I hesitate to recommend academic books to anyone, but I’ll make an exception for James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State. Subtitled “how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed”, it’s the best long-form exposition I know of, that explains how process and outcome first deform, then negate each other.
[…]
In brief, Scott argues that the process of making a society “legible” to government officials obscures social reality, to the point where the government’s maps and charts and graphs take on a life of their own. It’s recursive, such that those well-intentioned schemes end up first measuring, then manipulating, the wrong thing in the wrong way, to the point that the social “problem” the process was supposed to address drops out entirely — all you have, at the end, is powerpoint girls critiquing spreadsheet boys because their spreadsheets don’t have enough animation, and vice versa.
Scott doesn’t use the Domesday Book as an example (IIRC from a graduate school class 20-odd years ago, anyway), but it’s one we’re probably all familiar with. The first thing William the Conqueror needed to know is: what, exactly, have I conquered? So he sent out the high-medieval version of spreadsheet boys to take a comprehensive survey of the kingdom. Turns out the Duke of Earl’s demense runs from this creek to that rock. He has five underlings, and their domains run from etc.
The point of all this, of course, was so that Billy C. could call the Duke of Earl on the carpet, point to the spreadsheet, and say “You owe me a cow, three chickens, and two months in the saddle as back taxes.” It worked great, except when — as, it seems, is inevitable — the high-medieval equivalent of the spreadsheet boys did the high-medieval version of “ctrl-c”; just copying and pasting the information over. Eventually the tax situation got way out of whack, as it did for most every pre-modern government running a similar system — one of the reasons declining Chinese dynasties had such fiscal problems, for instance, is that the tax surveys only got updated every two centuries or so, such that a major provincial lord was still only paying 20 silver pieces in taxes, when he should’ve been paying 20,000 (and his peasants were all paying 20 when all they could afford was 2).
In other words: unless the spreadsheet boys periodically go out and check that the numbers on their spreadsheets actually correspond in some systematic, more-or-less representative way to some underlying social reality, government policy is being set by make-believe.
Severian, “The Finger is Not the Moon”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-14.
December 1, 2024
QotD: Recording and codifying the land that William conquered
November 30, 2024
It’s not just your imagination, the Canadian government is much bigger and much less efficient now
At The Audit, David Clinton shows that the Canadian federal government has gone through significant growth in staff at the same time as just about everything it does is now being done slower and less effectively1 than it was ten or twenty years ago:
Change is normal. The world around us isn’t sitting still and that’s got to have an impact on what’s needed by Canada and Canadians. So we can expect a government’s size and shape to evolve over time, but we’d certainly prefer that the changes were rational.
So let’s take a few minutes to understand how the size, cost, shape, and mandates of our government have been changing over the past few years.
Public service employment
Governments provide a set of services that don’t change dramatically from year to year. Sure, as the population grows they’ll need to process more passport applications and oversee the movement of greater numbers of international travellers across our borders. But task complexity shouldn’t increase faster than the population itself.
Therefore you would expect that the public service should grow in proportion to the overall population. Well, that’s not really true. Due mostly to digital automation, Canada’s private sector labour productivity rose steadily between around 1990 and 2014 and has maintained its peak level ever since. So in fact, since we can now do more with fewer people, you’d really expect public sector employment not to keep pace with rising population levels.
However, the actual proportion of federal employees to Canada’s total population has been growing noticeably over the past six years. Because of the scale I chose for its y-axis, the graph below does exaggerate the changes a bit, but you can see how the federal workforce grew from around 0.72% of the total population in 2017 to 0.9% in 2023. That means about one out of every 59 employed Canadians now works for the federal government.
Which means that – worker-for-worker – Canada’s public service is significantly less productive than it was ten years ago. And the growth in absolute numbers from 257,034 workers in 2015 to 357,247 in 2023 can be accurately characterized as bloat. Unforgivable bloat.
Departmental employment
Since 2011, by my count (and based on Treasury Board data), 11 new federal departments or agencies have come into existence and 18 have been shuffled off to wherever it is old bureaucracies go when they die. In some cases, the change represents nothing more than a technical realignment. The move from the Canadian Polar Commission to Polar Knowledge Canada is probably one such example.
I’m mildly curious to know how much such changes cost, even in terms of simple details like outsourcing designs for a new letterhead and getting IT to set up (and secure) a new website and email domain. I’m sure those don’t come for free.
It’s noteworthy that 11 of those 18 shutdowns took place in 2015 and 2016. That suggests they were the result of the incoming Liberal government’s policy implementations. Nevertheless, those changes don’t explain the scope of civil service employment growth since 2015.
1. I’m sure you’re all completely sick of me saying it, so I’ve relegated it to a footnote: the more the government tries to do, the less well it does everything.
