Quotulatiousness

August 4, 2009

California looking for all kinds of new sources of income

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:34

Neil Gaiman has some issues with the California tax department (individual Twitter messages, in sequence):

It wasn’t identity theft screwing up my credit rating. Twas the idiot state of idiot california deciding I lived there & wasn’t paying tax.

I know that California is bankrupt and stupid, but ohhhh the stupidness and ohhh the cupidity. Twerps.

They decided I lived there & wasn’t paying tax & took out a Tax Lien; then cancelled it when we yelled, but it lives on in the credit rpt.

Right. I just spoke to a nice man who pretended he wasn’t in India who said he’d get onto fixing it. We shall see what happens.

July 29, 2009

QotD: Conspiracy theorists

Filed under: Government, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 14:29

Science fiction writer Damon Knight once claimed that the popularity of conspiracy theories could be explained by our “desire to believe that there is some group of folks who know what they’re doing.”

Wishful thinking. And few “groups of folks” have displayed less aptitude in the art of keeping secrets than government.

Yet no matter who is in power, no matter how incompetent they may be, there always exists this irate minority that believes politicians possess supernatural powers of deception.

The mystery the nation faces isn’t President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. The mystery is how any American could believe that all the president’s former political opponents, both the Republican and Democratic parties, Hawaiian officials and two Honolulu newspapers (nay, the entire press corps) could work in concert to conceal the biggest con of the eon.

David Harsanyi, “Close Encounters of the Absurd Kind: What the Obama birth certificate conspiracy says about American politics”, Reason Online, 2009-07-29

July 28, 2009

QotD: Re-interpreting that number

Filed under: Government, Health, Quotations, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:38

There have been two trends in US health care over the last decade. On the one hand, a lot of Americans have become, in any rational sense, over-insured: They get tested for things they’ll never get. On the other, there has been an abandonment of health insurance by the rich. If you peel the Census Bureau and DHHS figures, of those alleged “45 million uninsured Americans”, one-fifth aren’t Americans; another fifth aren’t uninsured but are covered by Medicare; another two-fifths are the young and mobile (they don’t have health insurance, but they don’t have life insurance or home insurance, either: they’re 22 and immortal and life’s a party); and the remaining fifth are wealthier than the insured population. Really. According to a 2006 Census Bureau report, 19 per cent of the uninsured have household income of over $75,000. Since the last round of government “reform” in the Nineties, wealthy Americans have been fleeing insurance and opting to bring health care back to a normal market transaction. And, if you look at the “uninsured discount” offered by doctors, one can appreciate that, for everything but chronic disability, it’s not an irrational decision to say I’ll get a better deal for my broken leg or my colonoscopy or my heavy cold if I just write a check for it.

Mark Steyn, “The Nationalization of Your Body”, National Review, 2009-07-28

“The best thing about Miami is how close it is to the United States”

Filed under: Government, Law, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:20

Ryan Grim looks at the (government assisted) rise of Miami’s drug trade:

Miami was the perfect base for largescale drug smuggling. By the mid-1970s Coconut Grove was bursting with hippies, the type of smart, anti-authoritarian troublemakers who make the best smugglers. The Carter administration had pulled back on the effort to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro, leaving South Florida with an idle army of welltrained, mostly Cuban-American adepts of the dark arts that would become valuable in the cocaine smuggling business. They knew how to acquire and use weapons, how to hide money, how to surreptitiously pilot planes and boats. A speedboat could zip through any one of the Everglades’ hundreds of little waterways to find a hidden place to unload, or dock elsewhere along Florida’s 3,000 miles of coastline.

The infrastructure for this multibillion-dollar import business wasn’t created solely for cocaine, or even for marijuana before it. South Florida had a long history of smuggling coffee, tobacco, and other products subject to tariffs. A “mother ship,” either from the Caribbean or directly from Colombia, would anchor near the shore, though not close enough to be seen from land. Yachts or cigarette boats — named for the vessels that smuggled bootleg tobacco — would zip out to the offshore vessel to load up with coke. The drug also came in by air. In the late ’70s and early ’80s customs officials estimated that more than 80 cocaine-laden planes landed in the United States every night, mostly in Florida. In 1980 the U.S. Customs Service seized 200 cigarette boats and 50 airplanes, one of which was a World War II–era bomber. It had previously been used by customs agents investigating drug operations.

