Quotulatiousness

September 14, 2023

Canadians’ opinions have flipped on the immigration issue this summer

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

Tristin Hopper covers the rapid change in public opinion from majority in favour of the Liberal government’s expanded immigration targets to majority opposed in recent polling:

A billboard in Toronto in 2019, showing PPC leader Maxime Bernier and an official-looking PPC message.
Photo from The Province – https://theprovince.com/opinion/columnists/gunter-berniers-legitimate-position-on-immigration-taken-down-by-spineless-billboard-company/wcm/ecab071c-b57d-4d93-b78c-274de524434c

A majority of Canadians now seem to think that immigration is too high, according to a recent Nanos poll. Of respondents, 53 per cent said that the government’s plan to accept 465,000 new permanent residents was too high. It’s a sharp turnaround from just a few months prior, when a similar Nanos poll in March found that only 34 per cent of Canadians thought immigration was too high.

Canada has long been one of the most pro-immigration countries on earth, and since at least the 1990s the mainstream Canadian position on immigration levels was that they were just fine. On the eve of Justin Trudeau’s election as prime minister in 2015, an Environics poll found that a decisive 57 per cent of Canadians disagreed with any notion that there is “too much immigration in Canada.”

But if this sentiment is changing, it might be because Ottawa has recently dialled up immigration to the highest levels ever seen in Canadian history. Below, a quick guide to just how many people are entering Canada these days.

Immigration is nearly double what it was at the beginning of the Trudeau government (and way more when you count “non-permanent” immigrants)

In 2014 — the last full year before the election of Justin Trudeau — Canada brought in 260,404 new permanent residents. This was actually rather high for the time, with Statistics Canada noting it was “one of the highest levels in more than 100 years”.

But last year, immigration hit 437,180, and that’s not even accounting for the massive spike in “non-permanent” immigration. When the estimated 607,782 people in that category are accounted for, the Canadian population surged by more than one million people in a single calendar year. Representing a 2.7 per cent annual rise in population, it was more than enough to cancel out any per-capita benefits from Canada’s GDP rise for that year.

It’s about on par with the United States (a country which is eight to 10 times larger)

Proportionally, Canada has long maintained higher immigration than the United States. But in recent months immigration has gotten so high that Canada is even starting to rival the Americans in terms of the raw number of newcomers.

Last year, while Canada marked one million newcomers, the U.S. announced that its net international migration was about the same. Given the size of the U.S. (331 million vs. 40 million in Canada), this means that Canada is absorbing migrants at a rate more than eight times that of the Americans.

When these trends first began showing themselves in early 2022, CIBC deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal credited it with driving down Canadian wage growth. “The last time I checked, the U.S. is 10 times larger than we are,” he said.

September 13, 2023

QotD: The social contract

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

… ideas like “representative government” are cracked, probably beyond repair. I’m going to argue that they always were cracked; that the “social contract” was a patchwork solution to a historically contingent problem; that, in effect, it sounded good, but was doomed to failure, because it rested on an obvious untruth. Hobbes’s version of “all men are created equal” was much closer to reality than Jefferson’s goofy hippie nonsense, but it was false for all that, and Hobbes himself most certainly knew it.

Put simply but not inaccurately, the American Founding was based on Montesquieu, who was based on Locke, who was based on Hobbes, who based his entire political theory around a “thought experiment”, which is also known as “a 3am dorm room bull session”, which is glaringly false, as anyone who has ever solved the world’s problems over a few righteous bong rips with his fellow freshmen knows.

But if I’d just said that, with no prep, I’d sound like a lunatic.

Having established (1) that the “social contract” fails theoretically, I want to argue (2) that it fails practically, too, since it rests on the consent of the governed, which a combination of (a) irreducible complexity, (b) instant communications, and (c) caloric surplus renders moot.

In other words: it would be impossible to know what you’re actually “consenting” to in the first place, even if you could consent, which you can’t.

Severian, “Anticipations and Objections (I)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-16.B

September 12, 2023

It’s funny how many of those “climate-change-caused” wildfires were actually set by arsonists

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Elizabeth Nickson connects the dots on all the “natural” wildfires that have been so much in the news this summer:

Covert geo-engineering has been used for decades and this summer was used to burn down forests and towns including Lahaina to scare people into the extreme behaviour modification required for Agenda 2030 and Net Zero.

