Quotulatiousness

April 8, 2022

The structure of the Chinese government

Filed under: China, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Scott Alexander reviews The Third Revolution, by Elizabeth Economy, although as he says up front, “It’s a look through recent Chinese history, with The Third Revolution as a very loose inspiration.”:

How Does China’s Government Work?

The traditional answer is a flowchart like this one (source):

But you could give a similarly convoluted flowchart for America, and it would tell people much less than words like “democracy” or “balance of powers”. What’s the Chinese equivalent?

I found it a little more helpful to see it diagrammed it as a series of nested squares:

The inner levels have real power, and the outer layers are theoretically overseers but actually rubber stamps. Things get more and more rubber-stampy as you go out, culminating in the National People’s Congress, which recently voted to re-elect Xi by a vote of 2,970 in favor, 0 against — it’s so irrelevant that it’s literally called “the NPC”.

Who chooses the members of the inner groups? In theory, the outer groups; for example, the Central Committee is supposed to elect the Politburo Standing Committee. In practice, these selections tend to be of the “2,970 in favor, 0 against” variety, so they must be taking marching orders from someone. Who? The Chinese government doesn’t talk about it much, but probably the members of the Politburo Standing Committee hand-pick everyone, including the Paramount Leader and their own successors.

How do they pick? Mostly patron-client relationships. Every leading politician cultivates a network of loyal supporters; if he takes power, he tries to put as many of his people into top posts as he can. The seven Politburo members wheel and deal with each other about whose clients should get which positions, including any unoccupied Politburo seats.

If the two word description of US politics is “democracy, checks-and-balances”, then the two word description of Chinese politics is “oligarchy, patrons-and-clients”. If this seems exotic, it shouldn’t: it’s not much different from how the US fills unelected posts like “ambassador” and “White House staffer”. The Trump presidency put this into especially sharp relief, either because Trump did it more blatantly than usual or just because Trump’s clients were so obviously different from the normal Washington crowd. Consider eg the appointment of Jeff Sessions (among the first Congressmen to endorse Trump) as Attorney General.

In the US, this is a peripheral part of the system, checked by democracy. In China, it’s the whole game.

April 7, 2022

The EU only cares about democracy as long as the voters make the “correct” choice

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

In Spiked, Tom Slater points out the most recent proof that the EU’s principled defence of democracy fades out quickly when the voters don’t vote the way they’re “supposed to”:

Remember the other day when the European Union was pretending to care about sovereignty and democracy? When Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine had supposedly united European elites in their staunch, unflinching belief in a people’s right to determine their own destiny and shape their nation? You’ll be shocked to learn that they didn’t really mean it, at least if their reaction to the Hungarian election is anything to go by.

On Sunday, Viktor Orbán and his ruling Fidesz party won a landslide victory. Already the longest-serving EU leader, Orbán is now heading into a fourth consecutive term, with a two-thirds majority in parliament and an increased mandate. United for Hungary – an opposition coalition stretching from ex-communists to ex-fascists – defied the raised expectations of Euro elites and put in a dreadful showing, capped by gaffe-prone leader Péter Márki-Zay failing to win his own constituency race.

In the election, Orbán presented himself as a doughty defender of Hungarian national identity and interests against a meddlesome European Union and international set. Budapest and Brussels have been locked in a years-long battle over alleged “rule of law” breaches and LGBT rights. The EU is currently withholding €7 billion of coronavirus recovery funds from Hungary as part of a bitter legal standoff. In this, Márki-Zay was an all-too-willing foil, arguing that his government would be a “grand prize” for the EU.

In February, the European Court of Justice rejected a challenge by Hungary and Poland, upholding the legality of withholding funds from member states if they fail to adhere to “core values”. It sent a clear message to the Hungarian electorate in the run-up to the election: reject – or at least humble – this troublesome government or else. Now that Hungarians have politely refused to be pushed around, the European Commission has said it will press ahead with the formal mechanism that will deprive Hungary of the funds indefinitely.

Meanwhile, the European liberal media took a break from piously intoning about the defence of democracy in Ukraine to decry the election result in Hungary. Timothy Garton Ash even linked the ballot-box revolt to the barbarism in Bucha. “The Ukrainian horrors are clearly far worse than the Hungarian miseries, but the two are fatefully connected”, he wrote in the Guardian, accusing Orbán of being a Putin stooge. “Europe should now get tough on both the Russian enemy without and the Hungarian enemy within.” A Guardian editorial similarly called for swift EU action against this pesky central European state.

Alberta’s recall law

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

Recall laws are not common in Canada, with Alberta’s new law being only the second example:

The Recall Act, which was part of a 2019 UCP platform pledge to “strengthen democracy and accountability in Alberta” mirrors the terms of the recall law enacted in B.C. after the 1991 election that swept a scandal-plagued Social Credit party out of power (and, a few years later, out of existence). Like Alberta’s law, the B.C. law requires the signatures of 40 per cent of eligible voters in a constituency gathered within a 60-day period to trigger a by-election. In B.C., this barrier has not yet been cleared despite 26 recall initiatives (although, in a few cases, politicians have resigned rather than fight).

