Quotulatiousness

November 4, 2022

Ontario parents brace for yet more school disruption as CUPE threatens a Friday walkout

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

Matt Gurney, writing in Toronto Life, recounts a fairly typical Ontario parent’s concerns at the latest stand-off between the Ontario government and the non-teaching educational workers represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE):

It’s one thing to watch the news as a journalist and wonder how to cover it. Over the last week or so, though, I’ve just been another parent wondering if my young kids are going to be out of school for an extended period. Again.

It’s all very familiar by now, of course. Can I shuffle my deadlines? Should we get rotating playdates going with neighbours so we can have some quiet in the house when we have an important Zoom call? Do we still have the number of that tutor we used during Covid, and should we call her again if this drags on? Anyway, there’s always the grandparents, right?

This is stress we don’t need — a kick in an already tender spot. I remind myself that, all things considered, others have it way worse: people on shift work, single parents, parents of kids with special needs, those for whom a missed shift means a missed rent payment or a skipped meal. But, even among the affluent and privileged, the frustration, the sense of weariness at more of this, is strong.

[…]

Let me repeat that: my son, now in the third grade, has never had a normal year of school. Preschool and JK? Sure. But then Covid struck mid-senior-kindergarten, in a year already disrupted by job actions from teachers during contract negotiations with the province. (Once the pandemic began, deals were quickly reached.) Schools closed and didn’t reopen. The next year, his first grade, was a complete fiasco, with schools opening and closing as the virus surged and waned. The second grade was better but still had a lot of shifting rules and a relatively brief shutdown after Christmas. This year was the first shot for my son to know a normal school year.

And there are thousands of other kids like him out there, each with a parent (or two) who worries that their child has already lost too much.

Don’t discount the guilt parents feel. We spent years telling our kids, “No, you can’t do this.” Denying them birthday parties, family trips, sports and activities, even just playdates. If you aren’t a parent and don’t understand why people might get so passionate about whether their kids stay in a classroom, don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s all about the lesson plan or just a desire to ship them off so that the house is quiet for a few hours. Those both matter, but the bigger concern for many is that we’re tired of saying no to our kids. We’re tired of telling them that they can’t do things. We’re tired of having things taken away from them.

We knew that measures to limit the spread of Covid were important. We went along, for the most part. We waited. We got our jabs. Many of us got our kids jabbed. In exchange, we want normalcy back. Not for us but for them.

The Ford government’s treatment of CUPE is undeniably heavy handed — probably on purpose, to send a signal to other unions. It’s also unnecessarily nasty. Ford could have struck a better deal with education workers, like imposing a short-term contract with a higher wage boost to help them ride out inflation, as I proposed weeks ago. That might have eased the concerns of parents out there who, though worried about their kids, don’t like Ford or what he’s doing.

I think Jen Gerson has it right here:

November 3, 2022

Amnesty? How about “no”.

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

Tom Knighton on the recent trial balloons being sent up by certain media folks to test the willingness of us proles to “forgive and forget” their authoritarian cheerleading over the last two+ years:

Recently, a story over at The Atlantic proposed an amnesty over what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. The idea was that we just let bygones be bygones and no one holds anyone else accountable for what happened.

Lives were ruined, people died alone and miserable — and in some cases, because they were alone and miserable — but we’re supposed to ignore all of that.

At Spiked, Lauren Smith says that the nasty authoritarian tendencies of those in power during the pandemic should absolutely not be forgotten:

As the Covid-19 pandemic fades from view, some may be tempted to forget those miserable two years of lockdowns, social distancing and other restrictions on our liberties. This is certainly the view of a widely shared article in the Atlantic, which calls for a “pandemic amnesty”. American economist Emily Oster asks us to “forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about Covid”. It quickly becomes clear why Oster would prefer us to move on.

During 2020 and 2021, Oster was very much on the side of lockdown. And she supported vaccine mandates in universities and for workers. In fairness to Oster, she did not support every Covid measure. She did, for instance, criticise how long it took for schools to re-open in the US back in the summer of 2020. Yet ultimately, she belonged to the side that was happy to criminalise meeting a friend for coffee or to separate people from their dying loved ones.

Now, with hindsight, Oster regrets some of her positions. The crux of her argument is that the people baying for more lockdowns, harsher restrictions and vaccine mandates couldn’t possibly have known any different at the time. She says that they couldn’t have known that outdoor transmission of Covid was rare, that schoolchildren were always a low-risk group and that cloth masks were virtually useless in preventing viral spread.

Many, however, did know these facts, including back in the spring of 2020. But those who said them out loud were quickly turned into pariahs.

Although Oster admits that those on the anti-lockdown side got many things right, she says this was merely a question of “luck”. But it should not have taken any great foresight to see the danger of lockdowns. They were responsible for the most significant loss of liberty in the history of the democratic world. Their impact on economic output was as profound as that of any war. Not since the days before universal education had so many kids been shut out of school. Worse still, those who did warn of these inevitable and dangerous consequences were met with derision and censorship.