The mission of DOGE
One of Donald Trump’s more interesting announcements shortly after winning the federal election early in November was that he was going to give Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy a formal position to do to the US government’s vast array of bureaucratic organizations what Javier Milei did to Argentina’s bloated national government. Here, scraped from the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, is Devon Eriksen‘s thoughts on how to go about pruning back the “fourth branch” of government:
Since the framers of the Constitution created a federal government with three branches, not four, there are no Constitutional checks on the emergent fourth branch.
Currently, the fourth branch is in many ways the most powerful, and certainly the most destructive, arm of the government.
– It has the privilege of targeting individual citizens on its own initiative, which is forbidden to the three other branches.
– It can interfere their lives in any way it wishes by making a “ruling”.
– The only recourse against a “ruling” is to take the bureaucracy in question to court.
– But the process is the punishment, because this takes months if not years and costs tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
– Until recently, courts have deferred to bureaucrats as a matter of legal precedent. Now they merely do so as a matter of practice.
– But should the bureaucracy lose anyway, the only punishment the court inflicts is that they are told they have to stop doing that specific thing.
– Any fines or legal costs imposed on them punish the taxpayer, not the agent or even the agency.
– And the next, closely related, thing the bureaucracy thinks of to do is once again fair game, until the courts are once again brought in, at further cost, to tell it to stop.
All of this creates a Red Queen Effect.
Citizens must establish their own organizations, and raise donations to engage in constant lawfare, just to retain the rights they haven’t lost yet. And they must win every time to maintain the status quo.
Bureaucrats, on the other hand, can fight endless legal battles using money taken from their victims by the IRS, at no cost to themselves. Any victory they claim, they may keep permanently, while any loss may be refought endlessly simply by a slight variance of the attack.
Obviously, if this system is not changed, all power will accrue to the bureaucracy over time. They will constitute a totalitarian authority over every aspect of the life of every citizen.
This is why the name “DOGE” (Department of Government Efficiency) is a serious mistake.
Look, Elon, I like a joke as much as the next guy, and I do think irreverence is a load-bearing component of checking the bureaucracy, because a false aura of gravitas is one of their defenses against public outrage.
But words mean things.
When you create a check on the bureaucracy and call it the department of government efficiency, you focus the attention, and the correction, on the fact that the bureaucracy is stomping on people’s lives and businesses inefficiently, not on the fact that they are doing so at all.
But the name isn’t my decision. The power of the vote isn’t that granular. I can only elect an administration, not protect it from tactical errors by weighing in on individual policy decisions.
Unless someone with direct power happens to read this.
So, regardless of the name, here’s how an organization might be set up to effectively check federal bureaucracies.
1. DOGE must be responsive, not merely proactive.
Being proactive sounds better in the abstract, but it is much easier for a federal agency to gin up some numbers to fight a periodic overall audit, than it is to fight an investigation of a specific case.
2. DOGE must have direct oversight.
If it must take agencies to court, it is merely a proxy for the citizens whose money is being wasted, and whose rights are being trampled.
Imagine the level of inefficiency, waste, and delay, if your process for addressing bureaucratic abuse simply results in one part of the federal government pursuing an expensive court case against another.
Instead, DOGE must have the power to simply make a ruling, via its own investigation hearing process, which is binding on federal agencies.
Any appeals to the court system must be allowed to trigger their own DOGE investigation (for wasting taxpayer fighting a ruling).
3. DOGE must have the power to punish the agent, not just the agency.
“You have to stop that now” is not a deterrent. Neither is fining the agency, because such fines are paid by the American taxpayer.
DOGE must follow Saul Alinsky’s 11th rule: target individuals, not institutions.
Why?
Because agencies are agencies. They consist of agents.
An agent is someone who acts on behalf of a principal — someone whose interests the agent is supposed to represent.
When the agent is incentivized so that his interests diverge from those of the principal, he will be increasingly likely to act in his own interest, not the principal’s.
This is the Principal-Agent Problem.
An agency is a construct, a theoretical entity. What Vonnegut would call a “granfalloon”.
Agencies do not act, they do not make decisions, they do not have incentives they respond to. Any appearance to the contrary is an emergent property created by the aggregate action of agents.
Every decision, whether we admit it or not, has a name attached to it, not a department. It is that person who responds to incentives.
Agents will favor their own incentives over those of their principal (the American people) unless a counter incentive is present for that specific person.
For this reason, DOGE should, must, have the power to discipline individual employees of the federal agencies it oversees.
This doesn’t just mean insignificant letters of reprimand in a file. It means fines against personal assets, firing, or even filing criminal charges. No qualified immunity.
Yes, you read that right. DOGE must be able to fire other agencies’ staff. I recommend that anyone fired by DOGE be permanently illegible for any federal government job, excluding only elected positions.
4. DOGE investigations must be triggerable by citizen complaints.
This is self-explanatory. It gives DOGE the practical capability to redress individual injustices, and it crowdsources your discovery problem.
Establish a hotline.