Recall laws are not unique to Canada. The United Kingdom has had recall legislation since 2015, but it differs from the Alberta and B.C. laws in that it is triggered not by disgruntled voters but by MP wrongdoing, including being convicted of expense fraud, suspended from the House of Commons or sentenced to prison. Despite this extra requirement, the apparent criminal propensity of U.K. politicians plus a low threshold of 10 per cent of voters to trigger a by-election mean that the law has already been used successfully twice.

You may also remember the California vote last summer, in which the oleaginous Governor Gavin Newsom comfortably survived a state-wide recall. After some early uncertainty, California’s fit of popular pique ended in exactly the same place as the gubernatorial election three years earlier — literally, to the decimal place — with 61.9 per cent support for Newsom. After 18 months and half a billion dollars, all the process proved was that the period of appointed military governors from 1847-1850 remains the high-water mark for good governance in California.

The argument against recalls starts with the fact that they bear the same relationship to democracy that a mulligan does to the rules of golf. We already have regular elections to vote out unpopular politicians. A recall is for people who can’t wait four years to admit their own mistake. It is an impetuous power for impatient people. Besides, voting the bums out is the chief joy of democracy — surely we can wait a few years to savour the moment.

Some elected politicians are unworthy of the trust placed in them. But that is our fault as voters. Venting our frustrations at the people we elected is a cop out. Mencken infamously wrote that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” He was right. In an hereditary aristocracy, you can blame the bad luck of the genetic lottery, and in an autocracy you can fume about the injustice of might making right. But in a democracy, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We voted ’em in, and now we deserve to get it good and hard … for four years at least.

April 6, 2022

Proposed new Canadian censorship rules will ███████ the ████████ unless we ████ ██

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

In The Line, Josh Dehaas waves off accusations against Trudeau while also highlighting just how censorious his governments proposed internet bill can be to freedom of expression online:

Comparisons of our prime minister to a dictator are self-evidently ridiculous. But the Russian example is still a case study in the harms of governments having too much power over the flow of information and ideas in a society. Trudeau is no dictator but he does helm a government in which overreach is becoming a frequent and habitual complaint. And one such area in which this government’s more illiberal tendencies are beginning to show is in the realm of media regulation. Despite pushback from groups like the Canadian Constitution Foundation and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Trudeau government seems determined to press ahead with laws to control what you read, write, watch and hear online.

The Liberals have long promised three bills aimed at countering three ostensible problems with online speech. The first bill aims to correct the problem of too few people choosing CanCon, by manipulating what you watch and listen to on platforms like Netflix and Spotify. The second bill would address the problem of advertisers ditching legacy newspapers for Facebook and Google. (Apparently the $600 million bailout was not enough.) The third bill, aimed at so-called “online harms”, would try to prevent people from saying hateful things to each other on social media.

This “online harms” bill is the scariest. Recently rebranded as the “online safety” bill, it’s apparently getting an overhaul from an expert panel and will be re-tabled in a few months. Let’s hope it never comes back. A version tabled last year, Bill C-36, would have created a tribunal wherein people found guilty of “online hate speech” could have been forced to pay up to $20,000 to their accusers, plus up to $50,000 in fines. In some cases, the accusers would be allowed to remain anonymous. Unlike the rarely used hate speech provisions in the Criminal Code, the tribunal would have only needed to find that the speech was hateful on a balance of probabilities, as opposed to the higher standard of beyond a reasonable doubt.

Even more ominously, C-36 would have allowed judges presented with “reasonable grounds” that a person might commit “an offence motivated by bias, prejudice or hate” in the future to threaten the would-be hater with up to 12 months in prison.

I don’t deny that hate speech can lead to harm. But do we really want government and judges deciding what crosses the line? One person’s hateful tweet is another person’s harsh but valuable contribution. Think J.K. Rowling. Think Dave Chapelle. Or think of the University of Toronto student who wrote recently that it was hateful for a professor to show an unflattering cartoon about Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, a man whose theocracy executes people for being gay.

Proponents of the bill will tell you that it only applies to the most extreme forms of vilification, but at the end of the day it means government-appointees deciding who gets to say what in an environment that financially incentivizes the aggrieved. People will self-censor even more than they already do.

April 3, 2022

Of all the things the future might hold, “food shortages” was never one of the entries I expected to see on the Bingo card

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

Elizabeth Nickson on the astonishing news that we may be facing actual food shortages in the near future:

Food shortages. Food. Shortages. That’s how incompetent this vast superstructure of over-paid, over-benefited, bullies are. Out of their vast superstructures, their buildings filled with “administrators”, their massive computer systems that track everything and everyone, unending flows of money that they just print when they need it, they have created food shortages.

We haven’t had food shortages since the Blitz in London. You basically have to have been under bombardment by Nazis to have food shortages in the western democracies. Furthermore our wealth has grown since the early 1940s by about 1000%. You have to be bombed by 100 many Nazis as there were Nazis per capita, to have food shortages in the 21st century.

That’s how malignant they are.