This is a pretty representative viewpoint of the lockdown mindset:

November 2, 2022

Bill C-18’s scheme to force payment for online links threatens freedom of expression

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

Michael Geist considers the ways that the federal government’s Bill C-18 will suppress online freedom of expression in Canada:

“Automotive Social Media Marketing” by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0

The study into the Online News Act continues this week as the government and Bill C-18 supporters continue to insist that the bill does not involve payment for links. These claims are deceptive and plainly wrong from even a cursory reading of the bill. Simply put, there is no bigger concern with this bill. This post explains why link payments are in, why the government knows they are in, and why the approach creates serious risks to the free flow of information online and freedom of expression in Canada.

[…]

Why is the government suspending the fair dealing rights of Internet platforms in the bill? Because it knows that the platforms don’t typically use the news in a manner that would be compensable. For example, the platforms may link to the news, feature a headline with the link or sometimes offer a one-or-two sentence summary or quote from the article. These uses are generally permitted under Canada’s fair dealing copyright law rules and do not require a licence or compensation. In other words, claiming that links might qualify for compensation requires setting aside the platforms’ copyright rights which places Canada in breach of its obligations under the Berne Convention, the international treaty that governs copyright law.

The government’s intervention into the final arbitration process is further evidence that it recognizes the weakness of the argument for payments for links. Bill C-18 mandates final offer arbitration, which encourages the parties to provide their very best final offer as part of the process since the arbitrator must select one or the other. Yet Section 39 gives the arbitration panel the right to reject an offer on several policy grounds. Why would such a provision be necessary in a final arbitration system that encourages submitting your best offer? It is only necessary if you fear one side will examine the evidence and proffer a low offer on the grounds that it does not believe that there has been a demonstration of compensable value. That is a real possibility in this case given that there should be no need to compensate for links and there is little else of value. In light of that risk, the government gives the arbitration panel the power to reject offers that do not meet the government’s policy objectives.

[…]

Aside from the obvious unfairness, the broader implications of this policy are even more troubling. Once government decides that some platforms must pay to permit their users to engage in certain expression, the same principle can be applied to other policy objectives. For example, the Canadian organization Journalists for Human Rights has argued that misinformation is akin to information pollution and that platforms should pay a fee for hosting such expression much like the Bill C-18 model. The same policies can also be expanded to other areas deemed worthy of government support. Think health information or educational materials are important and that those sectors could use some additional support? Why not require payments for those links from platforms. Indeed, once the principle is established that links may require payment, the entire foundation for sharing information online is placed at risk and the essential equality of freedom of expression compromised.

To be clear, supporting journalism is important. But Bill C-18’s dangerous approach ascribes value to links where there isn’t any, regulates which platforms must pay in order to permit expression from their users, and dictates which sources are entitled to compensation. This is an unprecedented government intervention into the media and freedom of expression. If the government believes that Facebook and Google should be paying more into Canada, tax them and use the funds for journalism support. If that isn’t enough, create a fund for participation in the news system with mandated contributions similar to the Cancon broadcast world. That may not be ideal, but it would at least keep the system arms length, remove the qualification issues, and reduce the market intervention.

I suspect the government fears that Canadians would easily recognize the risks associated with mandated payments for links and fundamental unfairness with the system envisioned by Bill C-18. It is why it has misled on the inclusion of link payments, rejected the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s estimates on who benefits, and sought to frame Facebook’s concerns as a threat, when the real threat lies in the bill itself. But despite those efforts, make no mistake: Bill C-18 is a law about forcing some platforms to pay for links. It gives the government the power to regulate who pays and which expression is worthy of payment. In doing so, it creates a threat to freedom of expression for all Canadians.

October 29, 2022

The Canadian government, despite committing billions to replace old equipment, is still not serious about the Canadian Armed Forces

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney explains why — despite big-ticket items getting a few headlines — the Canadian Armed Forces need far more than what any government has been willing to provide since the start of the Cold War:

Objectively speaking, there has been progress. Canada has committed billions to replacing the CF-18 fighter jets with F-35s — 88 of them. (That’s still way too small an air fleet for a country our literal size — it’s not a lot of planes for such a big place, folks — but it’s something.) Billions more have been committed to modernizing NORAD’s early warning systems. And, miracle of miracles, we finally got around to replacing the goddamned Second World War-era pistols!

These are real, tangible things. These things matter. They will leave the Canadian Armed Forces better off, our soldiers better protected and our continent more secure. This is good news.

It’s also the bare minimum.

