Quotulatiousness

May 31, 2025

“U.S. libertarians [are] the best friends Canada doesn’t know it has”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Colby Cosh sings the praises of American libertarians for their work in trying to dismantle some of Donald Trump’s dubiously Constitutional extensions of presidential power:

The James L. Watson Court of International Trade Building at 1 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan, New York City.
Photo by Americasroof via Wikimedia Commons.

The U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) issued a decision Wednesday that annuls various salvos of surprise economic tariffs, including ones on Canada, that have been enacted by President Donald Trump since his inauguration in January. I won’t lie to you: I had the same initial reaction to this consequential news that you probably did, which was “Hooray!” and then “Huh, there’s a U.S. Court of International Trade?”

This court is surely unfamiliar even to most Americans, no doubt because much of its work involves settling issues like “Do hockey pants count as ‘garments’ or ‘sports equipment’ under customs law?” Nevertheless, the CIT does have exclusive jurisdiction over civil actions involving U.S. trade law. It’s just that no president has ever before rewritten the tariff schedule of the republic in the half-mad fashion of a child taking crayons to a fresh-painted wall.

The American Constitution, from day one, has unambiguously assigned the right to set international tariffs to Congress. Congress is allowed to delegate its powers to the president and his agents for limited or temporary purposes, but it can’t abandon those powers to him altogether. Defining this legal frontier is what the CIT was asked to do, and their demarcation of it will now swim upward through higher appellate courts (its decision has been put on hold in the meantime).

The lawsuit was actually two parallel suits raising overlapping objections to the tariffs. One was brought forward by 12 U.S. states, and the other was filed by a group of tariff-exposed American businesses, including manufacturers of bikes, electronics kits and fishing equipment. The latter set of plaintiffs was roped together by the usual posse of heroic libertarians and legal originalists, including George Mason University law prof Ilya Somin.

About 24 hours after Trump originally announced the “Liberation Day” worldwide tariffs, Somin quickly blogged about how insanely unconstitutional the whole idea was, and concluded his article essentially by saying “I’m darn well gonna do something about this nonsense”. I don’t mean to suggest he deserves primary credit; I only intend to call attention, once again, to U.S. libertarians being the best friends Canada doesn’t know it has.

May 30, 2025

Senate to once again try to pass internet age verification and website blocking

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Some ideas are so horrible that they never, ever die. The Canadian Senate nearly got an age verification and website blocking ban into law during the last Parliament, and as Michael Geist discusses, they’re not giving up now:

“In the east wing of the Centre Block is the Senate chamber, in which are the thrones for the Canadian monarch and consort, or for the federal viceroy and his or her consort, and from which either the sovereign or the governor general gives the Speech from the Throne and grants Royal Assent to bills passed by parliament. The senators themselves sit in the chamber, arranged so that those belonging to the governing party are to the right of the Speaker of the Senate and the opposition to the speaker’s left. The overall colour in the Senate chamber is red, seen in the upholstery, carpeting, and draperies, and reflecting the colour scheme of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom; red was a more royal colour, associated with the Crown and hereditary peers. Capping the room is a gilt ceiling with deep octagonal coffers, each filled with heraldic symbols, including maple leafs, fleur-de-lis, lions rampant, clàrsach, Welsh Dragons, and lions passant. On the east and west walls of the chamber are eight murals depicting scenes from the First World War; painted in between 1916 and 1920.”
Photo and description by Saffron Blaze via Wikimedia Commons.

The last Parliament featured debate over several contentious Internet-related bills, notably streaming and news laws (Bills C-11 and C-18), online harms (Bill C-63) and Internet age verification and website blocking (Bill S-210). Bill S-210 fell below the radar screen for many months as it started in the Senate and received only cursory review in the House. The bill faced only a final vote in the House but it died with the election call. This week, the bill’s sponsor, Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, wasted no time in bringing it back. Now Bill S-209, the bill starts from scratch in the Senate with the same basic framework but with some notable changes that address at least some of the concerns raised by the prior bill (a fulsome review of those concerns can be heard in a Law Bytes podcast I conducted with Senator Miville-Dechêne).

Bill S-209 creates an offence for any organization making available pornographic material to anyone under the age of 18 for commercial purposes. The penalty for doing so is $250,000 for the first offence and up to $500,000 for any subsequent offences. The previous bill used the term “sexually explicit material”, borrowing from the Criminal Code provision. This raised concerns as the definition in the Criminal Code is used in conjunction with other sexual crimes. The bill now features its own definition for pornographic material, which is defined as

    any photographic, film, video or other visual representation, whether or not it was made by electronic or mechanical means, the dominant characteristic of which is the depiction, for a sexual purpose, of a person’s genital organs or anal region or, if the person is female, her breasts, but does not include child pornography as defined in subsection 163.1(1) of the Criminal Code.

Organizations can rely on three potential defences:

  1. The organization instituted a government-approved “prescribed age-verification or age estimation method” to limit access. There is a major global business of vendors that sell these technologies and who are vocal proponents of this kind of legislation.
  2. The organization can make the case that there is “legitimate purpose related to science, medicine, education or the arts”.
  3. The organization took steps required to limit access after having received a notification from the enforcement agency (likely the CRTC).

Note that Bill S-209 has expanded the scope of available technologies for implementation: while S-210 only included age verification, S-209 adds age estimation technologies. Age estimation may benefit from limiting the amount of data that needs to be collected from an individual, but it also suffers from inaccuracies. For example, using estimation to distinguish between a 17 and 18 year old is difficult for both humans and computers, yet the law depends upon it. Given the standard for highly effective technologies, age estimation technologies may not receive government approvals, leaving only age verification in place.

