Robert Heinlein said that the smaller any unit of government happens to be, the harder it is to move. It’s relatively easy to make enough fuss to alter the course of a federal government, for example, but everybody “knows” you can’t fight City Hall and that the most viciously dictatorial level of government is the school board.
My daughter’s home schooled. And generally, I ignore my city government because I have far bigger fish to fry (or I’m taking the coward’s way out, you may decide for yourself which). But because I’m willing to bet that one city government across this country is pretty much like another (they should all be given 24 hours to get out of town) and the trends they set have a regrettable tendency to spread upward and outward, I think it’s appropriate to discuss them from time to time, so that we’ll all have an idea of what we’re up against.
If it were only a matter of good old-fashioned Chicago-style graft, we could probably accept it philosophically. For example, say some city council somewhere passed a law that lawn sprinkling systems (which our hypothetical city government urged us to install because they save water) must now be inspected and a whopping fee collected for this “service”. Never mind that the Earth got along perfectly well for the last four and a half billion years without the fee-collecting lawn sprinkling system inspectors who lobbied for this law. What we have here (and as usual, employing government as a truncheon) is sheer, primitive, plug-ugly greed, which I happen to define as an inordinate and potentially violent desire for the unearned.
L. Neil Smith, “Feeding the Ducks”, Libertarian Enterprise, 1995-10-01.
January 8, 2022
QotD: You can’t fight City Hall
January 4, 2022
J.K. Rowling’s subversive tale of a government “controlled by and for the benefit of the self-interested bureaucrat”
No, it’s not a new work by Rowling … it’s a deeply embedded thread of her best-known books in the Harry Potter series (as related in a 2005 article by Benjamin H. Barton for the Michigan Law Review):
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books include a very strong anti-authoritarian thread.
This Essay examines what the Harry Potter series (and particularly the most recent book, The Half-Blood Prince) tells us about government and bureaucracy. There are two short answers. The first is that Rowling presents a government (The Ministry of Magic) that is 100% bureaucracy. There is no discernable executive or legislative branch, and no elections. There is a modified judicial function, but it appears to be completely dominated by the bureaucracy, and certainly does not serve as an independent check on governmental excess.
Second, government is controlled by and for the benefit of the self-interested bureaucrat. The most cold-blooded public choice theorist could not present a bleaker portrait of a government captured by special interests and motivated solely by a desire to increase bureaucratic power and influence. Consider this partial list of government activities: a) torturing children for lying; b) utilizing a prison designed and staffed specifically to suck all life and hope out of the inmates; c) placing citizens in that prison without a hearing; d) allows the death penalty without a trial; e) allowing the powerful, rich or famous to control policy and practice; f) selective prosecution (the powerful go unpunished and the unpopular face trumped-up charges); g) conducting criminal trials without independent defense counsel; h) using truth serum to force confessions; i) maintaining constant surveillance over all citizens; j) allowing no elections whatsoever and no democratic lawmaking process; k) controlling the press.
This partial list of activities brings home just how bleak Rowling’s portrait of government is. The critique is even more devastating because the governmental actors and actions in the book look and feel so authentic and familiar. Cornelius Fudge, the original Minister of Magic, perfectly fits our notion of a bumbling politician just trying to hang onto his job. Delores Umbridge is the classic small-minded bureaucrat who only cares about rules, discipline, and her own power. Rufus Scrimgeour is a George Bush-like war leader, inspiring confidence through his steely resolve. The Ministry itself is made up of various sub-ministries with goofy names (e.g., The Goblin Liaison Office or the Ludicrous Patents Office) enforcing silly sounding regulations (e.g., The Decree for the Treatment of Non-Wizard Part-Humans or The Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery). These descriptions of government jibe with our own sarcastic views of bureaucracy and bureaucrats: bureaucrats tend to be amusing characters that propagate and enforce laws of limited utility with unwieldy names. When you combine the light-hearted satire with the above list of government activities, however, Rowling’s critique of government becomes substantially darker and more powerful. Furthermore, Rowling eliminates many of the progressive defenses of bureaucracy. The most obvious omission is the elimination of the democratic defense. The first line of attack against public choice theory is always that bureaucrats must answer to elected officials, who must in turn answer to the voters. Rowling eliminates this defense by presenting a wholly unelected government.
H/T to Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds for the link.