I guess destroying millions of businesses in the last two years, blowing up national and sub-sovereign debt way way way past sustainable level, ruining children, setting them back years, having to start math, reading, science all over again, their minds so slippery they have lost a half-decade of learning. Let’s not forget all the doctor’s visits that didn’t happen, the cancers that ran away, the heart disease that bolted given the nightmare stress they created. The domestic violence that spiked, the depression that spiked, the loneliness that turned into addiction. And then they launch a “vaccine” that has killed more people than the cold virus they engineered using elements of HIV using our money.

Everything they do turns to shit.

They expect us to forget this. We won’t. No one outside their civil services, their pet (read funded) satellites, their quangos, the PPPs that have subsumed corporations in their vicious enterprises, believes a word they say anymore. It is all bullshit, all the time.

Why the hell do we put up with them? What kind of forelock-tugging stupor leads us to believe anything they say about anything? They are the stupidest people the world has ever seen. And the most malignant, and that is saying something because history is filled with Game-of-Thrones level malignity.

This is all easier to understand once you take on board the fact that they hate us and want us to die.

Even before the lockdown pandemic theatre we all put up with for much of the last two years, the other globalist hobby horses had been out for quite some time:

The over-arching scam they are using is “climate change”. Which is not happening. No one with even basic statistics on board can read into the science and within a few hours know what a complete fabrication this is. The climate (and nature) is so complex, we probably know about 5% of what we need to know to make the decision that three billion people must die. Early on, it was engineers who realized it was false because engineers build things that can’t be faked. If a building, mine or bridge collapses, it’s because they fudged the math. Climate Change is entirely fudged math.

Everything about green energy is falsified. It doesn’t work. Other than of course, for the people who “invested” in it, which means their returns come from government subsidies, ie other people’s life energy. Here we find an ethical uncoupling at the deepest human level: Who are you to profit by the energy of others, by something that is destroying the energy system? Because destroy it, it does. Nowhere does “green” “energy” deliver sustained power. Literally nowhere. It is always breaking down, always failing, meaning that every winter the coal mines are 100% busy. It might work if the backup systems are reliable, or the climate absolutely perfect, in the desert say, but only on a small scale, never country, state or even county-wide.

“Coal is on the way out”, my CBC radio producer daughter said to me a couple of years ago. I looked at her, and managed not to laugh. Coal delivers 50% of the electricity on the east coast of North America. And it will continue. For fucking ever. Until we have nuclear.

So now, we have energy shortages. Our current inflation is caused by our administrative elites closing down energy creation and transport in the US, Canada and Europe. Energy prices have skyrocketed. Which means old people freezing in their homes.

King James I and the problem of gold and silver thread in England

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

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes began to research what appeared to be a minor economic issue that very quickly took over his time going deep down the gold and silver market rabbit hole:

A hammered silver sixpence of James I dated 1603 from the first coinage with a thistle mintmark. Obverse features a right facing crowned bust with the numerals VI behind and the inscription JACOBVS*DG*ANG*SCO*FRA*ET*HIB*REX. The reverse has a shield with the royal arms and the date 1603 above. The reverse inscription is EXERGAT* DEVS*DISSIPENTVR*INIMICI.
FindID 510696 – https://finds.org.uk via Wikimedia Commons

When England’s Parliament met in 1621, it was mainly supposed to vote King James I the funds to fight a war. His daughter’s domain, the Palatinate of the Rhine, had just been invaded, and the European Protestant cause was under grave threat. As I set out two weeks ago, however, the House of Commons had seized the chance to pursue a scandal. Jealous of the Crown’s challenge to their status as local power-brokers, and hoping to embarrass the king’s favourite, the Marquess of Buckingham, MPs opened an investigation into Sir Giles Mompesson’s patent to license inns.

When it came to inns, I argued that the case against Mompesson was flimsy (making me perhaps the only person to have defended him for over four hundred years). He appears to have been a trusted and able bureaucrat, the source of his downfall being his sheer effectiveness. But the flimsiness of the case against him was not enough to stop the political witch-hunt. Next on the list was a project he had administered for making gold and silver thread.

It sounds obscure, and I was fully expecting to write up a short overview of a niche industry that just happened to be thrust into the limelight of 1620s politics. That was a month ago, when I first started drafting this piece. But pulling on the golden thread revealed a desperate, decade-long battle between the City and the Crown, over who would get to control the financial stability of the realm. I’m sorry for the delay in publishing it, but I hope I’ve made it worth the wait.

April 1, 2022

Underbusing Hunter Biden?

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

Long after the story was initially reported, and the New York Post was hammered for publicizing it at the time, the rest of the legacy media is showing interest in Hunter Biden’s laptop contents:

… If someone disappears for a while, it could mean nothing more than he is having a blood transfusion at one of Google’s secret rejuvenation centers. On the other hand, disparaging information about an oligarch in regime media could simply mean that one mob family is unhappy with another mob family and this is how they are communicating it. Using the media promotes the interests of the gangster class and delivers the message.

That is probably how to interpret the sudden interest by regime media in the famous Hunter Biden laptop from two years ago. For those not interested, this was the laptop that President Biden’s drug-addled son abandoned at a Delaware computer shop, which contained a trove of embarrassing information about the family. In addition to thousands of naked selfies and pics of Hunter smoking crack and meth with prostitutes, it had details of the Biden family criminal dealings.