How did everyone enjoy their trauma this August? Admit it was thoroughly engaging, a blockbuster, tragic and comic by turns, everyone’s favourite Maui town incinerated and 1,000 children and hundreds of elderly dying in the worst way imaginable. Add in the keystone cops incompetence of administrators, the carelessness, the heartlessness was psychopathic. No, I don’t think that not sounding the siren was a mistake. No, I don’t think One Hawaii’s Smart Water program of shutting off the water on that day, was a mistake. No, I don’t think it was an accident that schools were closed for the day. Yes, I think the firefighters were stood down on purpose. Yes, I think the celebrities hired private fire fighters. Yes, the “winds” were engineered. Yes, Maui has the largest space supercomputing research installation in the world and of course they have Direct Energy Weapons. Yes, I think they only burned the shops and houses of lower income Hawaiians in order to take the town and land and turn it into a ghastly Dubai-like pleasure palace for the rich, heedless and criminal.

That was one motive. The other is the big one. It is to scare enough Karens to force the commodification of carbon, a multi-trillion dollar business and pretty much the only growth industry available to the psychopaths in government and the plutocracy. Make us pay to breathe. De Sade would be proud.

Admit, cap and trade is the ideal globalist organizer. It is government control without borders or limits or even the fiction of democracy. There is zero balance of power. Government is the winner, big energy companies are winners. Why don’t the oil companies fight the climate change nonsense? The science isn’t close to settled, we have had scandal after scandal of misuse and mis-management of climate data. At that level of fraud, especially since it has not had even the wisp of rigorous analysis, it should be thrown out.

These oil companies hedge years down the road. They know they can make more money trading carbon than supplying energy.

The fires will continue until we give up and allow them to sell us carbon credits in order to leave the house. Your washing machine will be turned off mid-use if you use too much energy as now happens in Switzerland.

September 11, 2023

The DOJ versus SpaceX

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I was a bit boggled when the US Justice Department announced it was going after Elon Musk’s SpaceX for alleged discriminatory hiring practices:

Image from SpaceX website.

The Justice Department recently filed a lawsuit against SpaceX, the California-based spacecraft manufacturer and satellite communications company founded by Elon Musk.

In its lawsuit, the DOJ accused SpaceX of only hiring U.S. citizens and green-card holders, thereby discriminating against asylees and refugees in hiring, an alleged violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Musk denied the allegations and accused the government of weaponizing “the DOJ for political purposes”.

“SpaceX was told repeatedly that hiring anyone who was not a permanent resident of the United States would violate international arms trafficking law, which would be a criminal offense,” Musk wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

It’s uncertain if the DOJ is actually targeting SpaceX (more on that in a minute), but George Mason University economist Alex Tabarrok quickly found a problem with the DOJ’s allegations.

“Do you know who else advertises that only US citizens can apply for a job?” Tabarrok asked. “The DOJ.”

Tabarrok even brought the receipts: a screenshot of the DOJ job website that explicitly states, “U.S. Citizenship is Required.”

So, if Musk is discriminating against non-U.S. citizens in his hiring practices, so is the DOJ.

This makes the lawsuit prima facie absurd on one level. However, one could also argue that there could be good reasons to discriminate in hiring. And as is usually the case, for better or worse, the government gets to decide when it’s OK to discriminate and when it’s not OK.

And that’s where things get hazy.

Musk and others claim that companies such as SpaceX are legally required to hire U.S. citizens because of International Traffic in Arms Regulations, a federal regulatory framework designed to safeguard military-related technologies.

The DOJ disagrees. So who is right? It’s difficult to say, Tabarrok pointed out.

“The distinction, as I understand it, rests on the difference between US Persons and US Citizens,” he wrote on Marginal Revolution, “but [SpaceX is] 100% correct that the DoD frowns on non-citizens working for military related ventures.”

In other words, SpaceX appears to have been trying to comply with Department of Defense regulations by not using non-citizens in military-related work, and in doing so, it may have run afoul of the DOJ.

September 8, 2023

UN official denounces Canada’s migrant worker program as a “form of slavery”

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

That this scathing report made it to the CBC’s website must really hurt for the federal government, who have a collective “white saviour” complex about their immigration stance:

Temporary foreign workers picking fruit in a Canadian orchard.
Image from http://www.yorkfeed.com/apple-picking-urgently-canada/

A United Nations official on Wednesday denounced Canada’s temporary foreign worker program as a “breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery”.

Tomoya Obokata, UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, made the comments in Ottawa after spending 14 days in Canada.

“I am disturbed by the fact that many migrant workers are exploited and abused in this country,” he said.