Even these big spending announcements, and even the itty bitty pistol one, don’t actually add capabilities to the Canadian military. They replace existing ones. They maintain our capabilities. Sure, we can quibble about “maintain” or “replace” — the F-35 will give Canada a stealth capacity it has never had before, and all that jazz. Fine. Fair. But it isn’t really adding to the overall list of missions we are capable of conducting. It’s fleshing out capabilities that, due to advanced age and wear-and-tear for our critical equipment, were starting to exist only on paper. The government deserves credit for this, but only a really small amount of credit. Getting the urgently necessary basics done, many years after they should have been handled, is good, but it’s not worth a pat on the back. It is the bare minimum the country deserved and that the military needed to function, so that’s how far I’ll go in my praise: congratulations, Liberals, on responding to a massive change in our geopolitical order by accomplishing the bare minimum that was already overdue.

If that sounds scathing, here’s the worst part: that’s me being sincere. Thanks for the bare minimum! I wasn’t sure we’d get even that

So yeah. Good, but … you see the problem here, no? In a new era of global instability and geopolitical turmoil, the Canadian response, thus far, has been to get caught up to where we should have been 10 years ago. At the latest. And it’s far from clear that, if not for Russia kicking off the largest conflict we’ve seen in Europe since 1945, we’d have even bothered to do these necessary, long-overdue things.

And this is all shaping up to be just the latest iteration of a little game both Liberals and Conservatives like to play with the Canadian Armed Forces (and, come to think of it, most policy files). They’ll point to specific investments or particular accomplishments when defending their record. And the investment and accomplishment may well be excellent indeed! But they won’t speak to the full, broader picture. And the full, broader picture of the Canadian Armed Forces is grim, and some new F-35s and 9mm pistols isn’t going to change that.

There was a little story last month you might have seen. After Hurricane Fiona wrecked big parts of several Atlantic provinces, the feds sent in the military. This is right and proper. The troops would have made a welcome sight in those communities, of course. What you might not have noticed, though, was that Nova Scotia had to go public with its desire for more troops. It asked for a thousand. It got 500. It kept asking for more. It got the 500. And most of those 500 were troops already stationed in Nova Scotia; only about 200 were actually sent in from elsewhere. The government never really commented on this, but it’s not hard to suss out the problem: the military couldn’t scrape together any more troops.

October 28, 2022

“Real Trussnomics” has never been tried, cry the disgruntled free-marketeers

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kristian Niemietz investigates the economic theories that Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng attempted to implement during their very brief moment in power:

British Prime Minister Liz Truss, 1 May 2022.
Official portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

Over the past couple of years, I have written a lot about how socialists always disown every socialist project as soon as its failures become apparent, and then go on to claim that the project was never “really” socialist to begin with. The idea of socialism is pure, noble and flawless. It cannot fail. It cannot be refuted by real-world evidence. It can only be “badly implemented”, “distorted” or “misappropriated”.

In recent weeks, however, the rhetoric of “Yes, but … not like that!” has not come from socialists talking about Venezuela or Nicaragua, but from disgruntled free-marketeers [https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/trusss-demise-ends-revival-thatchers-libertarian-economics-2022-10-20/] talking about the ill-fated Truss/Kwarteng government.

Whenever this happens, inevitably, within a few minutes, my Twitter notifications fill up with comments like “Oooh, so what you guys are saying is, Trussism-Kwartengism wasn’t real free-market economics? Real free-market economics has never been tried? Hmmm, what does this remind me of? An idea for your next book there, eh, Herr Niemietz?”

Fair enough, I suppose! It would be a bit rich of me to complain about that. My work on socialism was, after all, was not just about socialism per se, but also, more broadly, about the lack of accountability in the world of ideas. If you argue that people should be held to account for the track record of the ideas they advocate, you cannot credibly complain when you find yourself at the receiving end of that.

And, yes, admittedly, in recent weeks, disgruntled free-marketeers really have sounded very much like Continuity-Corbynites. “Truss and Kwarteng had the right ideas, their plan was just terribly executed”; “Truss and Kwarteng were never given a chance, the entire media establishment immediately ganged up on them”; “Truss and Kwarteng were undermined by their own party at every step of the way” – we have heard this all before, just substitute “Corbyn” for “Truss”, and “McDonnell” for “Kwarteng”.

So I cannot blame people for making this comparison. But that does not mean that I have to accept it: I believe that this is a fundamental false equivalence, and I would like to explain why.

(I should, at this stage, make clear that the IEA has no corporate view, so I cannot speak for any of my colleagues or ex-colleagues, or people from other pro-market think tanks. Where I refer to what other people have said, I will specifically say so.)

October 26, 2022

QotD: Protectionism forces buyers to take worse deals

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

No law or legislation prevents businesses from demanding, as a term of their selling outputs to consumers, that consumers continue to patronize these same businesses for a minimum number of years – or, indeed, until death (or bankruptcy) do them part. No law or legislation prevents workers from demanding, as a term of their agreeing to work for employers, that employers continue to employ these same workers for a minimum number of years – or, indeed, until death (or bankruptcy) do them part.