Regime media dutifully covered this up by declaring it Russian propaganda and going as far as to imply it was a Trump campaign dirty trick. The New York Post, which was the first to report the laptop story, came under withering assault from the Silicon Valley crime families until they dropped the story. Facebook started banning people from their site for mentioning the story. Like the people air brushed from official photos in the Soviet Union, this story was erased from public view.

This is nothing new. The power of regime media is in what they can make the public ignore and this was a typical example. They do this by framing the issue as good guys versus bad guys, which is catnip for the American moralizer. Then they declare the thing to be ignored as the black hat and let the moralizers do the rest. Anyone mentioning the laptop on-line or even in private conversation was declared a crazy QAnon conspiracy theorist by others in their circle.

For no reason at all, the laptop story is back. First the intel community told the New York Times to admit they lied two years ago about it being fake. They did not mention that it was the intel community that lied, of course. Then the Washington Post was told to write about the Biden family’s criminal dealings that were on the laptop. The Post is the official organ of the intelligence community. You will recall that the Post was instrumental in the Russian collusion hoax in 2016.

Sarah Hoyt on the “Irrational Regime Hypothesis”

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

Sarah Hoyt on finding ways to make sense of the irrational-to-us actions of western governments since the start of the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:

I have the same need to make sense, to see “reason” out of things that don’t seem to. And I can’t stand it when something doesn’t FIT. If you want to drive me insane, you do something completely out of character for which there is no rational explanation. I’ll obsess over it for years, whether it’s in my favor or not.

This is why I knew the covidiocy was a sham of some sort. Not only weren’t the homeless dying like flies; the third world, despite some reports, also weren’t dying like flies. And the big cities in the US were encouraging homeless to crowd and congregate while everyone else was locked up. It didn’t add, unless the whole thing were a sham perpetrated by several groups for several related goals. (A prospiracy more than a conspiracy. I could expound on the cross-purpose goals I’ve uncovered so far, but that’s another post, right?)

In the same way, this whole “We really are in a shadow war with Putin! The cold war is back! Putin is crazy! He’s invading the Ukraine for funsies! Putin is invading because we crowded him! Biolabs in Ukraine!!!!!!” But at the same time — to give Trump his due — Putin, in this head to head (supposed) context, hasn’t dumped the contents of Biden’s laptop (of course they have it. I mean our FBI has it, and they are rapidly approaching status of enemy, domestic) into our national discourse. (I mean, it would complete disorganize us, and lose us whatever international prestige we still have, such as it is.) Or Putin could have dumped all the other Kompromat I’m sure they have on the not-very-bright and not particularly stealthy Biden crime family. Why hasn’t he?

And Biden, despite his continuous gaffes that take us to the brink of nuclear exchange, at least in theory, is STILL USING PUTIN TO BROKER THE SUICIDAL IRAN DEAL. And hasn’t opened up the Keystone pipeline and started authorizing drilling, which would sink Putin and possibly save the Democratic party. (Yes, Greens, but seriously. It’s either a war and an emergency or it’s not.)

This morning, this thread hit my mailbox from three separate sources (and if you’re not following Trent Telenko on Twitter, create a burner account to do so. I’m going to need to do it, since I refuse to log in to my real account (I just use it to echo my blogs) and Twitter is getting pushy about logging in. It’s worth dipping a toe into the sewer for the man’s insights, honest).

You should go and read the whole thing, but until you do, let me quote a bit, so you get what we’re talking about. Again, the thread is here:

    Alright, this is the promised thread🧵explaining the “Irrational Regime Hypothesis.”
    This is a national/institutional behavior template.
    Warning: once you see this template. You cannot unsee it.

    The basic concept is that for certain unstable regimes (or even stable ones with no effective means of resolving internal disputes peacefully, particularly the succession of power) domestic power games are far more important than anything foreign, and that foreigners are

    … only symbols to use in domestic factional fights.
    The need to show ideological purity & resolve – “virtue signaling” in modern terms – as a means of achieving power inside the ruling in-group becomes more important than objective reality
    Only the internal power matters

    … as outside reality is merely a symbol to be used in the internal power game.

    The ruling Imperial Japanese military faction of 1931 – 1945 was a classic example of this irrational regime hypothesis.

    Trent Telenko, on twitter

And suddenly the back of my mind clicked. Not conspiracy, which is hard on this scale — Not kabuki which didn’t feel quite right — but like the Covidiocy? Prospiracy. “We’re all going this way because we think it fits our goals.”

Now I want you to consider that it’s not one, but two irrational regimes, we’re dealing with.

This has been bothering the heck out of me, because it smells like they’re cooperating, only that’s not QUITE the right pattern.

None of this makes sense, unless you have TWO irrational regimes (Ours and Russia’s. China is too, but it’s another ball of wax. China doesn’t really believe other nations are real, anyway. They’re just Barbarians and China is all-under-heaven, so this is all much of a muchness on that front.) that are using each other as scarecrows to quiet the opposition at home.