“Agricultural and low-wage streams of the temporary foreign workers program constitute a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.”

Obokata’s comments echo those of Jamaican migrant workers who, in an open letter to their country’s ministry of labour last month, described their working conditions in Ontario as “systematic slavery”.

The special rapporteur role was created by the UN in 2007. Its mandate includes investigating and advocating against forced or coerced labour.

Obokata said migrant workers face deportation if they lose their work permits, which also prevent them from changing employers if they face abuse.

“This creates a dependency relationship between employers and employees, making the latter vulnerable to exploitation,” he said, adding that many workers are reluctant to report abuse because they fear losing their permits.

Thousands of workers come to Canada each year to work through the program. Statistics Canada estimates that temporary foreign workers make up 15 per cent of Canada’s agricultural workforce.

The system came under scrutiny during the pandemic. Auditor General Karen Hogan reported in 2021 that the federal government did not do enough to ensure those workers were being protected.

Obokata said he spoke with a number of migrant workers who described having to work excessive hours with no access to overtime pay, being denied access to health care and being forced to live in cramped and unsanitary living conditions.

September 5, 2023

QotD: “Karl Marx was right after all”

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

Alas, as my fictional namesake said somewhere, time has a habit of turning all our lies into truths. It turns out Karl Marx was right after all. Who, I ask you, is more cartoonishly evil, more like the caricature capitalist of paranoid Communist fantasies, than Jeff Bezos? Mark Zuckerberg? Tim Cook? Jack Dorsey? Sundar Pichai?

We’re actually living, comrades, in the class-warfare world Marx preached in the 1840s. Everything Marx said about the factory owners of the First Industrial Revolution, that seemed so luridly absurd that even other Socialists criticized him for it, is true of the tech fascists of the Biden-Harris Revolution. Solzhenitsyn cites Russian writers from the late nineteenth century noting that Marxian socialism would end up as nothing more than dialectically-constructed feudalism, and lo, here we are. America in 2021 looks almost exactly like the USSR looked upon Lenin’s death …

… that was 1924, gang, and in case you’ve forgotten, what happened next was a vicious intra-Party civil war, in which Stalin crushed his enemies. AOC makes a pretty unlikely Trotsky, but it’s no less ludicrous than the thought of Nancy Pelosi as Koba … but that’s just the thing, isn’t it? We’ve been noting here for years that the modern Left is dedicated to being the Hollow Men in all things. They’re Revolutionaries without a Revolution — they go on and on (and on and on and on) about fighting the power and sticking it to the Man, even though they, themselves, have been the Man since at least 1974. They’re moralizers without morality — you’ll be scolded for not being as perverse as humanly possible. And, of course, their politics is a cult of personality without the personality — not even Orwell or Kafka could’ve come up with the Party installing an obvious dementia patient as its figurehead, not even if you’d dropped LSD in their tea.

As always — and yes, even in the depths of Stalin’s terror — the real rulers are the nomenklatura, the apparatchiki. Not even Koba the Dread can be everywhere. Being Hollow Men, our Postmodern Leftist masters have decided to dispense with the whole Kremlin thing. Who needs the NKVD, the gulag, the dreaded Lubyanka? The Junior Volunteer Thought Police “fact checking” everything on social media will do it for free, and much more efficiently, at which point their fellow travelers in the banking system will simply cut the badthinkers off. The only reason the gulag persisted after Khrushchev’s “secret speech” was that the Soviets, those fools, wanted to exploit their natural resources themselves, to build things themselves; labor camps were thus integral to the Soviet economy. Our masters don’t care about that, and their masters, the Chinese, certainly don’t. Much more efficient, and psychologically effective, to let the unperson simply starve in the middle of the town square, pour encourager les autres.

But hey, at least we’ll have some fun figuring out who the new Trotsky is. Again, my money’s on AOC — she’s so stupid that she’s bound to do something irrecoverably dumb sooner or later, after which she gets the digital icepick. That’ll be a hoot. Enjoy what parts of the spectacle you can, comrades – if you’re a student of human folly, you’re going to love the next few decades, because Marx was right about that too, the bastard — second time as farce.

Severian, “Marx Was Right After All (on ongoing series”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-12.

September 1, 2023

Grassroots protests continue against London’s expanded ULEZ

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

London mayor Sadiq Khan’s “Ultra Low Emission Zone” expansion is not sitting well with the people who see it as an undemocratic imposition on the poorest Londoners:

Nigel Farage at the ULEZ protests in London, 30 August 2023.
Image from JoNova.