5. DOGE must have sufficient power to protect and reward whistleblowers, and punish those who retaliate against them.
6. Bureaucrats must be held responsible for outcomes, not just for following procedure.
Often, procedure is the problem. The precedent must be established, and clearly enforced, that because agents have agency, agents are responsible for using their discretion to ensure efficient, just, and sane outcomes, not just for doing whatever departmental policy allows.
7. DOGE must have an adversarial relationship with the bureaucracies is oversees.
This eliminates the phenomenon of “we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing”.
Following the previous recommendation is almost sure to make this happen.
The point is not for DOGE to address every instance of waste or wrongdoing, it is to make bureaucrats act responsibly because they fear an investigation.
In essence, I am imagining DOGE (or some superior name that better reflects the mission) as an entity with a license to treat bureaucrats the way bureaucrats currently treat citizens.
QotD: Unrealized promises of a “Great Society”
Amity Shlaes, Great Society: A New History, 2020.
November 29, 2024
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya nominated as Director of the US National Institutes of Health
From the point of view of the establishment, the barbarians are well and truly inside the gates, as President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Stanford epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as the next director of the National Institutes of Health:
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Donald Trump’s nominee as Director of the National Health Institutes.
Photo by Taleed Brown, 2020, via Wikimedia Commons.
Four years ago, Jay Bhattacharya was ostracized by his colleagues at Stanford and censored on social media platforms thanks to a campaign against him by the public-health establishment. The director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, sent an email to another NIH official, Anthony Fauci, urging a “quick and devastating published takedown” of Bhattacharya and his fellow “fringe epidemiologists”.
Bhattacharya is far from the fringe today. Donald Trump nominated him this week for Collins’s old job, director of the NIH. Assuming the Senate confirms him, it will be a major victory for science and academic freedom — and a serious threat to the universities that suppressed scientific debate and promoted disastrous policies during the pandemic, causing public trust in science to plummet. Academic researchers and administrators have mostly refused to acknowledge their mistakes, much less make amends, but Bhattacharya promised yesterday to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again”.
As NIH director, he would wield a potent tool to induce reform: money. Stanford and more than a dozen other universities each get more than $500 million annually in grants from the NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. The NIH grants support not only researchers but also their universities’ bureaucracies, which collect a hefty surcharge to cover supposed overhead costs. The federal largesse has helped finance the administrative bloat at universities, including the expansion of diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies under the Biden administration, which took into account a university’s commitment to DEI principles when deciding whether to award grants from the NIH and other agencies.
Those priorities are about to change. Trump has vowed to rescind immediately Biden’s executive order directing federal agencies to promote DEI. During his first term, Trump threatened to issue an executive order barring universities from receiving federal funds if they suppressed free speech. He didn’t issue that order, but whether or not he does so in his next term, the NIH director will already have the power to consider a university’s commitment to academic freedom in deciding whether or not to award funds.
“For science to thrive and progress, we must be open-minded and allow vigorous and passionate debate,” says Martin Kulldorff, a former professor of medicine at Harvard. “Why should taxpayers subsidize universities that don’t allow that?” Kulldorff, an eminent epidemiologist, lost his job at Harvard after he became an early and outspoken critic of pandemic policies. In 2020, he joined with Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford, to write the Great Barrington Declaration, a critique of lockdowns that was signed by tens of thousands of scientists and physicians.
Bhattacharya, who has a Ph.D. in economics as well as an M.D. from Stanford, hung on to his job as professor of health policy at the latter’s medical school, but his views were taboo on campus. After he and colleagues did a field study at the start of the pandemic showing that the Covid fatality rate was much lower than the doomsday number used to justify lockdowns, they were vilified by academics and journalists, and Stanford subjected them to a two-month inquiry by an outside legal firm. (They were vindicated by the inquiry and also by subsequent research confirming their findings.)
Trump is a deals guy … and Canadian politicians need to negotiate with him on that basis
In what has turned out to be his final column for TVO, Matt Gurney says that Canadian views on Trump need to evolve if we hope to preserve the overall amicable relationship between the two countries. Trump made his career on making deals … but not many of our political leaders seem to have clued in that this means we need to approach all our post-Biden American affairs with that in mind:
Justin Trudeau meets with President Donald Trump at the White House, 13 February, 2017.
Photo from the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.
Ever since the re-election of Donald Trump earlier this month, the most interesting question in Canadian politics has been “Who gets it?” That’s the main thing I’ve been looking for, and I think some of our leaders get it — or are starting to, at least.
Doug Ford doesn’t get it. Or didn’t, anyway, up until Tuesday afternoon.
On Monday night, president-elect Trump announced via a post on his Truth Social app that, as one of his first acts upon retaking the Oval Office in January, he would levy a 25 per cent tariff against all goods coming in from Canada and Mexico until those two countries fix the problems Trump says exist along the border. That’s a careful bit of phrasing on my part, so let me explain: I don’t disagree that there are issues for the United States along both borders. I don’t necessarily accept that the issues are the same on both borders or that Trump has accurately characterized the overall situation. But, in any case, Canada now has less than two months to figure out what it can do, assuming it can do anything, to satisfy the president-elect’s demands.