March 31, 2022

Canada’s F-35 procurement process — “Dysfunctional, but, like, a masterpiece of dysfunction.”

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney reveals the embarrassing secret of his life: he has “a favourite Canadian military procurement fiasco”. He’s quite right that there’s a distressingly wide variety of procurement cock-ups to choose from since the 1960s, but in his opinion the F-35 saga is the best:

“F-35 Lightning II completes Edwards testing” by MultiplyLeadership is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Having a favourite Canadian military procurement fiasco feels perverse, in a way. It’s like having a favourite gruesome sports injury. Procurement fiascos are bad. We want fewer of them. There’s nothing to be celebrated when yet another one barfs all over the national rug. And yet I find myself indulging a bizarre fondness for a mostly overlooked low point in our long, embarrassing journey to this week’s re-decision to buy a fleet of F-35 fighter jets for the Royal Canadian Air Force. As bad as the low point was — and it was really bad — it also so perfectly summed up our utterly manifest dysfunction that I’ve come to almost admire it. It’s awful, but it’s a pure form of awful. Dysfunctional, but, like, a masterpiece of dysfunction. You couldn’t ask for a better example of what’s wrong with us.

[…]

That wasn’t the original plan; the Liberals first proposed buying 18 new F-18 SuperHornets, the more advanced American successor to the original F-18. That idea fell through due to a trade spat between Canadian darling Bombardier and Boeing, the SuperHornet manufacturer. This was the point of no return: the Boeing dispute was another opportunity for the Liberals to sigh, pop a few Tums and then just do the right thing and proceed with the full replacement as quickly as possible.

They did not. And this, dear readers, is where this embarrassing chapter of our already pathetic history of military procurement reached maximum absurdity.

With our CF-18 fleet at a state of exhaustion, and Boeing in Trudeau’s dog house, instead of actually replacing our old, exhausted jets with new jets, we just gave the air force enough old, exhausted Australian jets so that the RCAF could cobble enough workable jets and spare parts together to allow the Liberals to further delay any decision on a real replacement program.

When you write a lot about military procurement, as I certainly have, you can’t help but grow a bit (!) jaded and cynical. Even by the standards of my appallingly lowered expectations, though, this was an outrageous decision. As I said above, it’s so bad, so cynical, so crassly political, that it has perversely become something I almost admire, in a twisted way. It’s an almost too-brutal-to-be-believed example of politicians dodging accountability and leadership like Keanu bobbing and weaving out of the path of CGI bullets. Every dollar and hour of time we put into scooping up Australia’s leftover jets — they were unneeded because Australia was competent enough to procure more advanced SuperHornets and, ahem, F-35s — was money and time spent not to improve the readiness and capabilities of the Canadian Armed Forces, but to permit the Liberals to avoid acknowledging they’d made a dumb campaign promise.

Stephen Harper failed the Canadian Armed Forces and Canada generally by not getting the ball rolling on a replacement during his majority term. This was a major failure by the Conservatives that they get all awkward and squirmy about when you bring up, but we should bring it up. The CPC botched this, badly, and should feel shame. Justin Trudeau then repeated that failure, and then took it up a level. In this race to the bottom, where no one looks good, Trudeau “wins” by simple virtue of snapping up used jets — the last of which only arrived last spring! — to buy his government time to do absolutely nothing.

QotD: Nixon’s 1971 gamble to win re-election also tanked the economy for a full decade

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

[In 1971, economist Herb] Stein was saying aloud what they all knew. Prettifying a political grab by dressing it as an economic rescue was precisely the kind of action against which eminences like Burns warned foreign governments when they made grand speeches abroad. Nixon was indeed now preparing to do what Harold Wilson had done in 1967: disingenuously pretend that devaluing a currency would not affect the consumer. Stimulating the economy in this way might win Nixon the election, but inflation would eventually explode, as Friedman sometimes said, like a closed pot over high heat. Wage and price controls and taxes on imports could make the kind of growth America was accustomed to, the old bonanza, disappear for years, even a decade. True scarcity of key goods might suddenly become the rule. And that was true no matter how many times that cowboy Connally went around bragging about tariffs and telling others that America was “the strongest economy on earth”.

[…]

The 1971 run on American gold also, however, reflected foreigners’ insight. Outsiders knew a tipping point when they saw one. America had moved closer to Michael Harrington’s socialism than even Harrington understood. The United States had locked itself into social spending promises that might never be outgrown. Today, interest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies serves as a measure of markets’ and individuals’ distrust of the U.S. dollar. In those days there was no Bitcoin, but gold played a similar role. The dollar was the common stock of America, and foreigners used gold to short it.

The disastrous performance of the U.S. economy in the following years proved the foreigners’ 1971 wager correct. To pay for its Great Society commitments, the U.S. government in the next decade found itself forced to set taxes so high that it further suppressed the commercialization of innovation. Products that could have been developed from patents awarded in the 1960s remained on the researchers’ shelves. Today we assume all markets will rebound given a decade. But there was to be no 1970s rebound for the Dow Jones Average. The Dow flirted with the 1,000 level throughout the decade, but did not cross the line definitively until 1982, an astonishingly long period to stagnate, nearly a generation. While markets languished, unemployment for all Americans rose. High prices, high interest rates, and federal budget deficits plagued the nation. “Guns and butter” had proved too expensive, but so indeed had butter alone. The 1960s commitments required spending that, then and down the decades, would be far greater than for Vietnam or most other wars. Those on the far left who had originally pushed for aggressive public-sector expansion had achieved what they sought, to subordinate the private sector. In 1977, Harrington actually titled a new book The Twilight of Capitalism.