This week many Londoners are waking up to the impact of living in an Ultra Low Emission Zone as the £12.50 daily charge for unfashionable cars begins in the outer poorer suburbs.

Normally “climate change” costs are secretly buried in bills, hidden in rising costs and blamed on “old unreliable coal plants”, inflation or foreign wars. Your electricity bill does not have a category for “subsidies for your neighbors’ solar panels”. But the immense pain of NetZero can’t be disguised.

For a pensioner on £186 a week it could be as much as an £87 a week penalty for driving their car — or £4,500 a year. The Daily Mail is full of stories of livid and dismayed people who served in the Navy or worked fifty years, who can’t afford to look after older frail Aunts or shop in their usual stores now, or who will have to give up their cars. People are talking about the “end of Democracy”. The cameras are expected to bring in £2.5 million a day in ULEZ charges to City Hall. But shops inside the zone may also lose customers, and everyone, with and without cars will have to pay more for tradespeople and deliveries to cover the cost of their new car or Ulez fee.

Protests have reached a new level of anger and hooded vigilantes in masks carry long gardening clippers, or spray cans and lasers to disable cameras that record number plates for Ulez. In one photo the whole metal camera pole has been sheared by an electric saw of some sort. There chaos.

Interactive maps have sprung up to report where the cameras are, and help people “plan their trips”. The vigilante group called Blade Runners have vowed to remove or disable every ULEZ camera in London. Nearly nine out of ten cameras have been vandalized in South-east London.

The Transport for London website was overwhelmed with searches from people wondering if their car was compliant and they would have to pay just to drive on the roads their taxes and fees built. Some people have bought old historic cars to get around the fee, but apparently a lot of people hadn’t thought much about what was coming. Sadiq Khan probably didn’t mention this in his election campaign. Presumably there are others in London who will get a nasty surprise bill in the mail.

As Nigel Farage says: “I’ve never seen people so angry about this new tax on working people. “And people are not just furious at Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, they’re angry at the Prime Minister and the Conservatives for not stopping the scheme.

August 31, 2023

Disaster response plans? I’m sure they’ve established terms of reference for the to-be-appointed blue-ribbon committees to look into that … eventually

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line Jen Gerson discovers once again that our federal government is much more interested in making dramatic announcements — usually repeated many, many times — than in actually doing anything. Their response to her inquiry about federal disaster response planning is anything but comforting to worriers among the citizenry:

Front page of the Calgary Sun after major flooding hit downtown Calgary in June, 2013.

The clever and devoted readers of The Line will have already surmised that I am a touch neurotic, prone to catastrophize, and gifted with one of those imaginations that is perfectly capable of picturing in vivid detail every worst-case scenario playing out simultaneously.

And so, dear devotee, you will have no trouble picturing my mental state in recent months, in what will come be known as the Summer of Fire. Until next summer, anyway. Until then, it’s always fun to watch two cities burn (or come close to burning) over the course of a single weekend, eh?

Watching the long lines of cars fleeing Yellowknife, or the beachcombers lining the shores of Lake Okanagan as swathes of West Kelowna disappeared, I have to admit that my mind wandered into its darker wings.

Yellowknife and Kelowna are cities, yes, but relatively small ones: Yellowknife is remote and served by only one road, making it a particular logistical challenge to evacuate. But it’s still only a town of 20,000 people. This ought to be well within the capacity of a wealthy, organized G7 country.

What if wildfires threatened, say, Edmonton? A city of a million. How would we get everyone out? Where would they go? What would they eat?

And this line of internal paranoia brought me to the media landing page of the minister of Public Safety Canada. I have questions — to my mind, basic questions — about this country’s capacity to handle major catastrophes. They were as follows:

  • What are the transportation resources typically available to facilitate an evacuation: in an emergency, how many people could we move by air or land, and how quickly?
  • Does the federal government maintain stores of food or other basic goods? How much? How many people could we feed?
  • Do we have the capacity to establish temporary housing for evacuees displaced by an emergency situation? If so, how many people could it hold, and for how long?

I also had a few more general queries. I am aware that they may not have been fully answerable by the federal government, but I was curious about what the response would be. Specifically:

  • Are we going to rebuild everything that burns down, or do we have to accept that climate change will make some previously inhabited sections of Canada unlivable?
  • What kind of resources will the federal government marshal toward hardening infrastructure to prepare for more serious floods and fires in the future? Is this a priority?