It’s very possible that we can do enough. Trump is a negotiator and a dealmaker, and we have to see his social-media post through that lens. He is establishing a strong opening position, and we’ll negotiate him down from there. That’s the good news, such as it is. The bad news, though, is that there’s no reason to assume Trump is going to do this only once. After we meet his demands on the border, he could demand that Canada take on more of the burden of the military defence of North America and the Western alliance. After we’ve drafted a bunch of people and launched a fleet of new warships and sent a heavily armed stabilization force to Haiti, he could come after us for our dairy subsidies. Once we give way on that, it’ll be getting tough on white-collar crime or telecom access or airline access. And so on and so on and so on. It’ll be one damned thing after another.
The broad contours of this were clear to me by about 1:30 in the morning on the day after (or night of, if you prefer) the U.S. election. As I keep saying, the party is over. Some of Trump’s demands will be basically utterly bogus, and others may be arguably unreasonable, but some of them are absolutely going to be fair, and Canada has, to my enormous frustration, left itself very, very vulnerable to his brand of pressure. We have utterly failed as a country to adapt to a changing world order by getting this country onto a more serious footing on any number of fronts, especially trade and defence. We were warned by friendlier U.S. administrations, including by presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. We didn’t listen. That was idiotic, and I can only hope not suicidal on our parts. Trump is going to get his way.
QotD: Why nothing gets done in the Current Year
Having pumped billions of dollars into building the next generation of computer chip factories in the US, the Biden administration is facing new pressure over the health and safety risks those facilities could pose. Environmental reviews for the new projects need to be more thorough, advocates say. They lack transparency around what kinds of toxic substances factory workers might handle, and plans to keep hazardous waste like forever chemicals from leaching into the environment have been vague.
A coalition of influential labor unions and environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, have since submitted comments to the Department of Commerce on draft environmental assessments, saying that the assessments fall short. The coalition’s comments flag lists of potential issues at several projects in Arizona and Idaho, including how opaque the safety measures that manufacturers will take to protect both workers and nearby residents are.
This is not a serious complaint. This is actually the national association of environmental studies writers spotting a gravy train passing by and desiring to dip their ladle in. And that’s all it is too. But it’s also that excellent example of why fuck all ever gets built. We’ve an entire — and politically powerful — class that makes their living producing the hundred tonne reports that accompany building anything. And they’re not going to allow anything to be built unless they get paid for writing hundred tonne reports. And, to complete the circle, if every activity requires a hundred tonne report then fuck all will ever get done.
There was, back a time, a law passed about blood minerals. The law said anyone who might use them must write to all suppliers to ask if they do. Then those said anyones must tell consumers whether they do. This cost $4 billion just in the first year. From what I’ve heard — and might take the trouble to prove one day — the bloke who led the campaign for the law requiring the letters now runs a very profitable consultancy advising large corporates on how to write the letters. $4 billion spent by society so that one bloke can gain a minor summer place in the Hamptons. This doesn’t make us richer as a whole, it’s pissing the wealth of the nation up the wall.
Carthage, it’s the only solution. The biggest problem who is who the hell would buy our nice new stock of enslaved environmental bureaucrats? Razing, salt, ploughs, these are easy but who’s mad enough to offer a positive price for the last part of the process?
Tim Worstall, “Why Fuck All Ever Gets Done In This Modern World”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2024-08-28.
November 28, 2024
How is Argentina doing after a year under Javier Milei?
I don’t normally follow South American news all that closely, as despite being in the same hemisphere, little that happens there has much importance to us here in Canada or the United States. The election of Argentinian President Javier Milei, however, has made Argentina a much more interesting place to watch as Milei valiantly attempts to turn the economy around from its near-century-long decline. Here, Dan Mitchell provides his assessment of Milei’s efforts so far:
… let’s focus today on Milei’s goal of maximizing economic liberty.
The bad news is that if he wants Argentina to become the new Hong Kong, Milei has a long journey. According to Economic Freedom of the World, Argentina ranked a lowly #159 out of 165 nations in 2022.
As you can see from the EFW rankings, Milei’s country gets especially bad scores for Sound Money, Trade and Regulation (dead last for Sound Money and in the bottom-10 percent of the world for the other two categories!).
The good news is that you don’t have to be libertarian Nirvana (or even Liberland) to make a big jump in the rankings.
You don’t even need to be Hong Kong (which used to be very good with scores above 9 but has now declined to 8.58 thanks to Beijing’s intervention).
Heck, almost every country in the western world has experienced a significant decline in economic liberty this century.
Milei actually could put Argentina in first place today merely by achieving the same level of economic liberty (8.67) that the United States had in 2004.
For what it’s worth, I think it would take several years of good reforms to climb that high.
That being said, dramatic improvements are nonetheless possible in a very short period. Here’s my back-of-the-envelope estimate of where Argentina could be by the end of next year.