May 29, 2025

The King of Canada

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the National Post, Colby Cosh tweaks the berries of the tiny number of dedicated Canadian republicans:

King Charles III and Queen Camilla, official portrait by Millie Pilkington.

The Post and other Canadian organs have been full of conscious praise for our unusual absentee monarchy lately, what with the King being in the capital to give the throne speech in person. But Canadian republicans must be hoping that our people will instinctively reject the spectacle, and at least see the genuine need for that blessing without which no sovereign state can hope to be taken seriously — a president.

There are rumblings about behind-the-scenes diplomatic tensions between Canada and the United Kingdom over the royal visit, rumblings which the Sunday Times (of London) put in print this weekend. The crux of the story is that Canada and the U.K. are not quite using the same playbook in dealing with the volatile and cutthroat Trump administration.

Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government is applying lots of soft-soap, using Trump’s fondness for the British monarchy and its highly ornamented nature as a means of getting special treatment in trade negotiations. Meanwhile, Canada and its government hope to use the presence in Canada of Canada’s King as a subtle way of asserting independence, determination and strength as we bear the economic blows of Trumpian whim.

And — wait for it — the crazy part is, THOSE TWO KINGS ARE THE SAME EXACT DUDE. WHAAAT?

To a republican, this seems like a mystery concocted to obfuscate a logical weakness in the system. No doubt they see it just the same way an atheist looks at the centuries of early Christian debate over the Holy Trinity. It’s not exactly as though the U.K. and Canada are at war, or as though there is any overt disharmony between the two states. But the monarchists have to concede at least this much: when mutually sovereign countries have a shared head of state, you do in fact end up with the exotic possibility that George XIV of Canada might one day, in theory, have to issue a declaration of war on George XIV of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This is baked into the improvised post-Imperial ontology of our government and of Britain’s.

This is why Canadian monarchists are so fussy about the independent constitutional footing on which the Canadian Crown rests. We do this, implicitly insisting that our system of government was reinvented in 1931, while at the same time arguing that the advantages of monarchy include antiquity, historical continuity and the preservation of a special bond between Commonwealth realms. Perhaps we are sneaky imperialist (or racist) hypocrites. Perhaps we just feel that those advantages are legitimate and important, and that the Statute of Westminster is an optimum compromise that preserves them while guaranteeing our sovereign freedom of action in the interplay of governments.

QotD: FDR and Herbert Hoover in the Great Depression

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

November 1932. Hoover has just lost the election, but is a lame duck until March. The European debt crisis flashes up again. Hoover knows how to solve it. But:

    He had already met with congressional leaders and learned, as he had suspected, that they would not change their stance without Roosevelt’s support. Seized with the urgency of the moment, he continued to bombard his opponents with proposals for cooperation toward solutions, going so far as to suggest that Democratic nominees, not Republicans, be sent to Europe to engage in negotiations, all to no avail. Notwithstanding what editorialists called his “personal and moral responsibility” to engage with the outgoing administration, Roosevelt had instructed Democratic leaders in Congress not to let Hoover “tinker” with the debts. He had also let it be known that any solution to the problem would occur on his watch – “Roosevelt holds he and not Hoover will fix debt policy”, read the headlines. Thus ended what the New York Times called Hoover’s magnanimous proposal for “unity and constructive action”, not to mention his 12-year effort to convince America of its obligation and self-interest in fostering European political and financial stability …

    During the debt discussions and to some extent as a result of them, the economy turned south again. Several other factors contributed. Investors were exchanging US dollars for gold as doubt spread about Roosevelt’s intentions to remain on the gold standard. Gold stocks in the Federal Reserve thus declined, threatening the stability of the financial sector … what’s more, the effectiveness of [Hoover’s bank support plan], which had succeeded in stabilizing the banking system, was severely compromised by [Democrats’] insistence on publicizing its loans, as the administration had warned. For these reasons, Hoover would forever blame Roosevelt and the Democratic Congress for spoiling his hard-earned recovery, an argument that has only recently gained currency among economists.

And:

    Alarmed at these threats to recovery, Hoover pushed Democratic congressional leaders and the incoming administration for action. He wanted to cut federal spending, reorganize the executive branch to save money, reestablish the confidentiality of RFC loans, introduce bankruptcy legislation to protect foreclosures, grant new powers to the Federal Reserve, and pass new banking regulation, including measures to protect depositors … He was frustrated at every turn by Democratic leadership taking cues from the President-Elect … On February 5, Congress took the obstructionism a degree further by closing shop with 23 days left in its session.

In mid-February, there is another run on the banks, worse than all the other runs on the banks thus far. Hoover asks Congress to do something – Congress says they will only listen to President-Elect Roosevelt. Hoover writes a letter to Roosevelt begging him to give Congress permission to act, saying it is a national emergency and he has to act right now. Roosevelt refuses to respond to the letter for eleven days, by which time the banks have all failed.

Then, a month later, he stands up before the American people and says they have nothing to fear but fear itself – a line he stole from Hoover – and accepts their adulation as Destined Savior. He keeps this Destined Savior status throughout his administration. In 1939, Roosevelt still had everyone convinced that Hoover was totally discredited by his failure to solve the Great Depression in three years – whereas Roosevelt had failed to solve it for six but that was totally okay and he deserved credit for being a bold leader who tried really hard.

So how come Hoover bears so much of the blame in public consciousness? Whyte points to three factors.

First, Hoover just the bad luck of being in office when an international depression struck. Its beginning wasn’t his fault, its persistence wasn’t his fault, but it happened on his watch and he got blamed.