Those who had counted on the private sector to sustain prosperity saw they had expected too much. The nation’s confidence evaporated. Indeed, by the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter felt the need to undertake a national campaign to restore confidence, the kind of campaign Franklin Roosevelt had launched in response to the Great Depression. From being a nation that could afford everything, America morphed into a country that could afford nothing, a place where the president warned citizens to set their living room thermostats to sixty-five in January, or face catastrophe.

In a supreme irony, many of the people who caused the economic damage found themselves mired in the dirty work of reversing what they had wrought. The task of reducing inflation through punishing interest rates fell to Paul Volcker, who as a junior official aided leaders in the 1971 decisions that triggered the 1970s inflation in the first place. Mortgage rates rose to today incredible-sounding levels, over 15 percent. In the 1980s, the same John Connally who as treasury secretary in 1971 pounded on Nixon’s desk for populist measures that ensured an economic quagmire, went bankrupt, a casualty of the mess he had helped to create.

Amity Schlaes, Great Society: A New History, 2019.

March 30, 2022

The RCAF’s long, sad F-35 story

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Mitch Heimpel tries (without either laughing or crying) to tell the story of how the Canadian government finally got around to admitting they should have bought the F-35 fourteen years ago (when the RCAF told them it was the best fit for our national requirements):

If you’re looking for a simple meta-explanation for all of us, it would be this: Canadian politicians refuse to tell the public one simple truth — military procurement is expensive. There isn’t an inexpensive version of this. That doesn’t mean we should accept any and all costs just because it’s going to be expensive. It does mean that politicians have to stop trying to sell us on there being an inexpensive, or perfect, version of this. There is no MacGyver version of military procurement. No amount of rubber bands and paper clips replaces jet engines and submarines, no matter how many times we pretend it will. Indeed, the longer you delay, the more it’ll cost — the weapons generally get more expensive, and you end up spending more money to wring every last bit of use out of what equipment you already have, instead of replacing it in an efficient, orderly way.

So, let’s recap: We are, in fact, so bad at procurement that we ran a process for years, and then cancelled it. And then pledged not to buy the jets we’d originally pleged to buy. We then bought seven old Australian F-18s so we could keep our elderly and dwindling CF-18 fleet from experiencing a “capability gap” caused mostly by not just buying the F-35 in the first place. Then, almost 12 years after announcing we were going to buy the F-35, after all the drama above, we’ve announced we’ll buy the F-35, after all. Eighty eight of them, in fact. So there’s that, I guess.

In so many ways, the F-35 saga is another symbol of seven years of Trudeau governance. In 2015, the Liberals could not have been more clear in their campaign platform, which included a whole section titled “We will not buy the F-35 stealth bomber-fighter.”

What were Ministers Anand and Tassi out saying when the F-35 announcement was made this week? “Best plane” and “best price.” Which was true in 2008 when we were first told it was the only fighter that met our needs. It was still true when the Harper government blinked in 2012, and still true when Justin Trudeau was accusing the government of “whipping out” our CF-18s while on the opposition benches in 2014. Remained true in 2015 when the Liberals campaigned against it, too, and every year since.

We have no reason to believe that what is supposed to be a $19-billion announcement for 88 planes to begin delivery in 2025 will actually end up being any of those things. Don’t be surprised if we spend more money to get fewer jets at a later date. But we are now well past the point of being able to blame anyone other than ourselves for cost overruns or late deliveries. The Canadian government failed the Royal Canadian Air Force in this procurement. That is beyond dispute. These guys need the planes. They have for years.

Let’s hope we’ve at least been sufficiently embarrassed by this experience to be more serious when we have to talk about submarines, which is now, come to think of it.

But I doubt it.

March 29, 2022

A leading source of incompetence

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

My contacts on social media have probably gotten tired of me pointing out that any big organization will perform less well than a smaller one in the same activity, and governments across the western world have been growing bigger and less competent every year. Sarah Hoyt recalls the time she saw an almost Soviet display of big government incompetence on a visit to her native Portugal:

The last time I was in Portugal I got to witness (actually the time before last, while running through the Lisbon airport) something I’d only previously read about as being normal in the Soviet Union: structures that were being built and decaying, simultaneously, which seems impossible, but I assure you it’s not.

[…]

The question is: competence has existed, and had high marks. We know it existed at various times, because their works survive: the landscape of Europe is still littered with Roman bridges and aqueducts, not to mention Roman roads. Cathedrals and monuments abound. Our own country has marvels of engineering and construction still standing and you don’t have to fix daily.

So, where did that competence go? And why does no one seem to know how to do anything. (Here as an aside, almost everything I learned to do competently had to be learned on my own, and often against massive resistance.)