November 27, 2024
Trump’s plan to dismiss transgender troops will apparently “gut” the US military
As if the US military services hadn’t suffered enough from their own government, it’s now being widely asserted in the media that Trump’s declared plan to get rid of all current transgender service members will be a desperately hard blow to an already over-stressed military structure:
The news media is calmly warning that Donald Trump is planning to ban transgender servicemembers from the American military, which will absolutely gut the armed forces.
Sample claim, from Newsweek, quoting the leader of an LGBT advocacy nonprofit:
Abruptly discharging 15,000-plus service members, especially given that the military’s recruiting targets fell short by 41,000 recruits last year, adds administrative burdens to war fighting units.
There would be a significant financial cost, as well as a loss of experience and leadership that will take possibly 20 years and billions of dollars to replace.
We’ll practically have no military left! It would be like a whole infantry division suddenly just vanishing: 15,000-plus transgendered service members.
You’re going to see this number a lot in the weeks ahead. The New Republic, today: “Donald Trump’s plan to ban transgender people from the military would have a devastating effect: At least 15,000 members would be forced to leave.”
That number comes from a 2018 report by the now-defunct Palm Center, a pro-LGBT independent research institute in California, which reached this conclusion: “Transgender troops make up 0.7% (seven-tenths of one percent) of the military (Active Component and Selected Reserve)”. Their best guess about a total number: 14,707. The media is just rounding that number up to the next thousand.
The Palm Center … extrapolated a lot, let’s say, in good part by multiplying their guess about a percentage, derived from a grossly inadequate survey of a select number of active duty troops, times the total number of servicemembers. Page 4:
Assuming that the distribution of transgender men and women is roughly equivalent in the Active and Selected Reserve Components, it is possible to derive an estimate of the number of transgender troops in the Selected Reserve as follows. The number of transgender women is .0066 x 652,623 = 4,307 and the number of transgender men is .0091 x 156,080 = 1,420. The total number of transgender members of the Selected Reserve is 4,307 + 1,420 = 5,727. And, the total number of transgender troops is 8,980 (active) + 5,727 (reserve) = 14,707.
Assuming the distribution, it is possible to derive an estimate. That’s the basis of the 15,000 number that you’ll see in news stories. Remember that language.
Similarly, a 2016 RAND study offered these findings (among others), and note the remarkable thing that happens between the first and second paragraph:
It is difficult to estimate the number of transgender personnel in the military due to current policies and a lack of empirical data. Applying a range of prevalence estimates, combining data from multiple surveys, and adjusting for the male/female distribution in the military provided a midrange estimate of around 2,450 transgender personnel in the active component (out of a total number of approximately 1.3 million active-component service members) and 1,510 in the Selected Reserve.
Only a subset will seek gender transition–related treatment. Estimates derived from survey data and private health insurance claims data indicate that, each year, between 29 and 129 service members in the active component will seek transition-related care that could disrupt their ability to deploy.
So studies indicate that there are 3,960 transgendered servicemembers, and also that there are 14,707 transgendered servicemembers, and “between 29 and 129 service members in the active component” who will actively seek gender transition services in a typical year.
So it’s definitely somewhere between 29 and 15,000.
Scolianormativity
At FEE, Michael Strong defines the neologism and provides evidence that it has been a long-term harm to children forced into the Prussian-originated school regimentation regime:
Scolianormative (adj.): The assumption that behaviors defined by institutionalized schooling are “normal”. An assumption that became pervasive in industrialized societies in which institutionalized schooling became the norm that resulted in marginalizing and harming millions of children. Once society began to question scolianormativity, gradually people began to realize that the norms set by institutionalized schooling were perfectly arbitrary. It turned out that it was not necessary to harm children. The institutions that led to such widespread harms were dismantled, and humanity transcended the terrible century of institutionalized schooling.
The conventional educational model, government-enforced and subsidized, is based on 13 years of schooling consisting of state-defined curriculum standards and exams leading to a high school diploma.
Young human beings are judged as either “normal” or not based on the extent to which they are “on track” with respect to grade level exams and test scores. Students who are not making the expected progress may be diagnosed with learning differences (formerly known as disabilities). Students who can’t sit still adequately may be diagnosed with ADD/ADHD. Students who find the experience soul-killing may be diagnosed with depression or anxiety. Students who can’t stand to be told what to do all day may be diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD). Students who score higher on certain tests are labeled “gifted”.
Massive amounts of research and institutional authority have been invested in these and other diagnoses. When a child is not progressing appropriately in the system, the child is often sent to specialists who then perform the diagnosis. When appropriate, then the child is given some combination of medication, accommodations, and/or sent to a special program for children with “special needs”.
Many well-intentioned people regard this system as life-saving for the children who might otherwise have “not had their needs met” in the absence of such a diagnosis and intervention. And this is no doubt often true, but our fixation on scolianormativity blinds us to the fact that an entirely different perspective might actually result in better lives for more children.
How could one possibly deny mountains of evidence on behalf of such a life-saving system?