Second, in 1928 the Democratic National Committee took the unprecedented step of continuing to exist even after a presidential election. It dedicated itself to the sort of PR we now take for granted: critical responses to major speeches, coordinated messaging among Democratic politicians, working alongside friendly media to create a narrative. The Republicans had nothing like it; the RNC forgot to exist for the 1930 midterms, and Hoover was forced to personally coordinate Republican campaigns from his White House office. Although Hoover was good (some would say obsessed) at reacting to specific threats on his personal reputation, the idea of coordinating a media narrative felt too much like the kind of politics he felt was beneath him. So he didn’t try. When the Democrats launched a massive public blitz to get everyone to call homeless encampments “Hoovervilles”, he privately fumed but publicly held his tongue. FDR and the Democrats stayed relentlessly on message and the accusation stuck.

And third, Hoover was dead-set against welfare. However admirable his attempts to reverse the Depression, stabilize banking, etc, he drew the line at a national dole for the Depression’s victims. This was one of FDR’s chief accusations against him, and it was entirely correct. Hoover knew that going down that route would lead pretty much where it led Roosevelt – to a dectupling of the size of government and the abandonment of the Constitutional vision of a small federal government presiding over substantially autonomous states. Herbert Hoover, history’s greatest philanthropist and ender-of-famines, would go down in history as the guy who refused to feed starving people. And they hated him for it.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Hoover”, Slate Star Codex, 2020-03-17.

May 27, 2025

Four years on, and the media still haven’t been honest about the Residential Schools claims

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At The Rewrite, Peter Menzies looks back to the bombshell claims that horrified the nation, yet went unquestioned by pretty much all of the mainstream media:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

This week marks the fourth anniversary of the day Canada’s media broke faith with the public that funds it.

May 27, 2021, was when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced the “confirmation of the remains of 215 children” discovered at the former Kamloops Residential School site. Most, if not all, media reported this statement, which was based on anomalies shown on ground penetrating radar, without challenging its veracity.

Not long after, the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan announced that ground penetrating radar had located 751 unmarked graves in a community cemetery adjacent to the former location of a residential school.

Talk of “mass graves” ricocheted across the country and the world. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was in Saskatchewan in a flash on bended knee with teddy bears. It didn’t matter that the markers in the cemetery had been removed decades ago by a rogue priest; Anderson Cooper and a 60 Minutes crew were already flying in to Regina. The impression left by the coverage was that children had been murdered en masse. Statues were toppled or put in storage and close to 200 churches were burned — many to the ground — or vandalized in the months and years that followed. Pope Francis visited Canada in 2022 to atone once again for the Roman Catholic church’s role in operating many of the schools.

All because no one had the courage to ask: “This is a very serious allegation – how can you be certain?” and then, in the immortal words of the City News Bureau of Chicago, check it out.

The coverage at the time showed little evidence journalists looked for proof beyond the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc allegation or gave sufficient play to Cowessess Chief Cadmus Delorme’s efforts to establish context.

Since then, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc have revised their confirmation of bodies so that they now maintain the radar showed anomalies that possibly could be graves. No bodies have been found or, for that matter, searched for. The band has received millions of dollars to assist it with its investigation and the school is now a national historic site.

The original stories remain online and, in many cases, uncorrected, leaving the public’s understanding of the matter unchanged. Here’s one example from CTV/Canadian Press. The headline — “Remains of 215 children found buried at former B.C. residential school” — is still there. CBC has made an effort to update its stories, but its original headlines remain and recent incidents suggest staff still believe the initial version.

As Marco Navarro-Genie of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy recently wrote, media may even have been enlisted as allies to ensure the allegations went unchallenged:

    “According to The Knowing by Tanya Talaga, “select journalists” were given embargoed details to ensure “sensitive and impactful” coverage. CBC journalist Angela Sterritt admitted she was in contact with the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc the day before the announcement and was one of only a few journalists granted access to the June 4, 2021, video conference, where live-streaming was prohibited. This raises serious questions about whether the CBC acted as a passive reporter or an active participant in promoting an unverified claim.”

Shamed domestically and internationally, the nation’s flags went to half mast for months before being raised only in deference to Remembrance Day. A new holiday was declared for federal employees and the Prime Minister took advantage of the first one to go surfing.

There is no question that children died at residential schools. I have stood by and honoured the once unmarked graves — including those belonging to children of the school’s principal — at the reclaimed site of the Indian Industrial School outside Regina. Nor is there doubt that many students suffered from cultural dislocation, shaming and abuse. But that is no excuse for media not reporting the original Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc claim and the Cowessess news professionally and instead wildly and widely misinforming the public, raising the spectre of mass murders and traumatizing many. It’s one thing to make a mistake, quite another to leave it uncorrected because you prefer the impression it made.

May 25, 2025

Comparing Japan’s supply management system to the Canadian version

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Food, Government, Japan, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh considers the fate of a Japanese government minister who accidentally told the truth about a subject near and dear to Japanese consumers’ hearts (well, stomachs, actually):

“Japanese Girls at Work in the Rice Fields – Grand Old Fuji-Yama in the Distance, Japan” by Boston Public Library is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

I’m sure some of you saw Wednesday’s NP headline for an Associated Press wire story: “Japan’s agriculture minister resigns after saying he ‘never had to buy rice’” AP’s Mari Yamaguchi explained this international-news nugget. A cabinet minister in a shaky minority government made a flippant comment indicating that he was light-years out of touch with ordinary people facing high grocery costs in a developed country.