Well, for about a hundred years now, we’ve been under the ideological ascent of socialism. And socialism — international socialism, to be precise — is only good for creating picturesque ruins. (The romantics would have loved them.)

Note that I’m not defending national socialism. As I’ve pointed out before, when the government takes over the economic life of a country, and directs what the companies can or cannot do, the tendency is to quash innovation, and as a rule everyone becomes very poor.

It’s just that it depends. Like empires (which to an extent they are) national socialist regimes can do okay under an extraordinary ruler. I had a mini-dispute with Herb in the comments on whether Franco was or was not Fascist. He absolutely was, both in the economic, and in the repressive, take over every minutia of life aspect. He was also better than the average bear at directing the economic life of the country which is why before his death we used to go shop in Spain, where more and better goods were available than in Portugal.

Relatively speaking, Salazar was a softer leader. Or at least, he stomped less on the opposition (while making more noises about stomping. It’s the Portuguese way.) But as an economic leader (director of the economic life. Führer if you will. Or where did you think that came from?) he sucked. He sucked upside down and sideways and with his head in a sack. And that’s because he was raised by Jesuits, and got his economic theories from them. Which pretty much tells you everything you need to know. So over his rule, everyone became increasingly poorer. But weirdly not incompetent. (In fact, as a person who — there and here — likes to follow craftsmen around watching how they do things, the average craftsman who learned his trade under national socialism, was probably way better than anyone else.)

Which brings us to: how does international socialism/communism not only destroy competency but introduce incompetency and corruption to the degree it is enforced/implemented.

March 28, 2022

The only question in my mind is why the NDP thought they’d benefit from propping up Trudeau the Lesser

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

The editors at The Line, having taken last week off to look after kids on March break, sent out a brief round-up post on the deal Jagmeet Singh made with the Devil Justin Trudeau to keep the Liberals comfortably in power for (potentially) the full term:

The key question here that we can’t really think up an answer for is what this deal changes. In big picture terms, the NDP is going to keep the Liberals alive for a while, and the Liberals will serve up some goodies the NDP base will like. That’s what the parties have agreed to, distilled to the most basic essence.

And this is new how? This has changed what?

The NDP doesn’t want an election right now. The Liberals don’t want an election right now. The Liberals are led by a guy who has already moved the party toward the left and seemed quite happy to do it. The Liberals were getting along just fine with NDP support until they rolled the electoral dice and tried to secure a majority in summer of 2021; they fell short, and now they’ll continue getting along just fine with NDP support.

Well, gee. Stop the presses.

Yes, yes, there’s more specific commitments. The parties have put on paper what they’ll work jointly to achieve. But look at those commitments. Anything surprising? Is this not precisely what any random collection of reasonably bright high schoolers in a mandatory civics class could have guessed when their teacher told them to write a five-paragraph essay on things the NDP and Liberals agree on?

We aren’t particularly swayed by arguments, largely from angry Conservatives, that this deal suddenly leaves the Liberals immune from accountability. Again, the NDP was already playing ball to avoid an election. A week ago, the Liberals were going to be held precisely as accountable as Singh found convenient, and that’s just as true now as it was then. It’s not that the angry Conservatives are wrong about the Liberals being immune from accountability. It’s just that they essentially already were, NDP protestations aside. The NDP will tighten the screws enough to make Trudeau uncomfortable but not enough to trigger an election. They won’t be an opposition, but they’ll play one on TikTok. This sucks, but it is what it is, folks.

Nor do we expect the deal to last the full four years. Hey, it could happen. Both parties could find reasons to keep it going. But remember: this is a gentlemen’s agreement between gentlemen that don’t like each other. Gentlemen who are both pursuing different personal and political agendas. This deal will last right up until the moment one of them sees more advantage in stabbing the other guy than in continuing to play nice-nice.

We admit we really aren’t sure what the Liberals are thinking here. Trudeau had a largely free hand already. This is, to us, baffling.

And as for the NDP, well, gosh, all we can say is good luck, fellers. An old grizzled political observer your Line editors once knew liked to joke that being the junior partner in these kinds of arrangements is like being the mistress of a rich, married man. If you don’t know that you will be dumped while your former lover runs back to his family — the base voters, the caucus, the donors — well, sorry, sweetheart, but that’s on you. We saw a version of this play out in Ontario just a few years ago: the provincial NDP propped up the minority Liberals in exchange for a pledge to cut auto-insurance premiums. The Liberals failed to deliver, ran another election, won another majority and shrugged off the NDP’s complaints. The auto-insurance promise? Meh. That was just a stretch goal.

March 26, 2022

Long-delayed pair of Canadian Coast Guard icebreakers now expected to cost C$7.25 billion

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

It’s not just the Canadian Armed Forces that suffer from galloping cost increases for their equipment, as the Canadian Coast Guard’s original (2008) $720 million budget for a new icebreaker to be called CCGS John G. Diefenbaker is a dim distant memory:

Originally ordered in 2008 for delivery in 2017, the CCGS John G. Diefenbaker is now expected to enter service in 2030.
Canadian Coast Guard conceptual rendering, 2012.