[…] too often when buyers shift some of their patronage from domestic producers to foreign producers, domestic producers – both firm owners and workers – insist that the state is morally obliged to force buyers to continue to purchase their products and their labor without any reduction in the prices and wages charged by sellers. These producers greedily and falsely insist that it’s bad policy for the state to allow buyers to shift their patronage to other sellers. Because those other sellers happen to be located abroad – or in the case of immigrants happen not to have passports issued by the domestic sovereign – such greedy and false insistence by domestic producers and workers is remarkably seen as legitimate, despite the fact that there’s nothing remotely legitimate about such insistence.

Tariffs and other forms of “protectionism” are means of forcing buyers to act and to pay as if they agreed to terms of contracts with sellers that these buyers never agreed to and that the sellers who benefit from the protectionism were unwilling to pay for in their contractual dealings with their customers.

Protectionism is akin to changing the rules of a game in the middle of a game. It’s unfair. It’s unproductive. It’s theft wrapped in flags, and too-often faux-sanctified by specious theorizing.

Don Boudreaux, “Protectionism Is a Means of Stealing That Which Suppliers Are Unwilling to Purchase”, Café Hayek, 2016-09-10.

October 23, 2022

“It’s starting to be noteworthy how often people in government record their important conversations”

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

From the kindness of his heart, Paul Wells decided to make this column available to cheapskate non-paying subscribers like me because he feels it needs to be seen by a wider audience. The topic is the ongoing inquiry into the Trudeau government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act and it’s certainly promising to stay entertaining for a while (unlike the vast majority of such inquiries):

A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The goal of it all is to permit Rouleau to decide whether the Emergencies Act was used properly when it was invoked, for the first time in its 34-year existence, by the Trudeau government to end the mess in Ottawa’s Centretown. But it’s also a deep dive into conflicting ideas of police doctrine, the best look we’ve had at the stressed and dysfunctional city administration in Ottawa. And while we haven’t yet heard much about the Trudeau government’s processes, that’s coming. The prime minister and seven of his senior cabinet ministers, with their deputies, will testify soon.

Nobody can keep up with it. For Ottawa reporters it’s as though we’ve dragged ourselves for a decade through a desert of talking points and euphemisms into an oasis of unbelievable information bounty. The temptation is to gorge. I took Wednesday off, only to learn that Diane Deans, the city councillor who was heading the Ottawa Police Service Board when the mess began, secretly recorded the call in which she informed Mayor Jim Watson that she’d gone ahead and negotiated the hiring of an interim police chief Watson had never heard of. […]

Aaron Sorkin couldn’t have written it better. Deans tells Watson she’s found a new police chief for him in the middle of the worst public-security crises of their lives. He tells her it’s a terrible plan. She asks whether he’ll vote to remove her from her post and he won’t say, which of course is the same as saying. They talk about what to do next, in a way that leaves room for each to have an understanding of what they agreed that’s incompatible with the other’s. It’s gold. The consensus on Thursday among Parliament Hill people I talked to who’d heard the tape was that conversations like this happen all the time in workplaces across the capital, as of course they happen around the world. It’s just that usually in governments, as in most large organizations, any sign of their existence is buried under lakes of Novocaine.

It’s starting to be noteworthy how often people in government record their important conversations. Almost as though people were increasingly worried they might be lied about. When Jody Wilson-Raybould did such a thing three years ago, it was possible for her ex-colleagues to clutch their pearls and protest that such a thing just isn’t done. But after months of claims and assertions about what RCMP commissioner Brenda Lucki told the RCMP detachment in Nova Scotia, nine days after the worst mass murder in Canadian history, it’s handy to have a recording, isn’t it.

By this emerging standard, Patricia Ferguson is old-fashioned. As far as we know she didn’t record her meetings. But she did break open a notebook methodically, like clockwork, to write detailed longhand notes after her conversations. Those notes are hard to reconcile with the portrait Deans painted in her testimony a day earlier, of Peter Sloly as a lone good man, standing up for proper policing in the face of heckling and even racism from the city’s old guard.

In Ferguson’s version, it sounds like Ottawa’s cops were all reasonably good but they were cracking and colliding under immense pressure.

Ferguson described an Ottawa Police Service already worn down by the beginning of this year. There had been retirements, resignations, a high-level suspension and a suicide before and during the COVID lockdowns, followed by Black Lives Matter protests with the attendant internal soul-searching and external scrutiny every North American police corps faced.

And then the convoy hit. And then it stayed. This last was more of a surprise than it should have been.