Taku Eto’s political survival thus became impossible within a matter of hours, and his prime minister hastily swapped a congenial young star into the agriculture portfolio. Japan is a constitutional monarchy with a system of parliamentary government more or less like ours, so there’s nothing incomprehensible about any of this to a Canadian …

… but, of course, one almost couldn’t help flashing back to our recent election campaign, wherein the prime minister had half-boasted to a Radio-Canada reporter that he doesn’t buy his own groceries and has no earthly idea how the stuff in his fridge gets there. It struck me at the time that this was a classic mistake for an electoral neophyte like Mark Carney. Fans of the legendary American columnist Michael Kinsley will surely think of it as a “Kinsley gaffe”, i.e., an obviously true statement that is nevertheless bound to get a politician in trouble.

[…]

Eto was talking about rice because the prices for it in Japan have gone through the roof, the clouds and the stratosphere. And rice plays a role in the Japanese culture and diet for which there is no analogue in omnivorous Canada. For precisely that reason, rice is supply-managed there in much the same way our dairy, eggs and poultry are — i.e., through confiscatory tariffs on foreign products, along with a mafia of politically powerful producer cooperatives who operate under supply quotas.

If you read Canadian news, you can recite the effects of this, whether or not you’re capable of finding Japan on a map of Japan. Their supply-management system is, like ours, a major headache for counterparties in trade negotiations. Their farmers, like Canada’s, are dwindling in number and aging out of the business. They are sometimes paid to destroy crops. Farm costs for machinery and supplies are subject to inflation. And sometimes the system for domestic demand forecasting blows a tire.

It’s a constant high-wire act for Japanese governments, who still have official responsibility for the national rice supply under wartime statute. If store-shelf prices get too high, and consumers start to make trouble, the cabinet must consider loosening tariff barriers and releasing rice from the national strategic reserve. The LDP ministry has done both these things in the face of hallucinatory prices, and so the farmers are now just as ticked off as the buying public.

QotD: Cancellation of the Avro Arrow and destruction of the prototypes

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Military, Politics, Quotations, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

On Friday, February 20, 1959, 14,000 employees were immediately fired and sent home, after a project they had been working on since 1953, was abruptly cancelled. That project was the military, supersonic, advanced interceptor, the Avro Arrow. The company they worked for, A.V. Roe Canada Limited, had come into being just after the war, with the express purpose of designing and building both commercial and military aircraft in Canada. Its subsidiaries included Avro, responsible for developing and building the platform and Orenda, for developing the engines.

The first project of this new company was the C-102 Jetliner, the first commercial inter-city jet to fly in North America in 1949, and the second [civilian] jet to fly in the world, behind the trans-oceanic British Comet. After being test flown successfully for three years and with potential orders pending, the Jetliner project was cancelled, allegedly in favour of committing all company resources to the development of the military sub-sonic CF-100. The Arrow was to be the successor to the latter, designed to intercept and destroy if need be, incoming supersonic bombers coming across the North Pole, from the then Soviet Union.

The Arrow was a sleek, twin engine, delta winged aircraft embodying many advanced features such as fly-by-wire controls, titanium and magnesium alloys for light weight and resistance to frictional heat, transistorized electronics and an advanced engine, the Iroquois. While some other aircraft may have included some of these advanced features, what made the Arrow unique was that all of them were built into this one singular aircraft.

Adding insult to injury, the five flying preproduction aircraft, including all technical documentation, tooling and jigs and fixtures and others in various stages of assembly, were ordered destroyed. Why was a project being hailed by aviation experts around the world, suddenly cancelled? In the absence of clear facts and in the presence of rumour and innuendo, debates have raged back and forth as to the reasons, sparking a series of myths and misconceptions about the entire affair.

In 1988, the late Canadian historian, Professor Desmond Morton, lamented the fact that he could not obtain any government archival documents on the Arrow, assuming they even existed. Out of interest, I decided to try my own hand in this endeavour. Since then I have uncovered and have had declassified thousands upon thousands of records including many Secret and Top Secret, ranging from memos, reports both scientific and financial, to minutes of meetings and letters. The list includes some from the United States and Great Britain as well.

Those documents which I deemed more critical, I have either quoted from or have reproduced in my books, with full references. Following is a discussion of some of the myths and misconceptions that the documents have helped clarify.

Arrow Destruction

Perhaps one of the most enduring myths is that the destruction of the completed Arrows and all else, was ordered by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, due to his hatred of the President of A.V. Roe, Crawford Gordon. Alternatively, it has been argued that it was Gordon who had everything destroyed as a spite against the Prime Minister. Neither account is true.

The government records from the Department of National Defence clearly show the order to destroy came from the Minister of National Defence, George R. Pearkes, after receiving that recommendation from Hugh Campbell, Chief of the Air Staff, and after conferring with numerous others including the Deputy Minister of National Defence and the Minister of the Department of Defence Production. The documents contain the signatures of those involved, all of whom would later deny publicly having any knowledge of the destruction, leaving the Prime Minister to be subsequently vilified for it. In fact, the paper trail ends with Minister Pearkes. The matter was not discussed with the Prime Minister at all.

Even today, when the Department decides to dispose of something – it does not matter if it is an aircraft, a tank, a ship or some other equipment – there is no need to seek approval or even advise the Prime Minister as to the manner of its disposal. In fact, all departments dispose of their equipment through an arm of the government. At the time it was called Crown Assets Disposal, but today it is renamed GC Surplus. The name may change yet again.

Palmiro Campagna, “The Avro Arrow: Exploding the Myths and Misconceptions”, Dominion Review, 2025-02-20.