To be clear, none of these questions are “gotchas”. I was not out to catch the federal government by surprise, nor to embarrass it in any way. I don’t think any of these questions is unreasonable; in fact, I expected some fairly stock answers. That is, I expected that a federal government would keep at least a basic running inventory of things like temporary housing or food supplies. Further, I would have been perfectly content with very general answers. Perhaps some of my questions were misguided, and I would have been happy to understand that as well.

What I got was, well, I’m going to show you exactly what I got, offer a little of my own running commentary, and allow you to come to your own conclusions.

QotD: A typical polis

Filed under: Europe, Government, Greece, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Defining the polis (plural: poleis) is remarkably tricky, so tricky in fact that the Polis Center, after spending ten years inventorying every known polis, did not quite manage to settle on a single definition and instead inventoried poleis based on if they are called poleis in the sources or if they show signs of doing the things that a polis usually does (like building walls or minting coins). In Greek usage, a polis was a town, but it was also the political community of that town (which may or may not be an independent state, though the Greeks tended to think that poleis ought to be independent by nature) and the broader territory that political community controlled and also the body of citizens, the politai, who made up the community. These are connected definitions, of course, but there is a lot of give in these joints, yet the idea of a polis as a self-governing community centered on a single, usually fortified, town center is a strong one in Greek thought.

In any case there certainly were a lot of them. The Polis Center’s inventory counts just over a thousand archaic and classical poleis (it does not extend into the Hellenistic period), of which probably around 800-900 existed at one time. Now our vision of these poleis is necessarily a bit skewed: most were very small and leave little evidence, while the two most prominent poleis in our sources by far, Athens and Sparta, were both very unusual in their size and governing structures. That said while most poleis were very small, it doesn’t follow that most Greeks lived in very small poleis; M.H. Hansen notes ((2006), 83) that by his estimates 80% of all of the poleis housed around 35% of the polis-living population, while the top 10% largest poleis housed roughly 40%.

But the smallest poleis could be very small. A touch over 200 poleis in the inventory had territories of less than 100km2. A small polis like that might have a total population of just a few thousand, with an even smaller subset of that population consisting of adult citizen males. On the other hand, very large poleis like Athens or Sparta might have hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, though as M.H. Hansen notes in the inventory these sorts of massive poleis with territories in excess of 1,000km2 were very rare: there are just thirteen such known.

But crucially for this survey, what we’re going to see is that there some fairly common and standard polis institutions, which seem fairly common regardless of size. Indeed, the language and thinking of our Greek sources is often informed by a sort of idea of an ideal or standard polis, from which every real polis deviates in certain ways. These little communities had institutions which resembled each other, to the point that the difference between “oligarchic” or “democratic” or even “tyranical” poleis could be surprisingly slight. So that’s what we’re going to look at here: a basic sense of what a polis notionally was. And we’ll begin by looking at the parts that comprised a polis, which is going to be quite important as we go forward, since the way one structures a government depends on how one imagines the component parts being governed.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Polis, 101: Component Parts”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-03-10.

August 30, 2023

It’s hard to believe, but the big cabinet shuffle didn’t help Trudeau’s poll numbers

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

Rather the opposite, as Paul Wells explains:

The good news for Team Trudeau is that sometimes new inertia pushes old inertia off the front pages. In June, the apparent decision to stall on an inquiry into foreign election interference seemed bold to the point of recklessness. Now the conventional wisdom barely notices it’s happened. Perhaps one explanation for Pierre Poilievre’s rise in the polls is that he is now complaining about things more Canadians care about.

From Abacus

Did somebody mention polls! For many more reasons than this, the polls are dire for the Liberals. A cottage industry sprang up over the weekend, consisting of Liberal sympathizers pointing out that polls have often been lousy at predicting the future: Dan Arnold and Tyler Meredith; Gerald Butts; David Herle. They all have this much of a point: polls don’t predict the future, opinions can change, campaigns matter. Neither you nor I know what the future holds.

And yet. If Brian Mulroney managed to overcome John Turner’s polling lead in 1986-88, it’s partly because Mulroney’s government was still new, Mulroney was much less of a known quantity than Turner, and Mulroney was able to turn Turner’s chosen issue, free trade, into a huge advantage. If Trudeau has won three times while his share of the popular vote declines, it’s partly because he was less of a known quantity in earlier elections. There’s a reason why the last leader to win four consecutive elections was Wilfrid Laurier. It’s hard.