January 3, 2022
“… the ill-conceived concept of hate crime is tempting police officers away from law enforcement towards making moral judgements”
In The Critic, Josephine Bartosch outlines some of the problems with Britain’s approach to “hate crime” policing:
Photo from The Critic
When campaigner Harry Miller was questioned about comments he’d made online, the dutiful copper on the other end of the phone clearly thought he was just doing his job. Apparently unaware of the raging debate around the reform of the Gender Recognition Act, the officer explained that he knew he was right because he’d been on a training course. This small exchange, which was referenced in the recent case won by Miller at the Court of Appeal, underscores a wider problem: the ill-conceived concept of hate crime is tempting police officers away from law enforcement towards making moral judgements.
Hate crime does not exist in itself as an indictable offence; it is comprised of “non-crime hate incidents” (NCHI) and considered as an aggravating factor during sentencing. Developed as a response to the institutional racism exposed in the Macpherson report, hate crime is an attempt to give a voice to those too easily side-lined by a majority white, straight and male police force. The College of Policing (CoP) identify five specific “strands” which designate people at risk from hate: disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity.
A new form of prejudice is baked into this touchy-feely approach: provided complainants tick the requisite boxes to show social disadvantage, they are not credited with the wit to be vexatious. Consequently, the police have found themselves unwitting foot soldiers in a culture war which has seeped from social media into real life. The good intentions of officers have been weaponised by unscrupulous whingers who claim offence to muzzle their ideological opponents. Miller was far from the only person targeted by police for exercising his freedom of speech — numerous others have been questioned, arrested and in some cases dragged through the courts for doing nothing more than sharing their opinions online.
Miller’s well-publicised victory against the CoP will force a rethink. It is estimated 124,091 NCHI have been logged since 2014. Many of those with NCHIs recorded against their names have no idea about it.
Looking outside at the cheerless drizzle, it’s easy to understand why police officers might prefer to sit inside cosy offices logging tweets rather than pounding the streets or breaking-up bar room brawls. At a time when much of the left-leaning press has tarred the law enforcement officials as “baddies”, notching-up hate crimes serves as a reminder that law enforcement is on the side of the righteous.
January 2, 2022
Eat the bugs, peasants! Leave the meat for your betters!
Andrew Orlowski on the self-imagined elite attitudes to the environment and — as a direct result — the growing chorus of journalists pushing the idea of substituting plant-based synthetics and/or insects in place of meat for us proles:
In recent years, media messaging has been emphatically bossy about what we should eat. State micromanagement of taste has increased, too. After government intervention, British staples ranging from sticky-toffee pudding to Sugar Puffs have been reformulated beyond recognition. But the anti-meat crusade demands that something far more radical should happen – it seeks to stigmatise something central to many of our lives, and demands a shift in how we regard nature. As part of this, our media now seek to normalise lab-grown Frankenmeats, and strangest of all, adopt entomophagy – the practice of eating insects.
So what’s behind the war on meat? The apparent justification is the political elite’s great preoccupation of our time – climate change. We’re told that rearing livestock for meat is bad for the environment, and that cows are the worst offenders of all. That’s the assumption behind hit YouTube videos like Mark Rober’s “Feeding Bill Gates a fake burger (to save the world)”, a promotional video for Gates’ synthetic-meat investments, which has racked up nearly 46million views.
But the environmental argument doesn’t look so robust on closer examination. Agricultural CO2 emissions are small – so small that if the United States turned entirely vegan this decade, it would lower US emissions by just 2.6 per cent. In reality, a cow is a highly efficient protein-conversion system, turning protein that we can’t eat into protein that we love to eat. Three quarters of livestock, on balance, improve the environment, enhancing the yield of the land through fertiliser, which would otherwise need to be made synthetically. For example, one of the crimes regularly levelled against beef is water consumption. But the cow loses most of this water the same day – it’s returned to nature. So with environmental claims so weak, there must be some other rationale for the war on meat.
Much of today’s war on meat appears to be driven by venture capitalists, and their client journalists in the media. Ever eager for the next dot-com boom, Silicon Valley has made a bet on lab-grown, synthetic meat. This requires an industrial bioreactor – an expensive chemical process. But lab-grown meat doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Business Insider recently reported that scepticism about the sector is growing, as costs remain higher than those for real meat – and this is before one single laboratory-meat formula has received regulatory approval, let alone passed the consumer test.
Another factor driving the war on meat is the academic blob. For example, Professor Peter Smith, an environmental scientist at Aberdeen University and a leading contributor to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), likes to insist that “we’re not telling people to stop eating meat”, before adding that “it’s obvious that in the West we’re eating far too much”. Have a guess who defines what is “too much”. It’s Smith and his colleagues, not you or me making informed consumer choices.