The late stories out of Wednesday’s testimony were from Pat Morris, an Ontario Provincial Police superintendent in charge of intelligence-gathering. He dumped a bunch of old OPP “Project Hendon” reports, a term of art for the force’s intelligence-gathering operations, onto the commission server. Those reports were sent regularly to the Ottawa police as the various truck convoys approached the capital. Ferguson testified that she didn’t become aware of them until just before the trucks arrived. Which is too bad. What the OPP had found was a very large group of protesters from all over. They did not pose an organized threat of violence, though the Hendon reports acknowledged that confrontation can always escalate and that “lone wolf” extremists could well be tempted to join the crowd. But all the trucks represented a huge problem anyway, because they had rapidly growing funding — and no plans to go home at any point.

October 22, 2022

Taking Out the Trash: What We Get Wrong About Recycling

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Kite & Key Media
Published 24 May 2022

Recycling is essential to protecting the environment, right? Well … it’s complicated. Many of our recycling practices are largely ineffective. And many of the materials it would be most beneficial to reuse barely get recycled at all.

In the 1980s, the recycling movement really took off thanks to the viral story about a trash barge called the Mobro.

In 1987, the Mobro floundered at sea for six months trying to find a port that would accept its load of garbage. The Mobro was rejected by port after port because of unsubstantiated rumors that it was carrying hazardous medical waste.

The Mobro‘s journey put the issue of waste management in the forefront of Americans’ minds. We were told recycling would solve our waste management woes — reducing trash in landfills and facilitating the reuse of plastics. Turns out, recycling isn’t the panacea we imagined it would be.

For starters, we’re not running out of landfill space. If you took just the land in the country that’s available for grazing — and then used just one-tenth of one percent of it — it could hold all the waste Americans will produce over the next 1,000 years.

As for recycling … well, it’s complicated. Take plastic, for instance. Making new plastic is actually cheaper than recycling old plastic. And the newest, high-tech methods of recycling plastic generate carbon emissions 55 times higher than just putting it in a landfill.

Many localities that used to profit from their recycling programs are losing money. Prince George’s County, Maryland, made $750,000 on its recyclables in 2017. A year later, they lost $2.7 million. Recycling has become so expensive that hundreds of local governments have stopped doing it.

Fortunately, there is one area of recycling that has potential: electronic waste. In recent years, only about 30% of e-waste — the remains of discarded computers, cell phones, TVs, etc. — has been recycled, which doesn’t make much sense. It’s packed with valuable metals and rare earths that we rely on for everything from consumer electronics to military technology.

Adding e-waste to the mix could save recycling as we know it. It could make the practice profitable again. And it could be better for the environment.
(more…)

October 21, 2022

“The function of elected officials in California is the performance of symbols, the narcissistic status dance”

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

Chris Bray on the essentially performative nature of law-making in California:

That mayor is gone, now, but her rotating crop of replacements aren’t noticeably more committed to the quotidian reality of the city, 3.4 square miles of crumbling streets. They’re busy with the climate action plan, and with their very very serious regional outreach to achieve social justice and climate justice and, you know, something something justice something. They are performing their symbols.

So start with this premise: The function of elected officials in California is the performance of symbols, the narcissistic status dance.

Doing just that, the bumbling halfwit Richard Pan, a pediatrician turned Big Pharma water-carrier, has succeeded in the passage of his “disinformation” bill, AB 2098. Here’s how the legislative counsel explains the bill:

    Existing law requires the applicable board to take action against any licensed physician and surgeon who is charged with unprofessional conduct, as provided.

    This bill would designate the dissemination of misinformation or disinformation related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, or “COVID-19,” as unprofessional conduct.

But, as Igor Chudov notes, the bill — now the law — defines away its purpose, declaring that misinformation is “false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care”. (And disinformation, the law says, is merely misinformation spread with “malicious intent”, disagreeing with the consensus plus being mean and bad.)

Being a longtime admirer of Richard Pan’s unique mind, I adore the definition of falsehood as something contrary to the consensus. It’s true, you moron, ’cause lots of people believe it! (The earth is at the center, and the sun revolves around it! Go to your room!) But back to Chudov’s good catch: The law evaporates if you can show that the consensus isn’t, and European public health regulators, among others, are doing that work. So if a doctor violates the consensus by telling a patient that the mRNA injections don’t prevent infection or transmission … okay, hold on a second.

So Senator Pan wishes to burn the witch, but he defines “witch” in such pudding-soft language that he gives the witch-burners nowhere to stand without sinking and vanishing. His declared purpose evaporates in the sloppiness of his mind. But he gets the symbol, declaring that he has declared that the witch should be burned. He gets his tweet.

QotD: The real reason for Upton Sinclair writing The Jungle

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Business, Food, Government, Health, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In 1906, Upton Sinclair came out with his book The Jungle, and it shocked the nation by documenting the horror of the meat-packing industry. People were being boiled in vats and sent to larders. Rat waste was mixed with meat. And so on.

As a result, the Federal Meat Inspection Act passed Congress, and consumers were saved from ghastly diseases. The lesson is that government is essential to stop enterprise from poisoning us with its food.

To some extent, this mythology accounts for the wide support for government’s involvement in stopping disease spread today, including Covid and the catastrophic response.