Canada could face problems buying the specialized steel needed for its new $7-billion polar icebreakers, further driving up costs for taxpayers.

The polar-class icebreaker project was originally supposed to cost $1.3 billion for the construction of one vessel. Two icebreakers will now be built, but the cost has skyrocketed to an estimated $7.25 billion.

One of the top problems now facing shipbuilders is obtaining the special hardened steel needed for the icebreakers. In a response to questions from the House of Commons, the Canadian Coast Guard outlined the top 10 risks associated with the icebreaker project. Number one was listed as “Challenges sourcing specialized EH50 steel, which may impact cost, schedule and scope” of the project.

Other issues involved the type of helicopter that would operate from the vessels, the capacity of shipyards to do the work and potential design changes. All could contribute to boosting the project’s cost even further.

[…]

In 2021, the Liberal government decided to purchase two polar-class icebreakers, one to be built at Seaspan and the other at Davie in Quebec. Last year, Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux produced a report warning the cost of the two new ships was now estimated at $7.25 billion.

The CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent retires from service in 2030.

The construction of the two icebreakers will be done simultaneously at Seaspan and Davie. “In order to maximize vessel similarities across the two ships, the two yards will be encouraged to establish a strong relationship both between themselves and with firms that are engaged in the ship design phase to help ensure commonality,” parliamentarians were told by the coast guard in its response to questions. Such co-operation could prevent the project from slipping behind schedule, it added.

March 21, 2022

For some reason, Canadians’ interest in alternative currencies has risen substantially since February

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

I’m far from alone in taking the Canadian government’s absurd over-reaction to the Freedom Convoy 2022 political protest in February as a reason to be concerned about the Canadian banking system. Until then I’d paid very little attention to alternative currency options like Bitcoin and the like, but I now understand that they may be a key element in future financial planning. At Quillette, Jonathan Kay explains that he realized at the same time he needed to know much more about crypto:

“Bitcoin – from WSJ” by MarkGregory007 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

On February 15th, following weeks of anti-vaccine-mandate protests in downtown Ottawa, Justin Trudeau lurched from complete inaction to absurd overreaction by declaring a national emergency. One effect of this was that banks were suddenly authorized to freeze the personal assets of citizens linked with the protests, civil liberties be damned. Around the same time, moreover, hackers acquired and published identifying information associated with thousands of people who’d donated money to the protest movement. Rather than denounce this apparent criminal data breach, many public figures — including Gerald Butts, who’d been Trudeau’s right-hand man before resigning amid scandal in 2019 — actually celebrated this doxxing. Some media outlets even tried to mine the dox information for clickbait before being stung by a public backlash. While I hadn’t donated to the Freedom Convoy movement, I was sufficiently appalled by these developments that I started educating myself about how one might donate to a similar cause without government officials and social-media hyenas exploiting these transactions as a pretext to attack my assets and reputation.

The easiest way to get into the crypto market, I learned, is simply to open an account at an exchange platform such as Coinbase or Wealthsimple. But while they’re easy to use, exchange platforms also generally require clients to supply government-issued ID when they secure their accounts, and transactions are traceable by authorities. To assure myself of real anonymity and theft-protection, my tutor instructed me, a better (if more complex) option is “cold storage”. This is a real physical device — in my case, something called a Ledger — that acts as a personal crypto wallet.

My Ledger (which looks like a large USB key drive) contains the data required to generate the “private keys” (which look like long passwords, though that isn’t quite what they are) that allow me to send my crypto to other people. And that spending can be done only in those moments when the device is connected to the Internet, after which it can be relegated to a drawer or safe (thus the metaphorical concept of “cold storage”). On the other hand, I can receive money even if the Ledger is offline, so long as the sender has my public key, which (unlike a private key) is generally safe to give to others (such as, say, a prospective donor to any charitable cause that I might establish).

Bitcoin’s basic mechanics were set out in 2009 by the much-mythologized pseudonymous author (or collective) known as “Satoshi Nakamoto”. In a legendary white paper titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, Satoshi describes the newly conceived electronic coin as consisting of a chain of digital signatures (a blockchain) that build one upon the next through a mathematical mechanism known as a cryptographic hash function — a one-way function whose output doesn’t expose the original private key to reverse-engineering. So once a bitcoin transaction is recorded and added in verified form to the blockchain by everyone — this being the “public distributed ledger” that bitcoin users are part of — the transaction can’t be erased or reversed (with one important theoretical exception, described later on).

Image contained in Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, demonstrating the use of public and private keys to verify and sign bitcoin transactions.

Of course, you don’t need to understand how this cryptography works to use cryptocurrency. But it is worth getting your head around an important concept that fundamentally separates crypto from conventional assets such as, say, money that sits in a bank account. Your bank account number doesn’t have any value in and of itself: It’s just an institutional convenience that tells you and your bank where your actual money’s been filed (which is why that account number sits in plain sight on every physical check you sign, assuming you still use checks). But in the case of bitcoin, a private key basically is money — in the sense that anyone with access to such a key can spend the associated funds. And so if you lose your private-key information, or it gets stolen by a thief, there’s no 1-800 helpdesk number. It’s gone forever.

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