But the oddest spectacle of all is the relentless promotion of entomophagy at the posh end of the media. The posher the paper, the keener they are on normalising bug-eating.
This is a campaign that has a high hurdle to overcome in most markets, where insects are associated with disease. “Deeply embedded in the Western psyche is a view of insects as dirty, disgusting and dangerous”, a group of academics found in 2014. Many bugs, such as cockroaches, carry disease. Flies like shit, as the saying goes. “Individuals vary in their sensitivity to disgust”, another academic paper acknowledges. “This sensitivity extends to three dimensions of disgust: core, animal reminder and contamination.” Only seven per cent of the US population would countenance the idea of eating insects, even in powdered form, according to one academic study in 2018. Processing insects also raises practical problems, with e-coli and salmonella. “Spore-forming bacteria and enterobacteriaceae have been reported in mealworms and crickets, with higher levels found in insects that had been crushed – likely due to the release of bacteria from the gut”, another study found. It’s easier to clean a cow’s stomach than a cockroach’s.
It should be no surprise, then, that the edible-insect movement has hit a few snags. Blythman recalls the startup, Eat Grub (geddit?), providing the snacks for an insect pop-up in London’s hipster East End. On the menu were “Thai-inspired” creations such as spicy cricket rice cakes and buffalo worms wrapped in betel leaf. “It tasted disgusting, and so I swallowed it whole. Then the legs stuck in my throat”, she recalls. The pop-up hasn’t returned. The following year, Sainsbury’s tapped Eat Grub for its first range of insect products – barbeque-flavoured crickets. Today, the only crickets you can buy at Sainsbury’s are cigarette lighters.
December 30, 2021
The Cursus Honorum of the late Roman Republic
At Founding Questions, Severian notes that the Cursus Honorum — the formal “career path” for ambitious men in the late Roman Republic was a remarkably effective process … that ended up being a victim of its own success:
Ahhh, God bless the autists at Wiki, they’ve got it down to a chart:
This is from Caesar’s time, and since one of this blog’s main themes is the confusion between process and outcome, let’s put it right up front: This system, the cursus honorum, was designed to produce men like Julius Caesar …
… and you can take that in either sense.
Caesar is one of the most mulled-over men in history, but nobody seriously doubts that he was at least competent at pretty much everything. Maybe he didn’t make the big list of “Greatest Pontifices Maximi” (or however the Latin goes), but he wasn’t a disgrace to the toga, either. If it was a public function in the Late Roman Republic, Caesar was at least decent at it.
And that’s what the cursus honorum was designed to do. It was a three-fer: It gave you competent public officials, but it also gave young ruling class men some seasoning. Most importantly, it was a way of nurturing talent that also hedged against the Peter Principle. If you want to argue that that makes it a four-fer, go nuts, but the point is, it was a pretty good system … up to a point, and if you’re a regular reader, you know what that point is: The Dunbar Number, at which point relationships become too complex to be managed personally, and bureaucratic structures replace them.
One wishes later governments had something like this — if a guy starts out as a quaestor and discovers he can’t handle it, he’ll bring that knowledge with him to the Senate. (Of course, if he can’t even manage to get elected to that, he’ll know full well his level of talent, and he’ll sit down and shut up on the Senate’s back benches). Note too that the bottom rung is military service — since at that time legionaries were all militia, the voters got a good look at you where it really matters, right from the beginning.
By the time a man reaches the top, then, he has intimate experience of ALL the public offices. Not only that, but he’s well known to everyone who matters, since in between the various offices he’s in the Senate, making connections (or out in the provinces, making other — but no less valuable — connections). A consul, then, is pretty much by definition omnicompetent. He did a good enough job in all the previous public offices that he didn’t disqualify himself for the top slot. Also, he’s been thoroughly vetted — everyone who matters, at pretty much every level of society, has had a good look at him (or, at worst, has a good friend who has had a good look at him).
Obviously it wasn’t a perfect system. Rome had her share of inept consuls, because people are people and sometimes “promotion to your level of incompetence” means “promotion to the very top job”. But for the most part it worked well, and even if a guy turned out to be a dud as consul, well, what can you do? Everyone had at least a reasonable expectation that he’d be able to handle it, which is pretty much the best one can consistently achieve in human affairs. Not only that, but because of the candidate’s long experience and careful vetting, you had a much better than average chance of getting a real winner …
… a man like Caesar, who is at minimum competent at everything, and outstanding at lots of things.
HogmaNO! Scottish government warns Scots not to cross the border to celebrate Hogmanay
In Scotland, one of the traditions of the winter is Hogmanay (spelled umpteen different ways), the last day of the old year, but Scottish public health and government officials are trying to keep the Scots away from the English border this year:
Scots have been urged not to travel to England for new year celebrations to get around the more stringent Covid-19 restrictions north of the border.
There is no travel ban currently in place to stop people going to England, where nightclubs are still open.
But Deputy First Minister John Swinney said doing so would go against the “spirit” of Scottish Covid-19 measures.
He said travelling would be “the wrong course of action” due to the “serious situation” with the Omicron variant.
Case numbers in Scotland hit “alarming” record highs over Christmas and Boxing Day, with the faster-spreading strain now accounting for the majority of all infections.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon — who is to update MSPs in a virtual sitting of the Scottish Parliament on Wednesday afternoon — said she expected the figures to rise even more in the days ahead.
Scots have been encouraged to stay at home as much as possible, and to limit any social gatherings to no more than three households.
Large events such as Edinburgh’s traditional Hogmanay street party have been cancelled, with extra curbs in hospitality settings and nightclubs shut down entirely.
Clubs remain open south of the border, where no new restrictions are being imposed, but Mr Swinney told BBC Breakfast that he would “discourage” anyone from travelling to England to see in the new year.
He said: “People are free to make their own judgments. But what we have got recognise is that Omicron is a serious threat to absolutely everybody within our society and we have all got to take measures to protect ourselves by limiting our social contacts and connections and by complying with the restrictions we have in place.
Despite the Scottish government’s warnings, English pubs along the (currently) undefended border are expecting over a hundred thousand thirsty Scots to invade on the 31st:
English border pubs are expecting upwards of 100,000 Scottish and Welsh revellers to cross into England on New Year’s Eve amid mounting anger at Nicola Sturgeon and Mark Drakeford for cracking down on festivities.
December 29, 2021
Theodore Dalrymple reviews the latest work from Thomas Piketty, Time for Socialism
Thomas Piketty has been a big name among progressives since his first book hit the bestseller lists, so the release of his latest work calls for some consideration from Theodore Dalrymple:
Piketty still writes clearly, though without much imaginative verve, and he has obviously consulted a lot of data. He is intelligent, knowledgeable, and decent, with a very firm grasp of unreality. He believes in a world in which economic levers act frictionlessly, or to borrow the description a doctor of my acquaintance has used with regard to his own medico-legal reports: “You turn the handle and the sausage comes out.”
There is no difference in his world between investment and expenditure. Thus, when he correctly ascribes low productivity in Britain to the low educational level of the general population (such that, in a predominantly service economy, much of it is unable even to answer the telephone properly or with reasonable courtesy), he ascribes it to lack of expenditure on education. If only this were the case! But lack of expenditure cannot possibly explain why about a fifth of children leave school barely literate. Incidentally, France seems to be progressing, if that is quite the word, in this direction.
We read that “Research in the social sciences, of which economics is an integral part, whatever some may think, is and always will be hesitant and imperfect. It is not designed to produce ready-made certainties … we have to examine patiently to endeavour to draw some provisional and uncertain lessons.” Amen to that! But modesty or tentativeness is not Professor Piketty’s main characteristic, nor does prudence once enter into his proposals.
There is no awareness that deterioration is possible as well as improvement, or of the fragility of things. Nothing counts for him but equality. He is to taxation policy what Le Corbusier was to architecture: he wants to prescribe (and proscribe) for the whole world. Above all, no variation! He would tell us how much we may possess, how much we may leave to our descendants or receive from our ancestors, how much we may earn in a year.
As an egalitarian and firm anti-nationalist, he does not explain why redistribution should stop at national borders. But try telling the average Frenchman that from now on he must forgo half his wealth in order to raise up Somalia or South Sudan! The book sometimes reads as if it were written by an electoral propagandist for Éric Zemmour, acting as an agent provocateur.
Uniformity is for him the price of unity (his countryman, Frédéric Bastiat, did not make the same mistake). He has little regard for, or even awareness of, the potential political consequences of some of his proposals. In his European Assembly, for example, which would have real power (unlike the current European Parliament), France, Spain, and Italy could and probably would outvote Germany with regard to economic policy. It does not occur to him that there could be few better ways of arousing dormant German nationalism than this. Nothing is certain, but much is possible; and while he mentions the internationalism of Jean-Luc Mélanchon, the left-wing French politician, he might also have mentioned that M. Mélenchon wrote a book about Germany and Germans that could easily have been written by a patriotic Frenchman in 1916.