Not only that, but the story is also the basis for the US Department of Agriculture’s food inspection efforts, the Food and Drug Administration’s regulation of medical drugs, the central plan that governs food production, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the legions of bureaucrats who inspect and badger us every step of the way. It is the founding template for why government is involved in our food and health at all.

It’s all premised on the implausible idea that people who make and sell us food have no concern as to whether it makes us sick. It only takes a quick second, though, to realize that this idea just isn’t true. So long as there is a functioning, consumer-driven marketplace, customer focus, which presumably includes not killing you, is the best regulator. Producer reputation has been a huge feature of profitability, too. And hygiene was a huge feature of reputation — long before Yelp.

Sinclair’s book was not intended as a factual account. It was a fantasy rendered as an ideological screed. It did drum up support for regulation, but the real reason for the act’s passage was that the large Chicago meat packers realized that regulation would hurt their smaller competitors more than themselves. Meat inspections imposed costs that cartelized the industry.

That’s why the largest players were the law’s biggest promoters. Such laws almost have more to do with benefiting elites than protecting the public. It was not really about safety, the best scholarship shows, but exclusionary regulation to raise competitors’ costs of doing business.

Jeffrey A. Tucker, “Poke and Sniff: A Lesson from 1906”, Brownstone Institute, 2022-06-29.

October 20, 2022

The brief career of Kwasi Kwarteng as Chancellor of the Exchequer

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

Dominic Sandbrook had the misfortune of having fever dreams in which he found himself pursued by Kwasi Kwarteng. I sympathize, having recently had similar fever dreams, though lacking Mr. Kwarteng’s participation. His very brief time as Chancellor was as unpleasant for all concerned as it could have been:

Detail of a photo of Kwasi Kwarteng at a meeting with the US Ambassador, 25 August 2022.
Photo by the Office of U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom via Wikimedia Commons.

Nightmares about public failure are very common. There can be few readers who haven’t dreamed about turning up to an exam entirely unprepared, or about walking onstage having neglected to learn the lines. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the more you care about such things, the more likely they are to haunt you, which is why they’re so common among academic high-achievers. So perhaps Kwarteng himself, whose academic credentials are second to none, has had such dreams. And if he did, here’s the twist. His nightmares came true.

What happened to Kwarteng on Friday — and again yesterday, when Jeremy Hunt ripped up his mini-budget, poured petrol on the debris and set the whole thing alight — was more than your standard political sacking. It was a humiliation on the grandest possible scale, as the Chancellor was forced to fly back early from Washington, with some 6,000 people gleefully tracking his flight, before Liz Truss delivered the inevitable bullet. He had been in command at the Treasury for just 38 days, saved only from a post-war record by Iain Macleod’s heart attack in July 1970.

It’s hard to think of many British political figures with such a catastrophic trajectory. Kwarteng had been Boris Johnson’s Business Secretary since January 2021, but it’s a safe bet most ordinary punters had never heard of him. Then, suddenly, he was Chancellor, with a breathtakingly radical plan to defy the markets and turbo-charge a new era of growth. Then, equally suddenly, he became the most unpopular Chancellor in the history of the Ipsos-Mori poll, with even less public support than Denis Healey after the International Monetary Fund bailout in 1976 or Norman Lamont after Black Wednesday in 1992. And then he was gone, and it was all over. What a career!

You might assume from all this that Kwarteng is a fool. But he really isn’t a fool. Giving school talks, I’ve twice come across people who taught him, and both told me he was the cleverest boy they’d ever known. Were they wrong? Obviously not, for when you look at his biography, it’s a proud parent’s dream. At prep school he won a national history prize; at Eton he was a King’s Scholar and won the Newcastle Scholarship for philosophy, a competition examined by Stephen Sykes, Bishop of Ely and former Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge.

Kwarteng himself went to Cambridge, where he got a double first, twice won the Browne Medal for Latin and Greek poetry and even won University Challenge. He was a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard. He did a PhD on William III’s attempt to reform the coinage in the 1690s. And he’s written history books — two of which I reviewed at the time. “Well-researched and crisply written, Kwarteng’s book is a lot better than most MPs’ efforts,” I wrote of Ghosts of Empire, which examined the legacy of Britain’s rule overseas. “A politician with a sense of nuance: whatever next?”

For much of his gilded life, then, Kwarteng knew only success. And when he looked forward, he could reasonably expect more in the future. When he daydreamed, he surely imagined himself as a titanic reforming Chancellor to rank alongside William Gladstone or Sir Geoffrey Howe — and perhaps even as Prime Minister. And now? He’s the answer to a quiz question, the 38-day Chancellor whose tax bombshell exploded in his own face. To put that another way, if he were an England football manager, he’d be the love child of Steve McClaren and Sam Allardyce.

Omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset. “All would have agreed that he was capable of being emperor, if only he had never been it.” So wrote Tacitus of the short-lived Roman emperor Galba — who, in fairness, lasted almost seven times longer in his top job than Kwarteng did at the Treasury. It’s a line that often recurs in British political commentary. I’ve seen it applied to Prime Ministers as diverse as Lord Rosebery, Arthur Balfour, Sir Anthony Eden, Harold Wilson, Gordon Brown and Boris Johnson. Perhaps that tells you something about the job — an office in which, one way or another, failure is almost guaranteed.

October 16, 2022

QotD: State monopolies

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

Competition leaves people with choices. But under the New Socialism, people will really discover what it means to be unfree when they only have this choice: work for the state and spend your falling wages on government-supplied goods — or starve. And to whom does the unhappy citizen turn when there is only one healthcare provider, one landlord, and one education system? The state monopolies under socialism offer a kind of subjugation and submission far greater than that in competitive markets. The faceless corporate decision makers that trouble professor Robin are far less sinister than government bureaucrats who can block all exit options. Imagine how poorly the Post Office would function without competition from Federal Express and UPS.

Richard Epstein, “The Intellectual Poverty of the New Socialists” [PDF], 2018.

October 15, 2022

Freeland does a good job of “talking the talk”, but the government is doing anything but “walking the walk”

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney reluctantly agrees that at least some of what Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland covered in her recent speech to the Brookings Institute in Washington, DC was logical, sensible and well-crafted. What he finds mind-croggling is the chasm between what Freeland talks about and what the government she’s deputy leader of is actually doing:


Screencap from the CPAC video of Chrystia Freeland’s speech this week.

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland went to Washington this week, to give a speech at the Brookings Institution. It is a very interesting speech. Truly — it’s interesting. You should read it.

Is it a good speech, though?

In some ways, yes. You could even go so far as to say it’s a very good speech. Freeland lays out a stark but convincing critique of more than 30 years of Western foreign policy and economic assumptions, and offers some worthwhile Canadian initiatives that seek to address what we got wrong. We were wrong to believe that history had ended, Freeland said, and must now accept that we’re going to have to fight for the world we want to live in, and to win hearts and minds. We can’t just sit around and wait for the arc of history to bend things our way — we must work consciously and deliberately with our allies to make the Western alliance stronger, richer and safer, better able to withstand the hostility of our enemies and win over the undecideds of the world.

That’s the good stuff. There is, however, some bad news.

[…]

Freeland’s speech is full of little examples like this, where the value of her ideas collides bodily with the reality of her government’s competency problems. She is saying the right things. She is also saying the things that her government could already have been doing, but either hasn’t wanted to or isn’t capable of actually pulling off.

So we’re going to spend some domestic political capital to help draw the democratic allies together, eh? That sounds great. But what if they want to sell us some cheese or fancy butter? Are we going to spend some domestic political capital on that, or nah? Freeland says we must “deepen and expand” NATO and our other alliances, which also sounds super, but we’re already seeing signs that our allies are increasingly cutting us out of the loop and forming new Canada-free forums because we simply aren’t interested in deepening or expanding anything, and don’t add anything but an extra meal tab when we show up for the family photo. Freeland says that adapting to our changing world order is “one of our most urgent tasks”. Okay! Again, that sounds fantastic, but are we going to do a defence policy review? A foreign policy review? Are we going to spearhead any new initiatives? Are we going to build out our military, expand our diplomatic corps, and invoke that famous convening power in a way that tangibly helps? Or is this one of those things where the urgency is in the saying aloud before a well-heeled crowd, but not so much in the doing?

Indeed, this goes well beyond what I’d call this government’s meta-failure: a strong preference for saying the right things in place of doing the right things, but still expecting full credit for said things, as if they’d actually pulled it off. That problem is bad enough, but on top of that is layered the very real concerns I and many others have about our state capacity. Even if we chose to spend political capital to get things done, and then tried really hard to succeed, could we? I know it’s a bit of a deep cut now, but I wonder if everything Freeland wants to do will be charitably deemed “underway with challenges” by the time the war in Europe enters its second year, or fifth, or tenth.

There’s a line in Freeland’s speech that really jumped out at me. Early on, she’s talking about the assumptions many of us in the West had about the “end of history” — the proclaimed permanent triumph of democracy and capitalism after the end of the Cold War. “It is easy to mock the hubris and the naiveté which animated that era”, she said.

She’s right! Here’s the thing, though: it’s equally easy to mock the hubris and naiveté of a Canadian deputy PM who flies to Washington to lay out a vision of allied solidarity and hard work that her own government has yet to demonstrate the slightest interest in putting into action. Her government’s own record undercuts her (truly) very fine words. Canada could be leading by example here. Instead, Freeland is giving a speech about the things we ought to be doing, and could already be doing, but aren’t. The D.C. audience may not know enough of her government’s record to mock the hubris and naiveté; we Canadians have no such luxury of ignorance.