May 22, 2025

Lucy Connolly, political prisoner

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I’m no firebrand on social media — I’d probably have a lot more followers if I were — but I can easily imagine a situation like the one that got Lucy Connolly sent off to the British gulags for an ill-judged social media post:

In what has become an emblematic case of the UK’s betrayal of free speech, Lucy Connolly has now lost her appeal for early release. This mother and childminder had posted an offensive tweet in the direct aftermath of the Southport murders, in which a psychopath brutally attacked children with a knife at a yoga class. She had believed the false claim that the perpetrator was an asylum seeker, and written online that she had no objection to people burning down hotels where immigrants were residing.

The tweet was taken as evidence that Connolly had intended to “stir up racial hatred” and incite violence during the febrile climate of the summer riots. It had been deleted within hours, no violence occurred as a result, and yet she was sentenced to 31 months in prison. Given that the severity of Connolly’s sentence was doubtless related to unofficial government pressure on the judiciary, many have made the case that Connolly is a political prisoner.

For all our shared revulsion at the tweet, we must remember that we are still talking here about words, not actions. It was completely right that Philip Prescott, a man who attacked a mosque as part of a mob during the riots, was sentenced to 28 months in jail. But Connolly has received an even longer sentence having committed no acts of violence at all. Many rapists and paedophiles have been treated far more leniently. I know of no sound argument that could possibility justify this state of affairs. It is the very definition of two-tier justice.

Let’s get the caveats out of the way. Nobody is defending what Connolly wrote. It was unpleasant, rash, misjudged, and much else besides. Here is the post in full.

Grim stuff. But it by no means fulfils any serious definition of incitement to violence. For one thing, she is not calling on hotels to be torched, but is rather making clear that she would not care if that occurred. This distinction is key, but has been overlooked. Moreover, Connolly has zero influence or clout. It is not as though anyone reading this could have taken it as an instruction or order and acted accordingly. Those wishing to appreciate the full context of why Connolly behaved as rashly as she did should read this excellent piece by Allison Pearson for The Telegraph.

It should go without saying that in a free society some people are going to say ghastly things. That’s the price we pay for liberty. The judge in this case made a statement in his ruling that has been widely interpreted as political: “It is a strength of our society that it is both diverse and inclusive. There is always a very small minority of people who will seek an excuse to use violence and disorder causing injury, damage, loss and fear to wholly innocent members of the public and sentences for those who incite racial hatred and disharmony in our society are intended to both punish and deter.”

Trump, “the American Mussolini”, versus ever-so-democratic Mark Carney

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, John Robson contrasts the authoritarian dictator at the helm of the American ship of state with our peaceful, democratic, and fully accountable to the voters prime minister:

President Donald Trump greets Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney, Tuesday, May 6, 2025, at the West Wing entrance of the White House.
(Official White House Photo by Gabriel B Kotico)

It was the best of budgets, it was the worst of budgets, it was the age of restraint, it was the age of profligacy, it was the epoch of the legislature, it was the epoch of the executive, it was the season of open debate, it was the season of closed doors, it was the spring of Canada, it was the winter of America. Or possibly the other way around.

The confusion arises because as a patriotic Canadian I keep hearing how U.S. President Donald Trump is an American Mussolini who has abolished the last vestiges of the old Republic, so we should drink rye not bourbon or some other decisive action easily performed while sitting down. Yet the news media mysteriously insist that the Bad Orange Man is having trouble getting his budget through some quaint relic called the United States Congress while Green Mark Carney isn’t bothering to get his spending plans rubber-stamped by some quaint relic called the Canadian Parliament. How can it be?

Tuesday’s the Morning newsletter from the New York Times, which is no MAGA outlet, reads: “Speaker Mike Johnson has a math problem. He wants to pass a megabill before Memorial Day to deliver President Trump’s legislative agenda.” But with only three spare votes in the House, “there are way more than three G.O.P. dissenters, and they don’t agree on what the problem is. Some think the cuts to Medicaid are too large. Others think they’re too small. Some want to purge clean-energy tax breaks. Others want to preserve them because their constituents have used them.”

Likewise The Atlantic, part of the thundering herd of independent liberal American minds, says: “The struggle to pass Donald Trump’s second-term agenda in Congress has never been between Republicans and Democrats … it’s been a battle between the House and Senate GOP, between moderates and hard-liners, and, most salient, between Republicans and reality.”

Egad. What manner of rambunctious folly is this? Open debate within the Maximum Leader’s own party? Dictatorship! By contrast here in decorous Canada can someone remind me which inane or malicious measures from former prime minister Justin Trudeau were ever put at risk by the principled courage, truculence or mere pandering even of his NDP coalition non-partners, let alone the trained seals in red?

Periodically one would bark. But which ever bit? To be sure, as the Canadian Press noted on Sunday, “Prime Minister Mark Carney says the Liberal government will present a federal budget in the fall, allowing time for clarity on some key economic and fiscal issues to emerge”. But if there’s going to be a brawl, it will be inside his office, or head, with his finance minister promising to brush aside Parliament with an “economic statement” before Carney overrode him, saying the government would introduce “a much more comprehensive, effective, ambitious, prudent budget in the fall”.

QotD: Public goods

Filed under: Economics, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The reason we institute government is to get public goods created. Public goods are those things that are non-rivalrous, non-excludable, therefore difficult to near impossible to make money from. Therefore we rather expect private capitalism to underproduce such public goods. Let’s all chip into a pot which produces them for us instead then. And a wide reading of public goods would include things like the rule of law, drains and keeping the French at bay (usefully, those last two can be combined, afraid of drains are Frenchies as they imply washing).

Or, the internet was originally set up to provide a secure comms network when the bombs all went off — that routing in packets was the whole point, being able to route around the polished glass that used to be Indianapolis. GPS was funded by the Navy to have precise coordinates to lob our own bombs at. Both difficult things to profit from so government did them.

Then along came some entrepreneurs and they saw that it was good. Some use could be made of the existence of those things. And this is — it’s essential to understand this — exactly what an entrepreneur is. Someone who takes extant assets and resources, possibly combining them in new ways, and sets out to end up with hot and cold running Ferraris from having done so. We consumers then end up vastly richer than our starting point. One, wholly serious, measurement of the value of search and free email (so, roughly, Google) is $18,000 per person per year. No, there are not too many zeroes there, eighteen thousand of those big fat United States dollars per person per year.

OK. So we institute government to gain public goods. We get public goods from government. Entrepreneurs then do their job, picking up extant assets to use in novel ways that enrich all of us out there. Excellent, the system is working. The system is making us out here the richest society living highest on the hog that has ever existed.

Tim Worstall, “Mazzucato: ‘BUT WHERE IS MY SECOND DOZEN PAIRS OF LOUBOUTINS?'”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2025-02-12.

May 20, 2025

QotD: The autohagiography of the NHS

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The propaganda in favour of the NHS has been more or less continuous since its foundation in 1948, though it has become ever shriller, as propaganda tends to do, as it departs further and further from reality. Indeed, one might surmise that the purpose of propaganda in general is to forestall any proper examination of reality in favour of simplistic slogans convenient to political power.

I grew up, for example, in the inculcated belief that the National Health Service was, according to the slogan of the time, “the envy of the world”. Millions of people believed this, and indeed it was an assertion heard for many years whenever the subject of health care came up. The slogan was last wheeled out in any force in 2008 for the 60th anniversary of its founding.

Oddly enough, it never occurred to the people who repeated the slogan to examine the basis of the claim. Who, exactly, were the people doing the envying — not just one or two of them, but en masse? It is no doubt true that immigrants from very poor countries were pleased enough to receive care under the NHS, comparing it with what they would have received at home. But is it really much of an achievement for a developed country to have health care better than that offered in Somalia or Bangladesh?

A war of anecdotes, while always gratifying to the human mind, is not the way to decide important questions such as the superiority or inferiority of a system of health care.

It never occurred to those who repeated the “envy” slogan to look to comparable countries across the Channel or North Sea to see whether, in fact, those countries had anything to envy. In fact, between 1948 and 1975, even Spain under Franco performed better in the matter of improving the health of the population than did Britain. In most respects, in fact, Britain lagged or limped behind other countries, always in the rear and struggling to catch up.

What eventually struck me, then, was the willingness of so many people to repeat and believe a slogan without any compulsion whatever to do so, and without the slightest inclination to examine its truth — indeed without any awareness of the need for such an examination. There was no oppressive force to prevent or deter them from intellectual inquiry, but they preferred the comfort the slogan offered to the effort and possible discomfort of finding the truth. The NHS, or rather the idea of the NHS, played the role of teddy bear to a population with many anxieties.

True enough, many individuals may have experienced deficiencies in the service — long waiting times, offhand or disagreeable interactions with the bureaucracy, etc. But like Russian peasants of old who believed that the Tsar knew nothing of the oppression which they suffered, and would have put an end to it if he had known, the British continued to believe that the National Health Service had been born with original virtue and that the defects they experienced were exceptions. Repeated scandals of gross neglect or sub-standard treatment were shrugged off in the same way. And in a certain dog-in-the-manger way, the British were inclined to believe that if the NHS was unpleasant to negotiate, at least (being more or less a monopoly) it was equally unpleasant for everyone. Fairness and justice were equated with equal misery. Anyway, being ill is always unpleasant, so what did anyone expect?

Theodore Dalrymple, “Worshipping the NHS”, New English Review, 2020-05-07.

May 18, 2025

Trump today, Taft a century ago – interfering with Canadian federal elections

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Coolidge Review, Amity Shlaes looks at the long-ago pre-Trumpian example of US interference in Canadian federal politics:

President Trump isn’t the first U.S. leader to turn a Canadian election with a few remarks. A little over a century back another president, William Howard Taft, managed the same feat.

The story starts in 1908, when outgoing president Theodore Roosevelt handpicked a successor, the lawyerly Taft. Taft won election. But from the eve of inauguration, Roosevelt began to voice doubts that Taft was up to the job. Word got around. Taft reacted to this disloyalty by attempting to prove he was no Roosevelt puppet. Where Roosevelt had invaded nations, Taft would write trade treaties. As Taft biographer Jeffrey Rosen writes, the motto of Roosevelt had been “speak softly and carry a big stick”. Taft’s maxim could have been “speak softly and carry a free-trade agreement”.

Taft’s marquee effort was to be a trade agreement with Canada, then lodged in the ambiguous status of “self-governing dominion”. As Taft noted, the dominion did have the freedom to conduct trade policy. Canada’s prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier, was a distinguished free marketeer. The political stars appeared to align. In his enthusiasm Taft praised Canada, practically crowing: “She has cost us nothing in the way of preparations for defense against her possible assault, and she never will … I therefore earnestly hope that the measure will be promptly enacted into law.” Such a treaty, Taft said, would mark a new “epoch” for North America.

In those days, tariffs represented a much more important share of U.S. federal revenues. Selling free trade was no easy work, especially not to Republicans, for whom tariffs were part of the brand. Then as now, trade treaties, unlike peace treaties, required support from both chambers of Congress. But again Taft sang his heart out, not only making the usual case for an “increase in trade on both sides of the boundary line” but also trying out wider arguments.