Piketty is a strong believer in taxes as tools to make people more equal, and objects to the elimination of the wealth tax by the French government recently. Were he given the power, he would not only re-implement it, but vastly expand the taxes demanded of the wealthy.
[…] To all this, Professor Piketty has one sovereign remedy: tax the rich.
He thinks this is democratic because many, perhaps a majority, would vote for it. He has no problems with majoritarian democracy (provided the majority agrees with him): How can democracy be tyrannous? Thus, he sees no drawbacks in Senator Warren’s proposal to set a wealth tax and to provide — provide! — “an exit tax equal to 40% of total wealth for those who choose to leave the country and relinquish American citizenship.” Moreover, “the tax would apply to all assets, with no exemptions, with dissuasive sanctions for persons and governments who do not transmit appropriate information on assets held abroad.” Not only is this tyrannous with regard to individuals, but it is tyrannous with regard to international relations, providing a justification for American jurisdiction over the whole world. Needless to say, China, Russia, and India would never accept this, and might find allies. Conflict could become endless.
The answer to this little problem is obvious to Professor Piketty: a wealth tax worldwide, such that there would be nowhere for anyone to hide. There might be a few little teething problems with implementation — for example, who is to oversee it all — but think of the benefits: lie back and think of England! Professor Piketty has found the elixir of life, and it is taxation.
December 23, 2021
Cheshire and Durham in the English Parliament
In his end-of-the-year Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes looks at two of the historic counties of England that lacked Parliamentary representation until surprisingly late dates:
Cheshire and Durham (post-medieval boundaries: English county boundaries have varied wildly over the centuries).
Base map by Hogweard at Wikimedia Commons.
England, compared to other parts of Europe, is often said to have been remarkably centralised early on. France, for example, in the late eighteenth century had some thirteen or so regional parliaments, while Britain just had the one. Scotland’s separate parliament was famously dissolved in 1707, with the official union of Scotland with England. Wales gained representation at the English parliament at Westminster from 1536. So far so expected.
But less well-known is that the county of Cheshire — some of it now disappeared under Greater Manchester — used to have an entirely separate parliament of its own, and was not represented at Westminster until 1543. Arguably, it has about as much historical claim to a national assembly today as Wales. Rule of Cheshire was even, very briefly, included among the various titles of the monarch. Richard II, as well as being king of England, was in 1397-99 also styled “Prince of Chester”. He drew his personal bodyguard from among the men of Cheshire too. So whatever happened to Cheshire nationalism?
On a related note: the mantra “no taxation without representation” looms large in the history of American independence. But parts of England itself had gone unrepresented for decades too. County Durham, traditionally ruled by its prince-bishop, was not represented by any MPs in the House of Commons at all until 1654. And as it only gained representation under the revolutionary Protectorate, this was undone upon the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. The county would not be represented again until 1675.
Why? One might argue that the bishop of Durham, who sat in the House of Lords, could be considered its parliamentary representative. But he was not elected, and most importantly had little say over the matter of parliamentary taxation, which was controlled by the Commons. Before 1603 this was not much of an issue, as county Durham was exempt from various taxes because it was near the hostile Scottish border. But the accession of James VI of Scotland to become king of England meant that the hostile border suddenly disappeared. County Durham thus became subject to parliamentary taxation without having any say over those taxes at all — a situation that they then had to bear for over sixty years! Where were the Durham revolutionaries?
December 22, 2021
Repost – “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” versus “Happy Midwinter Break”
L. Neil Smith on the joy-sucking use of terms like “Happy Midwinter Break” to avoid antagonizing the non-religious among us at this time of year:
Original infographic from Treetopia – https://www.treetopia.com/Merry-Christmas-vs-Happy-Holidays-a/304.htm
Conservatives have long whimpered about corporate and government policies forbidding employees who make contact with the public to wish said members “Merry Christmas!” at the appropriate time of the year, out of a moronic and purely irrational fear of offending members of the public who don’t happen to be Christian, but are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Rastafarian, Ba’hai, Cthuluites, Wiccans, worshippers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or None of the Above. The politically correct benediction, these employees are instructed, is “Happy Holidays”.