I’ll say this for Freeland: I believe she is sincere. I believe she means what she says, I believe she has thought about these issues long and hard, and despite my previously acknowledged quibbles, it is a damn good speech. The problem, in this case, isn’t the message, or even the messenger. The problem is who the messenger works for.

October 13, 2022

Are we to believe that Prime Minister Trudeau lied about the Freedom Convoy? To the fainting couches!

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

Some recent revelations show that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was … less than perfectly honest … about the intelligence reports he was receiving about the Freedom Convoy:

It has now been revealed that statements by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau associating the “Freedom Convoy” with Nazism were unfounded, according to Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) documents published by Blacklock’s Reporter.

On January 31, 2022, Trudeau conflated support for the “Freedom Convoy” with “Nazi symbolism” in his first press conference addressing the massive anti-mandate demonstration that captured the world’s attention in the first two months of the year.

Trudeau also stated at the time that he would not meet with the truckers because of their supposed “hateful rhetoric” and “violence towards citizens”, behavior he consistently implied was a core aspect of the movement’s strategy to put an end to COVID jab mandates nationwide.

Contradicting Trudeau’s characterization, the now-revealed documentation from CSIS, dated February 2 – just two days after the prime minister’s initial comments – explain that the protest was predominantly comprised of “patriotic Canadians standing up for their democratic rights” and not of those holding extremists beliefs.

Detailing how the presence of bigoted imagery is “not unique” when it comes to large-scale protests, CSIS also noted that the presence of swastikas on some flags was “not necessarily to self-identify as Nazis but to imply the Prime Minister and federal government are acting like Nazis by imposing public health mandates”.

It was therefore the conclusion of CSIS that while some attendees had manually added swastikas to flags, it was to associate Trudeau with Nazism as a statement of their opposition to the ideology.

Two weeks after the CSIS report was produced, Trudeau doubled-down on his conflation of the Freedom Convoy with Nazism, accusing the Conservative Party of Canada, and in particular Jewish MP Melissa Lantsmann, of standing “with people who wave swastikas”.

October 12, 2022

The two traditions of the American political left

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

Chris Bray responds to a post by Leighton Woodhouse that declares that “left libertarianism” has won the battle for the soul of the American left:

I see two traditions on the American political left.

One is a tradition skeptical of authority, or aggressively hostile to it: Striking miners battling Coal and Iron Police, or Pinkertons, or Colorado sheriffs, or the National Guard; Wobblies fighting cops in the street; Great War-era socialists attacking the military draft, and going to prison for it; the Weatherman planting bombs in police and military offices. This tradition on the left views government as authority, a repressive servant of the status quo — “the executive committee of the bourgeoisie”. Leftists in this tradition say that of course government serves capitalism and corporate power, and of course the government isn’t on our side. Go back to the Coal and Iron Police to see how radical labor activists saw them: state-sanctioned police, with badges, on the private payroll of the industrialists. The young radical George Orwell, writing about his time fighting in Spain: “When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”

The other is a tradition centered on the supposedly inherent decency, wisdom, and fairness of government, a tradition that runs through the capital-p Progressive Era and Woodrow Wilson, to the New Deal, and onward into the Great Society. In this tradition, state power is benevolence itself, and points its kindness downward. Government interposes itself between the downtrodden worker and the power of the wealthy, ensuring the dignity of the poor. Tax the rich! In this tradition, government represents our best selves, our highest yearning for a better world. Why, just look at how much more equitable the progressive income tax made our social order, back when marginal tax rates were so much more fair at the top. Government serves, protects, nurtures: It’s the tool of the ordinary man, offering the noble guarantees of Social Security and Medicaid. Of course government is on our side, fellow downtrodden, and we need more of it.

Those two traditions don’t fit together, though the obvious way to square the circle is to say that a Bill Ayers opposes the power of the state when it opposes him, and embraces it if he thinks his side has come to control it. This would mean that there aren’t two ideological traditions — just two different instrumental postures. But no one who survived the Ludlow Massacre thought the government was a benevolent servant of the working man.

As Leighton Woodhouse notes, we have a good deal of what looks like anti-authority leftism in our cities, in the form of movements that call for the end of mass incarceration, the defunding of the police, and the transition to a social services model in response to homelessness and drug addiction. In this view, rising crime and growing homelessness are signs of urban leftists rejecting authority as a tool. Homelessness is not a crime, you fascists!

But I’ve written before about the incredible strangeness of progressive political columnists denouncing Donald Trump’s vicious authoritarianism, and then proudly pivoting to an expression of their approval of the warm and caring Justin Trudeau — who cracked down on incipient Trumpism in his country by boldly freezing the bank accounts of dangerous participants in the evil right-wing truck convoy. When government freezes the bank accounts of protesters, government is fighting against authoritarianism, obviously. More government power means less authoritarianism!

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress