Quotulatiousness

February 16, 2025

Canada – parliamentary democracy or elected dictatorship?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

During the entire dramatic confrontation with Donald Trump, Canada’s parliament has been prorogued … effectively meaning that the opposition can’t hold the government to task for how it is handling Trump’s aggression. In any other western country, parliament would have been in session all the way through this, but because Justin Trudeau was aware that his government might be defeated in the house, he chose to ask the Governor General to prorogue until late March.

Not everyone has been meekly accepting Trudeau’s position, and the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms is challenging the prorogation in Federal Court. Dan Knight updates us on the progress of the hearing:

Arms of the Federal Court of Canada

We are now in Day 2 of the Federal Court hearing, where Justin Trudeau’s government is trying to convince a judge that shutting down Parliament to avoid Well, folks, here we are. Day two of the Federal Court showdown, where the Trudeau government is desperately trying to convince Canadians that shutting down Parliament to protect their own hide was a completely reasonable thing to do. They want you to believe that this is all perfectly normal, that it’s routine, that it’s just a quirk of the system. Nothing to see here, folks!

But the problem with lying is that eventually, you get caught. And on Day 2 of this hearing, Justin Trudeau’s legal team got caught. Over and over again.

If you watched what unfolded in court, you saw the Trudeau government’s lawyers flailing like fish on dry land, fumbling through weak excuses as Chief Justice Paul S. Crampton shredded their arguments one by one. At one point, they actually misrepresented a legal precedent in court, only for the Chief Justice to read the case aloud and reveal that it actually contradicted their argument. Humiliating.

And that was just the start.

This case isn’t just about whether Trudeau technically had the ability to prorogue Parliament. It’s about why he did it — and more importantly, whether Canada is now a country where the Prime Minister can shut down democracy whenever it gets inconvenient for him. Because if the courts let this stand, what’s stopping the next Prime Minister from proroguing indefinitely? What’s stopping the government from suspending Parliament every time there’s a corruption scandal, every time they fear a non-confidence vote, every time they need to cover up a mess of their own making?

And that’s exactly what Trudeau did. His government was facing multiple crises all at once — a massive financial scandal, a looming non-confidence vote, and an economic firestorm caused by Trump’s tariff threats. So rather than actually dealing with it, he shut Parliament down. The question is: Did he have the right to do that?

[…]

The Chief Justice has promised to issue a ruling before Parliament resumes on March 24. That means this case will be decided before Trudeau can walk away and pretend none of this ever happened.

If the court rules against the government, it will mean that future Prime Ministers cannot abuse prorogation to avoid scrutiny. It will send a clear message that shutting down Parliament to protect yourself is unconstitutional and illegal.

But if the government wins, it will mean that the Prime Minister can shut down democracy anytime he wants. It will mean that Canada is no longer a functioning parliamentary system but a country where the executive can do whatever it pleases.

And if that happens, ask yourself this: What’s stopping the next Prime Minister from just shutting down Parliament indefinitely?

Trudeau might be stepping down soon, but his legacy of corruption, incompetence, and political cowardice will haunt this country for years. The question now is whether the courts will allow him to rewrite the rules of democracy on his way out the door.

We’ll find out soon.

Update: Fixed broken link.

February 8, 2025

QotD: American gun rights

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I was asked last night why, when I talk about politics, I focus on gun rights so much. Surely, said querent, there are lots of other important things for a libertarian like you to weigh in on. Censorship. DEI. AGW hysteria. The list goes on …

Fair question. It’s because many years ago L. Neil Smith, a libertarian SF writer sadly no longer with us, persuaded me of something important.

A politician’s attitude about firearms rights is a very reliable index for his actual attitude about individual freedom and agency.

Never mind what they say about other issues. A politician standing up for the right of ordinary citizens to be armed is sending a very reliable signal that he values their ability to assert their freedom, and trusts them to generally make correct choices about the use of violence even it might be directed against himself.

Conversely, a politician who is against gun rights is telling on himself. He fears the wrath of the people and wants them disempowered. He does not trust them to employ violence only when necessary.

And that’s actually the best case. In far too many cases, anti-gun politicians clearly dream of being the jackboot that stomps on human faces forever, and view the disarmament of the general population as a step towards that end.

If I must have politicians meddling in my affairs, I demand at the very least that they respect my freedom and my agency. That’s why I demand that they respect my right to keep and bear arms.

Gun rights may look like a narrow single issue. It isn’t. It’s an even better index of a politician’s attitude about liberty than questions about free speech and censorship, because it pushes the stakes higher. Because words can’t kill you, but arms wielded by enraged citizens can.

No matter what soothing words drop from his lips, no matter what promises he makes, the politician who tries to disarm you is always, always, always your enemy. Never forget that.

ESR, Twitter, 2024-11-06.

January 28, 2025

What Britain desperately needs is common-sense pointy stick controls

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Britain’s gun laws make Canada look like the wild west, yet the government still wants far greater control over objects that can be used as weapons. The conviction of the Southport murderer, who used a knife obtained through Amazon, seems to have given the British government under Kurt Stürmer Keir Starmer an excuse to crack down even further on any kind of device with a sharpened blade rather than the criminals who wield them:

Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana.
Photo released by Merseyside Police.

“Time and again, as a child, the Southport murderer carried knives. Time and again, he showed clear intent to use them,” U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer wrote in a piece for The Sun about Axel Rudakubana, who admitted murdering three girls and injuring others at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last year. “And yet tragically, he was still able to order the murder weapon off of the internet without any checks or barriers. A two-click killer. This cannot continue. The technology is there to set up age-verification checks, even for kitchen knives ordered online.”

What Starmer mentioned but glossed over is that Rudakubana was three times referred to a program intended to divert people from radicalization and terrorism before authorities lost interest in him. At the time of his arrest, he had a copy of an Al Qaeda training manual, which led him to being charged and sentenced for terrorism. He also possessed the deadly poison ricin that he’d manufactured himself in sufficient quantity to conduct a mass attack.

Rudakubana was a human bomb waiting to go off. But Starmer focused not on officials’ failure to pay attention, but on knives — edged tools that are among humans’ earliest and most important creations.

“Online retailers will be required to ask for two types of ID from anyone seeking to buy a knife under plans being considered by ministers to combat under-age sales after the Southport murders,” reports Charles Hymas of The Telegraph. “Buyers would have to submit an ID document to an online retailer and then record a live video or selfie to prove their age.”

It’s difficult to see how an ID check is going to stand between those planning mayhem and tools first crafted 2.6 million years ago in their most primitive form and still used by people every day. My dentist forges knives in his backyard for fun. One of my nephews turns files into knives on a grinding wheel. Scraping an appropriate material against a stone will give you an edge and a point. ID checks don’t seem like a barrier to people with bad intentions and the ability to make ricin in their bedrooms.

A Case History in Ridiculously Restrictive Policies

This is why the U.K. strikes many Americans as the reductio ad absurdum of policies that demonize objects rather than targeting bad actors. Opponents of authoritarian laws ask: What will the authorities do once they’ve made firearms difficult to legally acquire, and crime continues? Will they ban knives?

The answer from the U.K., which already has restrictive gun laws, is yes, they will ban knives — or at least impose access and carry restrictions and consider forbidding blades to have points. The result has been a black market in smuggled and illicitly manufactured firearms that will inevitably extend to knives. Harmless people are now arrested for having Swiss Army knives in car glove compartment or for possessing locking knives on the way home from jobs that require them. And the country’s crime problems continue to grow.

That’s bad enough, but U.K. authorities, like those elsewhere, also prefer to surveil the entire population to detect anything they could call a danger to public order, rather than focusing on specific individuals harming others.