What Trudeau used to have was agility. He was a critic of the status quo. Stephen Harper needed to have jets in the air over Iraq; Trudeau didn’t. Harper had a low cap on the number of Syrian refugees he could accept; Trudeau didn’t. Harper and Mulcair were obsessed with balanced budgets. Trudeau was less of a fuddy-duddy. He’d change everything, from the electoral system on up.

This sort of stuff is simply easier for the young leader of a third party than for a prime minister nearing a decade in office. But as their manoeuvring room and novelty wear off, incumbent leaders can usually offer compensating virtues: their experience and wisdom. Sure, he’s less exciting than before, but now he’s a surer hand.

Unfortunately, for that to work you need to be a surer hand.

August 29, 2023

The noble reasons New Jersey banned self-service gas stations

Filed under: Business, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:46

Of course, by “noble reasons” I mean “corrupt crony capitalist reasons“:

“Model A Ford in front of Gilmore’s historic Shell gas station” by Corvair Owner is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

New Jersey’s law, like Oregon’s, ostensibly stemmed from safety concerns. In 1949, the state passed the Retail Gasoline Dispensing Safety Act and Regulations, a law that was updated in 2016, which cited “fire hazards directly associated with dispensing fuel” as justification for its ban.

If the idea that Americans and filling stations would be bursting into flames without state officials protecting us from pumping gas sounds silly to you, it should. In fact, safety was not the actual reason for New Jersey’s ban (any more than Oregon’s ban was, though the state cited “increased risk of crime and the increased risk of personal injury resulting from slipping on slick surfaces” as justification).

To understand the actual reason states banned filling stations, look to the life of Irving Reingold (1921-2017), a maverick entrepreneur and workaholic who liked to fly his collection of vintage World War II planes in his spare time. Reingold created a gasoline crisis in the Garden State, in the words of New Jersey writer Paul Mulshine, “by doing something gas station owners hated: He lowered prices”.

In the late 1940s, gasoline was selling for about 22 cents a gallon in New Jersey. Reingold figured out a way to undercut the local gasoline station owners who had entered into a “gentlemen’s agreement” to maintain the current price. He’d allow customers to pump gas themselves.

“Reingold decided to offer the consumer a choice by opening up a 24-pump gas station on Route 17 in Hackensack,” writes Mulshine. “He offered gas at 18.9 cents a gallon. The only requirement was that drivers pump it themselves. They didn’t mind. They lined up for blocks.”

Consumers loved this bit of creative destruction introduced by Reingold. His competition was less thrilled. They decided to stop him — by shooting up his gas station. Reingold responded by installing bulletproof glass.

“So the retailers looked for a softer target — the Statehouse,” Mulshine writes. “The Gasoline Retailers Association prevailed upon its pals in the Legislature to push through a bill banning self-serve gas. The pretext was safety …”

The true purpose of New Jersey’s law had nothing to do with safety or “the common good”. It was old-fashioned cronyism, protectionism via the age-old bootleggers and Baptists grift.

Politicians helped the Gasoline Retailers Association drive Reingold out of business. He and consumers are the losers of the story, yet it remains a wonderful case study in public choice theory economics.

The economist James M. Buchanan received a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work that demonstrated a simple idea: Public officials tend to arrive at decisions based on self-interest and incentives, just like everyone else.

QotD: Private versus public decision-making

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

Those who wish to turn ever-more decision-making power over to government – and, hence, to take such power from individuals operating in their private spheres (including, but not limited to, private markets) – believe this bizarre notion: when Jones has the power to spend Smith’s money and to order Smith about, Smith’s welfare is improved compared to when the power to spend Smith’s money and to determine how Smith will act is reserved to Smith, with Jones’s authority confined to his – Jones’s – own business.

In private-property markets each individual has the power to say “no”, and when each individual says “yes”, that individual spends only his or her own money. Also, in private-property markets each individual’s choices are significant: if Smith chooses to buy a new car, Smith gets the new car that he chooses; if Smith chooses not to buy a new car, Smith gets no new car.

These basic features of private-property markets, along with a handful of other features that are embodied in the common law, ensure not that markets operate “perfectly”, but that the market process is always in action to generally improve the operation and outcomes of markets.

The political marketplace is nearly the exact opposite. In the political marketplace, Jones spends Smith’s money, and Smith has no real power to say no. Nor [are] Smith’s choices ever genuinely significant (unless, of course, Smith becomes one of the relatively small percentage of people who succeed in grabbing hold of political power).

If a malevolent all-powerful being were intent on designing a market that is destined to abuse the vast bulk of people, that devil could do no better than to impose on his victims majoritarian politics largely unconstrained by constitutional rules. This devil – being, of course, ill-mannered, and evilly-intentioned – would seek to destroy private-property markets.

Don Boudreaux, “Bonus Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2019-07-31.

August 28, 2023

Charter school students do better academically, yet are funded at a lower level than other students

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

Jack Elbaum on recent studies that show charter schools in the United States have higher academic success rates than ordinary state-funded schools, despite a significantly lower funding rate:

If you thought charter schools received anywhere near the same amount of funding as traditional public schools, then think again.

A new, massive study from the University of Arkansas finds that “On average, charter schools across 18 cities in 16 states (…) receive about 30 percent or $7,147 (2020 dollars) less funding per pupil than traditional public schools.” Over the past two decades, this funding disparity has remained relatively stable.

The gaps are, predictably, more severe in some places than others. The study notes that “Atlanta has the largest percentage-based charter funding disparity (about 53 percent), while Camden has the largest disparity in dollars ($19,711). Houston has the smallest disparity in terms of percent (three percent) and dollars ($417).”

Importantly, the regression analysis run by the authors did not suggest differences in the proportion of students in poverty or English Language Learners are the reason for the disparity. However, it did find that after taking into account differences in the number of special needs students, the disparity dropped considerably — although it remained significant ($1,707).

[…]

Based on these data alone, it would not be unreasonable for one to expect that these charter schools had worse educational outcomes than their traditional public school counterparts.

The only issue is that this is not the case.

A recent study from Stanford University, for example, found that charter school students gain 16 days’ worth of reading and six days of math per year relative to those in traditional public schools. These benefits were particularly pronounced among minority students who were also in poverty. Education Week reported that “Black charter students in poverty gained 37 days of learning in reading and 36 days in math over their counterparts in traditional public schools, and Hispanic students in poverty gained 36 days of reading and 30 days of math over their traditional public school peers.”

Economist Thomas Sowell’s 2020 book Charter Schools and Their Enemies also offers compelling data suggesting the efficacy of charter schools. He studied a set of charters and traditional public schools in New York City that served essentially identical populations. In many cases in the study, a charter school and traditional public school would even occupy the same building.

August 26, 2023

The United Banana Republics of America and their efforts to “get” Trump

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

Chris Bray points out an interesting historical precedent for the US government’s determination to pin something on former President Donald Trump:

There’s a whole lot of this sentiment on social media this morning, and I agree with it entirely:

But also read this. It’s important, and it’ll take you three minutes. Click on that link and read. You’ll see the point with every paragraph.

There are American precedents for the shameful acts of disgusting political lawfare being directed against Donald Trump (and his lawyers and political staff), and the most obvious and extremely telling precedent is the behaviour of Federalists during the Adams administration. The Sedition Act of 1798 made criticism of the federal government a crime, on a comparable construction of the idea of “disinformation” that’s now used as a repressive tool: the law forbade “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government, subjective terms that in practice opened the prison doors to mere disagreement and ordinary political criticism. Federalists arrested and prosecuted newspaper editors and a congressman. Representative Matthew Lyon was imprisoned for criticizing the Adams administration.

But the effects of the Sedition Act are extremely important. Here’s a description from archives.gov — from a site run by the federal government:

    The laws were directed against Democratic-Republicans, the party typically favoured by new citizens. The only journalists prosecuted under the Sedition Act were editors of Democratic-Republican newspapers.

    Sedition Act trials, along with the Senate’s use of its contempt powers to suppress dissent, set off a firestorm of criticism against the Federalists and contributed to their defeat in the election of 1800, after which the acts were repealed or allowed to expire.

The criminalization of dissent by Federalists destroyed the Federalists. The party went into a hard decline; John Adams became the only Federalist president in our history (because Washington, sentimentally a federalist, declined to identify as a Federalist), though the party continued to be regionally important in New England until it finally destroyed itself at the Hartford Convention. The event that historians call the Revolution of 1800, the election of the Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson to the presidency, was in significant part a result of American disgust over the political repression of dissent1. See this point clearly:

Federalists jailed their political opposition, so America loathed the Federalists and turned against them.

    1. See also the High Federalist response to the Fries Rebellion, which treated a careful act of resistance as a dangerous insurrection. If you’ve never read about this one, I strongly recommend this book.

