implications of what we were actually doing, they’d have insisted on more centralized control. ~For the public good and the children, don’t you know.~

So, yes, sometimes very tiny groups can change society in visibly large ways on a short timescale. I’ve been there when it was done; once or twice I’ve been the instrument of change myself.

Eric S. Raymond, “Engineering history”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-09-12

Sir Humphrey Appleby on Brussels

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, Humour, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:41

As long as they’re allowed, http://sirhumphreyappleby2010.blogspot.com/ will be posting some fascinating memos from Sir Humphrey Appleby KCB CVO on various topics of interest. If-and-when the Official Secrets Act is invoked, of course, we will be deprived of this wonderful insight into the real workings of modern parliamentary government.

For example, here is Sir Humphrey on the manifold advantages of Brussels:

Any attempt by this new government to weaken our ties with the European Union must be firmly resisted. Our membership has been a godsend. Since no cabinet minister is really au fait with all the provisions of the treaty of Rome, we can guide them towards our desired decisions by telling them there are obligations under the treaty, and deflect them from unwelcome actions by saying that the treaty prohibits them. In addition we can cite some of the myriad directives, which can be creatively adapted to our purposes by skilful translation from the original French. Since few of them have progressed beyond O level in any modern language, our version is unlikely to be challenged. And of course when we want to get rid of a minister for a few days we can always arrange an emergency meeting in Brussels, Strasburg or Luxembourg to give us a few days breathing space.

Brussels provides a model for modern government. Legislation can be brought forward only by officials, not by elected members. All important posts are filled by appointment, not election. Political ‘leadership’ is rotated every six months, to ensure that no one ever gets a real grip on the job. The proliferation of nations and languages gives officials endless scope for fomenting distrust, confusion and conflict between members. And there is no nonsense about financial constraints: the auditors have refused to approve the EU accounts for the past fourteen years, but they go on spending happily regardless.

Ministers in previous governments have occasionally expressed concern about this in their early months, but we have always found that after a few visits to Brussels and contingent exposure to the legendary Belgian hospitality, their opposition has cooled remarkably, and indeed they express enthusiasm for further visits, which of course we are more than happy to arrange.

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