Early in 1911, Taft infused urgency into negotiations by threatening Canada via ultimatum: Team up with the United States, or there might be a “parting of the ways”. Hunting votes at home, Taft wrote a private letter to the still influential Roosevelt. Appealing to the imperialist in his predecessor, though not very hard, Taft suggested such a treaty might render Canada “only an adjunct of the United States”. Historians debate whether the “adjunct” letter was leaked or stayed private over the course of the 1911 negotiations. Lawmakers on the Hill, in any case, began to speak in similar tones.

Next, Taft called a special session of Congress. Congress warmed to the treaty but pounded the imperialist angle as much as Taft’s main case. “I hope to see the day when the American flag will float over every square foot of the British North American possessions, clear to the North Pole,” thundered the soon-to-be House Speaker, James Beauchamp “Champ” Clark of Missouri.

Such statements did not elude Canadian ears. Some loathed the treaty for pulling Canada farther from Britain; others, independence minded, loathed the idea of trading the thumb of one empire upon them for the thumb of another. By the time Taft signed the Tariff Reciprocity Agreement in July 1911, Canadian reciprocity opponents were on the march. By September, Canada was rejecting in a landslide referendum Taft’s and Laurier’s work.

As The Literary Digest commented in 1912, these flamboyant statements from U.S. politicians were handy weapons for Canada’s treaty opponents. They had put into Canadian Conservatives’ hands “an excellent club with which to cudgel the Liberals and their brilliant leader, Laurier”. Laurier himself was defeated in an election as well, on the argument he was pandering to the U.S.

May 17, 2025

German democracy … saved by bureaucratic incompetence?

Filed under: Germany, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Checking in to the situation in Germany, it seems that the big secret report compiled by the German spy agency on the extremely extreme extreme right-wing Alternative für Deutschland party is a bit less than what was expected. Okay, a lot less:

In my last post, I wrote that “The campaign to ban Alternative für Deutschland is not going well“. Today – a mere seventy-two hours later – you could say that the campaign to ban Alternative für Deutschland is all but dead. This is because the people most committed to banning the AfD also happen to be some of the stupidest, most incompetent legal and political operators the world has ever seen. Their incompetence is so enormous that I am for once willing to entertain conspiracy theories as to why they might have undermined their own project. It is that bad.

Two weeks ago, you may remember, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser forced the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) to rush their long-planned upgrade of the AfD and declare the party to be a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organisation. Word spread of a mysterious 1,100-page assessment, full of damning proofs that allegedly supported this upgrade. This document had to be kept secret, Faeser explained in an interview, “… to protect sources and withhold indications of how our findings were obtained”. So espionage, much secret, wow.

The thing was, the anti-AfD dossier could not have been that secret, because somebody (almost certainly, somebody in the Interior Ministry) immediately leaked it to Der Spiegel, whose journalists published various excerpts in an effort to make the case for how evil and fascist and Nazi and Hitler the AfD are. In this way the press could climax repeatedly in a wave of democratic orgasms over the renewed possibility of an AfD ban, even in the absence of the supersecret report.

The media circus dissipated quickly, however. The publicity campaign, the roll-out – a lot of things went wrong, some of them inexplicably wrong. Still, I thought there was a 40% chance that the Bundestag would try to open ban proceedings sometime this year. That, as I said, was on Monday. What happened on Tuesday, is that Cicero, NiUS and Junge Freiheit all received the secret 1,100-page assessment (actually, it contains 1,108 pages) and published it in its entirety. Since Tuesday evening, a great many people have been reading this document, and they have been realising various things.

The first thing they’ve realised, is that it contains hardly anything derived from supersecret spy sources at all. It is little more than a collection of public statements by AfD politicians. Faeser’s sources-and-methods justification for keeping the report hidden was a total lie.

The second thing they’ve realised, is that it is an abomination. The vast majority of material that the BfV have collected is not even suspect. It is a lot of off-colour jokes, memes, but also just banal nothing statements – thousands and thousands and thousands of them, arranged under various hysterical subject headings. Nothing in here is remotely strong enough to support the case for banning the AfD and a lot of it is also very bizarre in terms of argument. Not only have the prospects of an AfD ban all but evaporated, but I think it’s even likely the party will succeed in their present lawsuit and that the administrative court in Cologne will throw out the “right-wing extremist” label.

May 15, 2025

“You can earn a degree in economics without ever encountering the Depression of 1920-1921”

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Most modern economists focus on the lessons learned (and not learned) from the Great Depression, but as John Phelan points out, a better learning experience occurred nearly a decade earlier:

Warren G. Harding, 14 June 1920.
Library of Congress control number 2016828156

In July 1921, the United States emerged from a depression. Though the economic statistics of the time were rudimentary by modern standards, the numbers confirm that it had been bad.

By one estimate, output fell by 8.7 percent in real terms. (For comparison, output fell by 4.3 percent in the Great Recession of 2007-2009). From 1920 to 1921, the Federal Reserve’s index of industrial production fell by 31.6 percent compared to a 16.9 percent fall in 2007-2009. In September 1921, there were between two and six million Americans estimated unemployed: with a nonagricultural labor force of 31.5 million, this latter estimate implies an unemployment rate of 19 percent.

“In this period of 120 years,” wrote one contemporary, “the debacle of 1920-21 was without parallel”.

And then it was over. From 1921 to 1922, industrial production jumped by 25.9 percent and residential construction by 57.9 percent. Manufacturing employment increased by 9.5 percent and real per capita income by 5.9 percent. The 1920s began to roar.