“Email jobs”, as defined by Freddie deBoer

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Freddie deBoer offers some notes on what he calls “a book I’ll probably never write”:

When I talk to people about college-educated workers, even informed people, there’s a constant tendency to immediately think of doctors, lawyers, engineers, data scientists … Reflexively, people seem to think of educated labor in terms of college graduates who a) tend to go on to some sort of graduate study, b) work in fields that directly utilize domain-specific knowledge from their majors or graduate education, and c) are generally high-income relative to the economy writ large. These professions, combined, are a healthy slice of our labor force, and there’s nothing wrong with paying an appropriate amount of attention to them. But I think the amount of attention they’re given in the educational and economic discourse is in fact disproportionate. And I also think that there’s a kind of profession that is intuitively very understandable but which (despite considerable effort on my part) remains very difficult to classify and thus to quantify. Though it has many names, I think my preferred term is “email job”.

[…]

To me, prototypical email jobs

  • Depend, naturally, on email and other digital communicative tools like video conferencing, online calendars, and networked workspaces for the large majority of their actual productive capability
  • Are staffed almost entirely by people with college degrees, but while they do take advantage of time management and organizational skills that can be developed in college, almost never call on domain-specific knowledge related to a particular major
  • Dedicate a considerable amount of time not to the named productive goals of the job themselves but to meta-tasks that are meant to facilitate those goals (scheduling, coordinating, assigning responsibility, “touching base”, enhancing productivity, ensuring compliance with various HR-mediated job requirements and odd whims of the boss)
  • Have no immediate observable impact on the material world; an email job might involve coordinating or supporting or assessing a project that will eventually move some atoms around, but the email job itself results only in the manipulation of bits
  • Cannot be considered creative in any meaningful sense — they do not entail the production of new stories, scripts, code, images, video, blueprints, patents, research papers, etc — but may involve the creation of materials that are subsidiary to larger administrative goals, such as PowerPoint presentations, reports, postmortems, or white papers
  • May or may not be partially or fully remote but could likely be performed fully remotely/on a “work from home” basis without issue
  • Can involve supervising lower-level workers, even teams, but these positions are not themselves fundamentally supervisory and the holder of an email job is rarely the only “report” for anyone; these positions, in other words, are not executive or executive-track, though some may escape the email job track and gain entry to the executive track
  • Tend to top out at middle management, and often have a salary range (with a great deal of wiggle) between $50,000 and $200,000/year.

Doctors do not have email jobs because the human bodies they treat exist in the world of atoms, not the world of bits, and their work involves domain-specific knowledge. There are some lawyers who are effectively in email jobs, as their law credentials are used for hiring purposes but their actual task is handling particular kinds of paperwork that a non-lawyer could complete, but most lawyers are not in email jobs as their work involves various functions at courthouses and otherwise away from the computer, and anyway their work too involves domain-specific knowledge. Most accountants and actuaries are not in email jobs as their jobs require domain-specific knowledge that they acquired in formal education. Architects create new things that will someday exist in the world of atoms and utilize domain-specific knowledge they learned in college. Programmers take advantage of skills gained in college to create new things that exist for their own purpose, rather than to satisfy other administrative functions. Professors don’t have email jobs, even those who work at online colleges, as working with students takes place in the world of atoms and they are constantly accessing domain-specific knowledge they learned in formal education. Screenwriters create something new; engineers move atoms and usually get graduate degrees; CEOs don’t have email jobs because they’re on the executive track and enjoy the ability to delegate most of the email work to subordinates. I could go on.

So who does have an email job? Take someone who works in accreditation at a college in a large public university system. He or she didn’t get a major in accreditation (there is no such major) and is unlikely to have majored in education, and even if they did they would have learned about pedagogy and “theory” and assessment rather than anything having to do with their daily work lives. Essentially everything they do for work takes place within the confines of their laptop screen, and the exception is various in-person meetings that accomplish nothing beyond delegating various tasks, defining roles, critiquing past performance, and otherwise reflecting on how to do a better job of supporting the tasks that other people do. A person in this job might have a secretary or lower-level administrative functionary that reports to them, but they are not on a track that makes advancement likely — becoming a VP somewhere will likely require many years of service and going on the job market to get a job at another school. A person in this position will never interact with students in any real capacity, demonstrating the psychic distance between email jobs and the actual function of their institutions. Though they have a clear and defined set of responsibilities written into their job description, their overall impact on the day-to-day functioning of their college is nebulous, and far more time is spent on administrivia than their “real” duties. They live between the 50th and 75th percentile for individual income in their state.

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