Feh.
As a lifelong atheist, I never take “Merry Christmas” as anything but a cheerful and sincere desire to share the spirit of the happiest time of the year. I enjoy Christmas as the ultimate capitalist celebration. It’s a multiple-usage occasion and has been so since the dawn of history. I wish them “Merry Christmas” right back, and I mean it.
Unless I wish them a “Happy Zagmuk”, sharing the oldest midwinter festival in our culture I can find any trace of. It’s Babylonian, and celebrates the victory of the god-king Marduk over the forces of Chaos.
But as anybody with the merest understanding of history and human nature could have predicted, if you give the Political Correctness Zombies (Good King Marduk needs to get back to work again) an Angstrom unit, they’ll demand a parsec. It now appears that for the past couple of years, as soon as the Merry Christmases and Happy Holidayses start getting slung around, a certain professor (not of Liberal Arts, so he should know better) at a nearby university (to remain unnamed) sends out what he hopes are intimidating e-mails, scolding careless well-wishers, and asserting that these are not holidays (“holy days”) to everyone, and that the only politically acceptable greeting is “Happy Midwinter Break”. He signs this exercise in stupidity “A Jewish Faculty Member”.
Double feh.
Two responses come immediately to mind, both of them derived from good, basic Anglo-Saxon, which is not originally a Christian language. As soon as the almost overwhelming temptation to use them has been successfully resisted, there are some other matters for profound consideration…
December 18, 2021
The bully doesn’t actually want you to do this one thing they demand, they want your constant submission to all demands
Charles Eisenstein on the ongoing relationship between the citizens of most western countries and their governments:
The relationship between our governing authorities and the public today bears many similarities to the abuser-victim dynamic. Facing a bully, it is futile to hope that the bully will relent if you don’t resist. Acquiescence invites further humiliation. Similarly, it is wishful thinking to hope that the authorities will simply hand back the powers they have seized over the course of the pandemic. Indeed, if our rights and freedoms exist only by the whim of those authorities, conditional on their decision to grant them, then they are not rights and freedoms at all, but only privileges. By its nature, freedom is not something one can beg for; the posture of begging already grants the power relations of subjugation. The victim can beg the bully to relent, and maybe he will — temporarily — satisfied that the relation of dominance has been affirmed. The victim is still not free of the bully.
That is why I feel impatient when someone speaks of “When the pandemic is over” or “When we are able to travel again” or “When we are able to have festivals again.” None of these things will happen by themselves. Compared to past pandemics, Covid is more a social-political phenomenon than it is an actual deadly disease. Yes, people are dying, but even assuming that everyone in the official numbers died “of” and not “with” Covid, casualties number one-third to one-ninth those of the 1918 flu; per-capita it is one-twelfth to one-thirty-sixth. As a sociopolitical phenomenon, there is no guaranteed end to it. Nature will not end it, at any rate; it will end only through the agreement of human beings that it has ended. This has become abundantly clear with the Omicron Variant. Political leaders, public health officials, and the media are whipping up fear and reinstituting policies that would have been unthinkable a few years ago for a disease that, at the present writing, has killed one person globally. So, we cannot speak of the pandemic ever being over unless we the people declare it to be over.
Of course, I could be wrong here. Perhaps Omicron is, as World Medical Association chairman Frank Ulrich Montgomery has warned, as dangerous as Ebola. Regardless, the question remains: will we allow ourselves to be held forever hostage to the possibility of an epidemic disease? That possibility will never disappear.
Another thing I’ve been hearing a lot of recently is that “Covid tyranny is bound to end soon, because people just aren’t going to stand for it much longer.” It would be more accurate to say, “Covid tyranny will continue until people no longer stand for it.” That brings up the question, “Am I standing for it?” Or am I waiting for other people to end it for me, so that I don’t have to? In other words, am I waiting for the rescuer, so that I needn’t take the risk of standing up to the bully?
If you do put up with it, waiting for others to resist instead, then you affirm a general principle of “waiting for others to do it.” Having affirmed that principle, the forlorn hope that others will resist rings hollow. Why should I believe others will do what I’m unwilling to do? That is why pronouncements about the inevitability of a return to normalcy, though they seem hopeful, carry an aura of delusion and despair.
In fact, there is no obvious limit to what people will put up with, just as there is no limit to what an abusive power will do to them.
H/T to Perry de Havilland for the link.