July 27, 2009

Audax toujours

Filed under: Economics, Government — Tags: — Nicholas @ 14:12

Thaddeus Tremayne may appear to have gone off his medications when he proposed this:

I think it behooves us to begin spreading this idea: that people who work in the public sector should be exempt from having to pay tax. All tax.

But he really does have a valid and interesting point:

No, what I am proposing is the stripping away of a fig-leaf that disguises the very important distinction between tax-payers and tax-consumers.

Currently, only those who earn their living in the private or voluntary sector are tax-payers and while public sector employees do file tax returns and, on the face of it, pay their taxes too, this is a mere bookkeeping fiction. They are the recipients of tax, adding nothing to the public purse. The number of people who fail to understand this distinction, holding instead that “we are all taxpayers” is alarmingly high. By forcing the public sector to lead tax-free lives, we make their true status not just clearer but undeniable.

Consider the meme-spreading to have started.

July 25, 2009

Quebec voters’ relationship with the rest of Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:52

Publius outlines exactly my suspicions about the way a significant number of Quebec voters view the rest of Canada:

The hard truth of Canadian unity, and why Quebecers “park” their votes with the Bloc, is that each of the two solitudes views Canada differently. To anglophones Canada is — save some of the more Balkanized ethnics ghettoes — their country. To francophones, especially in Quebec, Canada is simply a vehicle to advance their cultural interests. If French culture can be better preserved by keeping Quebec in Canada, so be it. If independence — or whatever half-way house euphemism the separatists are using at the moment — looks like a better option, vive la independence!

The Bloc Quebecois is monumentally useless if your political aims is something humdrum, like forming a government. But if the goal is to extort concessions form the rest of the country, by raising the specter of national destruction, the Bloc is wildly successful. Stephen Harper has to run a national governing party. The West wants to scrap the Wheat Board and the Long-gun Registry. The typical Ontarian couldn’t tell wheat from cauliflower and is terrified of being caught in a drive-by, while touring the less scenic parts of Toronto. A certain measure of negotiation and compromise is required to run so disparate a group, how much is another matter. Giles Duceppe, the longest serving party leader in Canada, doesn’t have to face such wide cultural chasms. He leads a nearly monoethnic one issue, one note party where the internal debate is about when to pick up and leave. The swing voters who alternately support the Bloc, the Tories and the Liberals, aren’t Canadians mulling over policy options, but foreigners in spirit trying to get the best deal. Expecting them to put Canada’s interests above their parochial concerns is a fantasy.

QotD: the last honest trash collector

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:18

There are lots of levels of fear and complaint about the government getting involved in business. First and foremost, of course, is incompetence. We actually have experiential evidence about this. In England, all the English car companies were beginning to circle the drain in a series of well-deserved failures and bankruptcies, earned by making lousy products with very poor production at high prices. So, the government, back in the ’70s, nationalized all the British car companies. The result was British Leyland, a name that perhaps doesn’t resonate much with you. Many of your friends probably drive Humber Super Snipers, or perhaps not. [Laughs.] That’s certainly one thing that we’re headed for. The other thing is that there’s a very good reason that governments aren’t supposed to compete with private-enterprise companies. Governments have monopolies on certain things, like eminent domain and deadly force. What’s another example of an organization that gets into the same business that you’re in, except that their guys have got guns? That would be the Mob. Ford is like the last honest trash collector in the New York metropolitan area, the last one that’s not mobbed-up. How long is that gonna go on for?

P.J. O’Rourke interviewed by Gregg LaGambina, A.V. Club, 2009-07-16

July 22, 2009

QotD: Republican government

Filed under: Government, Law, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:04

Republican government is impossible in an age where not only are the bills too long for a reasonably engaged citizen to read, not only are they too long for a legislator to read, but they’re too long to write down before they’re passed into law. We just have to trust our rulers, and they just have to trust whichever aides negotiated whichever boondoggles with whichever lobbyists.

Mark Steyn, “Jacksonian America”, National Review, 2009-07-20

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