Scolianormativity
The Prussian school model, a state-led model devoted to nationalism, is only about two hundred years old. For much of its first century it was limited to a few hours per day, for a few months per year, for a few years of schooling. It has only gradually grown to encompass most of a child’s waking hours for nine months a year from ages 5 to 18. Indeed, in the U.S., it was only in the 1950s that a majority of children graduated from high school (though laws requiring compulsory attendance through age 16 had been passed in the late 19th and early 20th century). In addition, for most of its first century, it was far more flexible than it has become in its second. The increasing standardization and bureaucratization of childhood is a remarkably recent phenomenon in historical terms.
In his book Seeing Like a State, the political scientist James C. Scott documents how governments work to create societies that are “legible”, that can be perceived and managed by the state to suit the needs of the state’s bureaucrats and political leaders. Public schools are one of the most pervasive of all state institutions. The structure of public schooling has grown to suit the needs of the state bureaucrats who monitor it.
November 26, 2024
Crony Capitalist Canada – “Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre … has vowed to protect Big Dairy just like every other party leader”
In the National Post, Chris Selley discusses the latest attempt to further protect the outrageous profits our dairy companies make by overcharging Canadians for milk, butter, cheese, and other dairy products:
That unelected senators should not overrule the will of the House of Commons has always struck me as a rule most Canadians could agree on, whatever they think ought to happen with Canada’s upper chamber. Senators can propose amendments to bad bills, rake ministers over the coals at committee, call witnesses the House wasn’t interested in for whatever reason, raise red flags that haven’t yet been raised, all to the good. But gutting a bill, as the Senate has done with proposed legislation that would protect supply management in Canadian dairy, poultry and eggs even more than it’s already protected, is not kosher.
Not all violations of this policy are equally appalling, however. When the House of Commons is clearly not operating for the benefit of Canadians, when its focus demonstrably isn’t the public good but rather coddling and currying favour with special interests, it behooves the Senate to intervene as strenuously as possible while still at the end of the day respecting the lower chamber’s democratic legitimacy.
Coddling and currying favour is exactly what C-282, a private member’s bill from Bloc Québécois Luc Thériault, does: It proposes to make it illegal for a future government to lower the tariff rate for foreign products in supply-managed industries. You could call it the “no to cheaper groceries act.” Some senators wish to neuter it, such that it wouldn’t apply to any existing trade deals or deals already in negotiation. Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet had originally demanded the bill passed as one condition of keeping the Liberals afloat (although his deadline to do so has passed).
Fifty-one MPs of 338 opposed the pricey-groceries act at third reading. I would have said “only 51” except that’s a shocking number: 49 Conservatives and two Liberals, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith and Chandra Arya. It’s almost reason for hope … except of course that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre voted for it, and has vowed to protect Big Dairy just like every other party leader. It goes without saying that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau not only supported it, but has come out against the Senate’s amendments.
“We will not accept any bill that minimizes or eliminates the House’s obligation to protect supply management in any future trade agreement,” Trudeau reassured Blanchet in the House on Wednesday. ” No matter what the Senate does, the will of the House is clear.”
I mean, what elected politician in Ottawa gives a shit about Canadians being gouged on grocery staples every week? They’d rather get the support of the milk, poultry and egg crony capitalists than help ordinary Canadians, and they’re terrified of being portrayed as anti-Quebec in an election year. Spineless cowards, the lot of them.
November 25, 2024
Looking toward the first order effects of 47
At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter is delighted that his pessimistic election forecast turned out to be wrong and considers what the incoming Trump administration will be doing in the short-term:
There are obvious parallels between the 2024 election, the 2016 election, and the Brexit vote, all of which are a bit awkward for elite theory maximalists. Their position, taken to its extreme, seems to be that only the elite can actually do things, that all political phenomena are ultimately a consequence of elite machinations. Which makes elite theory in many ways the highbrow version of conspiracy theory, the main difference being that they talk about the Cathedral’s systems of power instead of the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and smoky backrooms. And yet, the elite clearly don’t always get their way. In the case of Brexit, the elite were absolutely unanimous in their support for Remain … and the elite lost. Similarly in the case of the 2016 US election. Elite preferences carry an enormous amount of weight; it’s generally much better for a cause to have elite support than suffer elite opposition. But elites are not actually decisive. They can be beaten.
It’s obviously much too early to judge the 47th US presidency, which hasn’t started yet. Cynics expect a repeat of 2016: just as Trump’s promises to drain the swamp and build the wall came to, if not nothing, then very little, so will his promises to deport them all, replace the income tax with tariffs, reign in the universities by going after their accreditation and endowments, drain the swamp for real this time, and so on prove to be so much hot air. So far all we know are Trump’s cabinet picks and other appointments, which suggest that this cynicism might be premature. […]
The new Trump admin shows every sign of gearing up for a Dark MAGA rampage through the Beltway.