What caused the crash of 1920-1921? Why was it so short? And why was the economic recovery so vigorous?

[…]

Bust to Recovery

As output slumped and unemployment soared, there were those urging action. In December 1920, Comptroller of the Currency John Skelton Williams wrote:

    It is poor comfort to the man or woman with a family denied modest comforts or pinched for necessities each week to be told that all will be, or may be, well next year, or the year after. Privations and mortifications of poverty can not be soothed or cured by assurances of brighter and better days some time in the future. Our hope and purpose must be to forestall and prevent suffering and privation for the people of today, the children who are growing up and receiving now their first impression of life and their country.

No such policies were forthcoming.

In October 1919, Woodrow Wilson, then entering the last year of his presidency, was incapacitated by a stroke and his administration ground to a halt: “our Government has gone out of business”, wrote the journalist Ray Stannard Baker.

Wilson’s successor Warren G. Harding, who took office in March 1921, supported Strong’s policies, noting “that the shrinkage which has taken place is somewhat analogous to that which occurs when a balloon is punctured and the air escapes”.

While lower prices meant reduced incomes for some, they meant reduced costs for others. Eventually, producers and consumers started to buy again. By March 1921, lead and pig iron prices bottomed out: cottonseed oil, cattle, sheep, and crude oil followed by midsummer.

The higher interest rates had attracted gold. From January 1920 to July 1921, foreign bullion augmented the American gold stock by some $400 million to $3 billion. By May 1921, 80 percent of the volume of Federal Reserve notes was supported by gold. Interest rates could fall.

In April, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston cut its main discount rate from 7 to 6 percent. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York followed suit next month, cutting from 7 to 6.5 percent. The Roaring Twenties began.

The Lessons

Students of macroeconomics will learn about the Great Depression of the 1930s. They will learn that many of the policies routinely used to fight downturns now — fiscal stimulus and expansive monetary policy — were forged in those years. You can earn a degree in economics without ever encountering the Depression of 1920-1921. Yet, initially, it was as bad as that which began in 1929 but ended more quickly and was followed by a rapid recovery.

Whereas the policymakers of the 1930s — led by the defeated vice-presidential candidate of 1920, Franklin D. Roosevelt — diagnosed the economic problem facing them as unemployment and deflation, those of 1920 diagnosed it as the preceding inflation. Where policymakers of the 1930s used cheap money and government spending to boost demand, those of the 1920s saw this as simply repeating the errors which had created the initial problem. To them, there could be no true cure that didn’t deal with the disease, rather than the symptoms.

It is for history to judge who was correct, but it’s undeniable that the recovery of the Depression of 1920–1921 was immensely stronger and faster than that of the Great Depression. Ironically, this may be the very reason it is often overlooked in history and economic courses.

An additional lesson of eternal relevance can also be drawn: successful solutions will be those which are based on a correct diagnosis of the problem.

May 14, 2025

We welcome (almost) all refugees

Filed under: Africa, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mark Steyn notes the odd situation of rabid pro-refugee organizations suddenly finding that there are some refugees they don’t want to come to the United States after all:

We are told, relentlessly, that “diversity is our strength”. But it’s a delicate balance, isn’t it? After Biden’s untold millions of drug mules and sex fiends, just fifty-nine whites from South Africa could completely destroy all the multiculti harmony:

I confess to mixed feelings about those scenes myself. When I was a kid, the Boers had a reputation, unlovely as they might be in certain aspects, as the toughest buggers on the planet. In Britain and Canada, it was not uncommon to hear fellows, depressed at how their own countries were going, talk breezily about emigrating to South Africa. Yet in the end they folded in nothing flat — and the country’s new masters don’t want them and they have to find somewhere to go. Gee, it’s almost like that might be a lesson of more general application in the year ahead.

So it’s interesting to see the American left tiptoe all the way up to making the real purpose of “diversity” explicit: We’re in favour of open borders … except for whites. Rather than sully their hands with fifty-nine Afrikaners, the Episcopal Church has declared it’s willing to forego the moolah from the federal “refugee resettlement” racket. The spousal-abusing MS-13 gangbanger may be the quintessential “Maryland man”, but these white guys never can be.

Watching hoity-toity upper-class whites like NBC’s Andrea Mitchell finger-wagging from the anchor chair about their anti-whiteness is instructive. They assume that they will never have to face the consequences of their virtue-signalling. But the chasm between Eliteworld and Reality yawns wider with every day, and it will one day consume most of the west’s high-status “progressives” too. There are limits to kingly power. That’s the lesson Canute tried to teach his courtiers when he took them to the water’s edge and commanded the tide to lay off his loafers. But King Canute would never have ordered his staff to tell the peasantry to eat crickets on a bed of cockroach coulis. Because that would be too ridiculous.

For that we had to wait until Justin Trudeau, sinking bazillions of dollars into bug farms as part of the masterplan: that’s not just a bug, it’s an indispensable feature. Because at the World Economic Forum all the clever guys decided that, in the interests of saving the world from “climate change”, our rulers had to do to our own farmers what the mob is doing to white South Africans: destroy their farms, kill all the cows and sheep, and ensure that nothing grazes there ever again.

There are few things sadder than a post-developed society. If you walk around South African towns at the end of the day, you will notice in high-rise buildings the absence of lights on the upper floors: the inability to maintain skyscrapers is one of the first signs of a society in decline. It starts at the heights and then sinks to the basement, whether those heights are Boeing or bug farms. If you’re in on the racket, you can still live high off the hog-simulating scorpions … for a while. But the people who make the running in the western world are mad, and their fever dreams are boundless.

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