King James and the search for ready cash
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes outlines how and why England’s new Stuart king found himself in desperate financial straits very early in his reign:
King James I (of England) and VI (of Scotland)
Portrait by Daniel Myrtens, 1621 from the National Portrait Gallery via Wikimedia Commons.
… after a generous honeymoon period of about a year, he and his government soon discovered that they were leaking cash. Despite eliminating the costly wars in Spain and in Ireland, James still had to pay off the debts that his predecessor Elizabeth I had incurred in fighting them. And he had a more extensive, and expensive, royal family to support. He traded the one-off expenses of war for the ongoing expenses of a profligate court.
This may sound like a good deal. James effectively stopped the English Crown splashing out money on really big but infrequent expenses, while increasing its ongoing expenditure — like refraining from buying a new car every few years, while spending a lot more each month eating out at restaurants.
But the Crown’s sources of revenue were ill-suited to this change. The funding for wars had been voted to Elizabeth by Parliament, usually as and when the need arose. Such expenditures were matters of national interest, and she otherwise just relied on other sources of income — ongoing taxes like customs duties, or simply the rent from her lands. When the one-off “subsidies” granted to her by Parliament had not quite been sufficient to cover the costs of the wars, Elizabeth had made up the difference by keeping her own ongoing expenses as low as possible, and took out loans to fill any gaps. It also helped that in the years before crises, Elizabeth had tried to run a surplus, building up a war-chest of cash to dip into.
So switching to the new pattern of expenditure was not straightforward. To increase the Crown’s ongoing expenses, it would have to find more sources of ongoing income, especially as it was already in deficit and had loans to pay off. It was politically impossible for James to ask Parliament for extra one-off subsidies to help him bridge the gap, as some of Elizabeth’s subsidies from 1601 had yet to even be collected. He did actually test the waters about what would happen if he did ask, just in case, but when the matter was raised by some would-be sycophants, it was met with outrage. As one member of Parliament angrily put it, “we have no sheep that yields two fleeces in the year.”
The country was already feeling over-taxed, there were no looming crises to justify such extra taxation, and even if there were, such one-off measures would be unsustainable. James needed to find revenue streams to match his spending leak — and ideally, to even exceed it. His ministers fretted about getting the Crown back into surplus again, to build up another war-chest. Who knew when the next war or rebellion might arise.
So when James called his first Parliament in 1604, it was not really to ask for one-off subsidies as Elizabeth had so often done. Instead, he and his ministers focused on outlining a series of financial deals.
December 14, 2021
The Omicron variant of the Wuhan Coronavirus
Jim Treacher gets to the essential question about the dreaded and fast-spreading Omicron variant that the media somehow always forgets to ask:
We’ve seen a lot of headlines about the Omicron variant, which is the latest thing we’re all supposed to panic about. That’s how it works: You must be driven into a perpetual state of hysteria. You must never be allowed a moment to stop and catch your breath and think about what’s happening, because you might fall into badthink. The latest name for that is Omicron.
Omicron! OMG!! Run around like a headless chicken!!!
But here’s a question that none of our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters in the press are asking, because they have no incentive to ask: How many people have died of Omicron?
Like, in the entire world. It doesn’t need to be a precise number. A rough estimate is fine. You can round up to the nearest 10.
Anybody? Hello?
I’m not sure how trustworthy Snopes is, but they say the number so far is … zero.
Zip.
Zilch.
Goose egg.
1 – 1.
None.
So please excuse me if I don’t freak the hell out every time somebody gets Omicron. Every story about it lists the number of cases but glosses over minor little details. Like what happens to the people who get it.
Do they get sick?
If so, how sick do they get?
If not, what’s the problem?
The media is just selling fear, as usual. Yes, COVID-19 is real, and a lot of people have died. No, nobody is dying from this Omicron variant. That’s good news, which is why the “news” isn’t interested.
Of course, on the weekend British PM Boris Johnson announced the death of someone in Britain who had contracted the Omicron variant … but it’s not clear if the person’s death was a direct result of that infection. So, we know at least one person has died with the Omicron variant, but we don’t know if it was from it.
December 10, 2021
Shovel-ready infrastructure we’re already busy working on … the superhighway to serfdom
Jacob T. Levy considers the warning about authoritarian solutions to societal problems given by Friedrich A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom and shows just how little we heeded his concerns:
It is well-known that the classical liberal economist F.A. Hayek dedicated The Road to Serfdom to “socialists of all parties”, and wrote the book “as a warning to the socialist intelligentsia of England.” I suspect we now understate the importance of these facts. After decades of the Cold War and self-conscious conservative-libertarian “fusionism” in both the U.S. and Britain, what sticks in our memory of The Road to Serfdom is its defense of liberal open markets against economic planning and regulation of the sort advocated on the left. That is of course how it was wielded in the post-2008 surge in interest in it, in the wake of the financial crisis and the subsequent bailouts and stimulus packages: as a weapon of the right.