If you’re curious about where Dark MAGA came from, why yes it was memed into reality. Aristophanes
tells the wild saga: from in-joke to shitcoin to the hat on Elon Musk’s head.They aren’t going to just drain the swamp. They’re going to drain it, dry it, soak it in gasoline, and set it on fire. They are going to purge the US government of the useless, the incompetent, the subversive, and the criminal. At least, that seems to be the intention … and given the way the rats are scrambling to escape the ship before it sinks, the regime’s minions, at least, seem to think that plan has a good chance of succeeding. […]
Of course, a lot could happen between now and January. The Democrats might find some convoluted legal pathway to deprive The Insurrectionist of the Oval Office, as Tree of Woe suggested, which of course would initiate a constitutional crisis and probably a civil war. They could assassinate him, which would also probably start a civil war, and which is probably why Trump has been holed up in Mar-a-Lago since the election. Either of these outcomes would probably place JD Vance in the presidency, which is probably much worse for the regime than Trump: Vance is marine corps combat vet who reads Curtis Yarvin and is fluent enough in meme that he probably has a frog alt on Twitter.
[…]
News that suicides spiked after the election is apparently fake, though crisis call centres catering to the Pronoun Jugend did experience a massive increase, and one guy apparently unalived his entire family. They’re still in a state of shock: shaving their heads, vowing to start a sex strike, fleeing to Canada (I do not recommend).
The left are religious fanatics, and religious fanatics don’t give up just because it looks hopeless. It’s also worth recalling that the last time Trump won, the riots didn’t start until inauguration. There’s plenty of time yet, and there are a lot of very wealthy and very influential people who probably feel they have nothing to lose as their precious oxen are in danger of being lethally gored by Dark MAGA on the Washington Mall as a sacrifice to America’s Founding gods, after which they themselves will be hanged from Wotan’s Tree of Liberty. Note that it doesn’t matter if Trump will really follow through with all of this; what matters is if the other side thinks that he will. Ruling out a dramatic escalation in civil violence in the US is almost certainly hasty.
[…]
Another play the regime could make is to just start World War III before Trump takes office, either in order to justify a military coup d’etat, or just to dump a catastrophe in Trump’s lap so that he’ll be too busy dealing with that to drain the swamp. They definitely seem to be ramping things up in Ukraine, with the new strategy of long-distance missile strikes deep into Russian territory. The idea is probably to provoke the bear so badly that it starts mauling NATO countries directly, rather than just chewing through their exhausted national arsenals in the mud of the Donbass. That might work; then again, Putin knows full well that all he has to do is wait a couple months and he’ll be dealing with Trump directly, and Trump is on record as wanting to wind down hostilities as a top priority as soon as he’s in office. Vlad may be a bad man, but he is a very patient bad man.
Assuming that the regime is unsuccessful in baiting Russia into a direct attack on Europe, Trump’s victory probably has very big, tumultuous, and positive implications for European politics. Positive, at least, for anyone who doesn’t hate Europe … and therefore very bad implications for the people currently running the civilizational centre of the human species into the dirt.
The Germans, at least, seem to think so.
Yes, it’s real.
Chancellor Scholz’ unstable “traffic light” coalition disintegrated almost immediately after Trump was elected, sending Germany into its own election … in which the AfD is poised to do very well for itself, much to the consternation of Germany’s political class. eugyppius has been doing invaluable work covering Germany’s politics for the anglosphere audience; he provides an excellent overview of the reasons for the coalition’s collapse in this recent interview on the J Burden show.
QotD: Le Corbusier
But most bureaucrats aren’t evil, just ignorant … and as Scott shows, this ignorance isn’t really their fault. They don’t know what they don’t know, because they can’t know. Very few bureaucratic cock-ups are as blatant as Chandigarh, where all anyone has to do is look at pictures for five minutes to conclude “you couldn’t pay me enough to move there”.
Severian, “The Finger is Not the Moon”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-14.
November 21, 2024
“If the Federal Court of Appeal greenlights that standard for freedom of peaceful assembly … then governments would have the power to ban virtually every large protest”
In The Line, Josh Dehaas explains why Justice Mosley’s Federal Court decision earlier in 2024 didn’t go far enough to protect Canadians’ rights, specifically their right to assemble in large numbers where the government claims to think that things might get violent:
Arms of the Federal Court of Canada
Earlier this year, Justice Mosley of the Federal Court of Canada ruled that the invocation of the Emergencies Act in response to the Freedom Convoy protests was illegal.
There was a lot to like in that ruling, not least of which because it agreed with the official position of my organization, the Canadian Constitution Foundation.
First, Mosley agreed that the definitions of “national emergency” and “threats to the security of Canada” weren’t met by the federal government, thus invalidating their use of the Emergencies Act. Second, the Justice agreed that freezing bank accounts without a warrant violated the Charter right against unreasonable searches. Third, he agreed that the regulations that banned travelling to, participating in, and funding certain assemblies under threat of up to five years in prison violated freedom of expression.
But not all of Mosley’s ruling was commendable, from our point of view. What we didn’t like was a finding that the same regulations that violated expression because they banned a person from “merely going onto Parliament Hill waving a placard” regardless of whether that person had blockaded or breached the peace, didn’t also violate the Charter guarantee of freedom of peaceful assembly. How could that be? The CCF is asking the Federal Court of Appeal to overturn that finding when it hears the government’s appeal, most likely in early 2025.
This week, we got the government’s stunning and frankly, disturbing, response to that very point of contention. We expected the government to argue that the limitations to individuals’ rights to peaceful assembly were reasonable, given the need to deal with the protest writ large. That wasn’t their only claim.
Instead, the government pulled out an entirely novel line of reasoning, arguing that the Charter doesn’t protect assemblies if they might turn violent or breach the peace. If the Federal Court of Appeal greenlights that standard for freedom of peaceful assembly — establishing a new precedent on when Charter freedoms can be subject to limits — then governments would have the power to ban virtually every large protest. The federal government’s view that assemblies are not Charter-protected and can be blocked in advance if someone in the crowd might reasonably be expected to breach the peace cannot stand if we’re to have any meaningful right to peaceful assembly at all.
Canadian defence priorities – don’t listen to what they say, watch what they spend the money on
The Hub provides an edited transcript of what retired Lieutenant General Andrew Leslie (and former Liberal whip in the Commons) said to the Standing Committee on National Defence earlier this month, which shows very clearly where national defence ranks in Justin Trudeau’s world:
My intent is to offer some criticism of the status quo so that we can learn and then perhaps some sort of question period to get into some solutions. Essentially, in my opinion, “Strong, Secure, Engaged“, the precursor to the current defence policy, delivered nothing substantive in terms of modern military equipment, which saw Canada, in fact, become weaker, more insecure, and essentially absent from the deployable stables of troops required for either United Nation missions, or, of course, NATO.
The 2024 defence policy update of “Our North, Strong and Free” is no better, unfortunately, in that it promises some urgently needed equipment years from now, but nothing today. Indeed, the 2024 defence spend will be less than that of 2023. Of course, we’re well aware of what just happened down [in the] United States. Both Republicans and Democrats are united and increasingly vocal about telling Canada how disappointed, frustrated and fed up they are with Canada’s failure to defend itself and their allies, with a special mention on the Arctic.
Meanwhile, as we know, and I was involved in the last NAFTA renegotiations, that’s coming due at a time when a variety of key players down south have articulated clearly the base of 3 percent [of GDP spending on defence] looms on the horizon, and how defence, security, trade, and border security are all intertwined. At this time of crisis internationally, with what’s happening in the Middle East, in Ukraine, Canada’s military readiness is at its lowest level in 50 years. Canada spent last year, in 2023, more money on consultants and professional services than it did on the Army, Navy, and Air Force combined — which quite frankly, is madness.
The Army has over 50 percent of its vehicle fleets, which are awaiting spare parts and technicians. The Navy is struggling mightily — bless them — to keep elderly warships, a handful of them at sea, specifically in the Indo-Pacific, and they’re desperately short of trained sailors. The Air Force has been unable to participate in significant NATO deterrent exercises, either up north or over the oceans, in conjunction with our friends and allies, because they don’t have the pilots, the spare parts, or the money to fly the aircraft.
In the Arctic, which is many times larger than Europe, Canada has fewer than 300 military support staff who are not a deterrent — they’re essentially unarmed. Some of them are part-time, bless them, and about 1,600 Ski-Doos equipped with rifles, and Canadian Rangers who are not combatants. Their role is to observe and report.
The bottom line is that Canada has no permanently assigned combat elements to deter potential presence by the Russians or the Chinese, who are showing up in our waters with increasing frequency. But other people do. Russia specifically has between 25,000 to 35,000 combat troops deployed in their Arctic with huge amounts of operational equipment — air, land and sea. The United States, bless them, has 22,000 full-time military and part-time military professionals with more equipment than the entirety of the Canadian Forces in terms of combat delivery. So really, thank you America for defending our Arctic.
We are facing unprecedented dangers and challenges, and quite frankly, I see no sense of urgency to change, to modify, to re-guide the efforts of the government towards supporting and assisting in the Canadian Forces.
Some facts. We have less than 35 military personnel deployed on UN missions; in 2003, we had close to 2,500. We are the only NATO nation whose level of military operational readiness is going down when everyone else is skyrocketing up. We have the longest and least efficient procurement system in NATO; indeed, in any nation that I can find. We are the only nation in NATO that does not have a costed plan to get to 2 percent of GDP, which was first agreed to by the minister of defence in 2008 and reiterated in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and I could go on. We are the only NATO nation whose defence minister has publicly admitted that he could not convince his fellow cabinet members of the importance of NATO defence spending, and the 2 percent GDP. And, as mentioned already, we’re the only NATO nation whose defence budget decreased this year.
Emphasis mine.