But if Hayek’s argument characterized socialist planning and regulation as a slippery slope, the slope did not only slope down toward the left. Fascist Italy and Germany figure even more prominently than the USSR in the book’s image of the despotism being risked:
It is necessary now to state the unpalatable truth that it is Germany whose fate we are now in some danger of repeating … students of the current of ideas can hardly fail to see that there is more than a superficial similarity between the trend of thought in Germany during and after [World War I] and the present current of ideas in the democracies … And at least nine out of every ten of the lessons which our most vociferous reformers are so anxious we should learn from this war are precisely lessons which the Germans did learn from the last war and which have done so much to produce the Nazi system … [A]t an interval of fifteen to twenty-five years we seem to follow the example of Germany.
In the face of resurgent right-wing populist and nationalist authoritarianism in the world, it is worth reconsidering the legacy of The Road to Serfdom and of Hayek’s work to bolster liberalism.
Hayek warned of centralizing and authoritarian urges of both the left and the right, but it’s in the “permanent” government — the civil servants who remain in office regardless of electoral outcomes — that much of the danger to individual liberty lies:
Throughout Hayek is concerned for constitutional parliamentary government and the rule of law, and their protection against arbitrary government. The idea that freedom requires clear and general rules of conduct anonymously applicable to all — that government run by ad hoc edict is oppressive — was to be the major theme of his subsequent works in political theory, The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation, and Liberty; but it is central to the argument of Road to Serfdom as well.
In the preface to the 1956 edition, Hayek described the postwar Labour government as having created a bureaucratic “despotism exercised by a thoroughly conscientious and honest bureaucracy for what they sincerely believe is the good of the country. But it is nevertheless an arbitrary government, in practice free from parliamentary control; and its machinery would be as effective for any other than the beneficent purposes for which it is now used.”
Here one hears a predecessor of the widespread classical liberal “we told you so” after the election, blaming the Obama administration for increasing the presidential power that the Trump administration would now inherit. But it is worth emphasizing that Hayek still called the purposes pursued by the left-wing bureaucratic state “beneficent”.
The tone Hayek adopts here is not the schadenfreude of contemporary whataboutism. Now that “hot socialism is probably a thing of the past” (hardly what one would expect Hayek to say were he the determinist caricature sometimes embraced by fans as well as critics), the welfare state calls for “careful sorting out” in the pursuit of its “practical and laudable” aims. He calls for the welfare state and social insurance to be implemented through general rules and fiscal policy rather than administrative coercion, nationalization, and direct economic planning, because the latter instruments “are not compatible with the preservation of a free society.”
H/T to Tamara Keel for the link.
December 9, 2021
QotD: “The Knowledge” of London’s licensed cab drivers
Obtaining the Knowledge is a formidable intellectual feat: indeed, neuroscientists have used it to demonstrate by brain scans differences between London taxi drivers and others in the possession of spatial knowledge and powers of orientation. And the result of the regulation requiring the Knowledge is that London taxi drivers, besides being small businessmen working largely on their own account and therefore committed to their profession, are generally intelligent, capable men. No doubt the advent of GPS will reduce the need for much of this effort, at least among unlicensed drivers, who were never required to have it anyway. The license was, and is, a guarantee of quality; and the point remains that regulation is not sometimes without benefit to the public.
What do the regulation of London taxi drivers and the success of the vaccination program have in common? I think that it is in the clarity, but also in the modesty, of their goals. The object of the regulation of taxi drivers, for example, is to produce a large cadre of drivers who provide an excellent public service — and the means to achieve this object are unmistakably and obviously connected to that goal. Any group comprising tens of thousands of human beings will contain some who fall below, even much below, the standard desired, but I know of no profession whose members more approximate its ideal. The drivers are justly proud of what they are. There have been no efforts to make saints, or even good people, of them; all that is required is that no ill be known of them and that they have the requisite knowledge. In 50 years of taking London taxis, I’ve never had a bad experience and have had innumerable good ones.
Theodore Dalrymple, “A Cure for Government Incompetence”, City Journal, 2021-08-30.