“There are now said to be over 5.2 million CCTV cameras in the UK,” according to Politics.co.uk. “Surveillance footage forms a key component of UK crime prevention strategy,” but “the proliferation of CCTV in public places has fueled unease about the erosion of civil liberties and individual human rights, raising concerns of an Orwellian ‘big brother’ culture.”

The British government also monitors online activity to an extent that Edward Snowden deemed it “the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy.”

That surveillance turns up comments, jokes, and rants authorities just don’t like. “Think before you post,” the government warns people. “Content that incites violence or hatred isn’t just harmful – it can be illegal.” But the authorities enforce a broad definition of unacceptable material. People have been arrested for dressing as terrorists for Halloween, for making intemperate online remarks, and for just getting things wrong when posting on the internet (they’ll need a big paddy wagon for that one).

January 25, 2025

“How can an active program of ending censorship; of lauding colour blind appointment on merit; … be Fascism redux?”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

As discussed yesterday, one of the many “hitting the ground running” acts of Donald Trump at the beginning of his second term in office has been to issue executive orders to dismantle a lot of progressives’ favourite policies, and many of them are calling it “fascism”:

Trump-the-Presidency 2.0 has already proved to be rather different from the 1.0 version. It is not merely that this time around he won the US popular vote. It is that he has “hit the ground running” with a whole stack of executive orders.

Watching the reaction to this has become — to put it mildly — a somewhat bifurcated experience. Lots of people, who were relieved at his victory, applaud what they see as a return to common sense; a rejection of censorship; a rejection of a politics intrusive into any and all aspects of life.

Conversely, there are also lots of — typically very online — people who see it as Fascism redux, as the equivalent of the end of Weimar Germany being live-streamed. How can an active program of ending censorship; of lauding colour blind appointment on merit; of removing DEI commissars from the US Federal Government; that includes appointment of women and persons of colour to senior positions; be Fascism redux?

The short answer is: it isn’t. The question then becomes, how can it be seen as such? This is where the long-run consequences of anti-discrimination law kicks in.

Anti-discrimination law creates a legal-bureaucratic structure that operates on the basis that the general citizenry is continually hovering on the edge of wrong think (racism) and wrong act (discrimination). The presumption becomes — without all this active effort — racism and discrimination will be unleashed.

This is nonsense. Anglosphere countries have low levels of racism and anti-discrimination norms have become widely accepted. Where there are discrimination issues, they are mostly problems of cultural distance that have a significant element of practicality from differing expectations between groups.

Nevertheless, it is very much in the interests of the legal-bureaucratic structure that anti-discrimination law sets up that propensities to wrong act and wrong think be seen as real, and endemic. Even better, is if the problem is seen as even larger than originally conceived.

So, we get a double expansion. The first expansion is in the range of protected groups. This provides a broadening of the social ambit of the potential wrong thinking (racism, misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia …) and of the potential wrong acting (who might be discriminated against).

As this moral dimension becomes so elevated—not least because there are so much employment involved, but also as considerable social leverage is created by for those who can set what is, or is not, legitimate action and speech—there is expansion of what constitutes wrong think and wrong act. There is large, indeed expanding, ambit for intellectual and other entrepreneurs to identify new sins of discrimination, new sins of unequal consideration, new ways wrong think propagates, and new ways of signalling one’s rejection of such sins.

It is better still if uttering true things becomes a wrong act, expressing wrong think, for people are prone to do that, to notice things. Of course, if you start trying to shun, shame and punish folk for expressing true things, for noticing things, you are likely to generate quite a lot of resentment. This is useful, for such pushback just further “establishes” the propensity to wrong think and wrong act. Hence Transphobia and Islamophobia becoming such markers of wrong think—there are so many true things to not notice.

There is even a term for someone who notices inconvenient patterns — far right. A term that has become the classic thought-terminating cliché in the service of not noticing.

January 24, 2025

When the law schools went woke

Filed under: Education, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the New English Review, Bruce Bawer reviews Ilya Shapiro’s book Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites:

As Donald Trump begins his second term as president with a mandate to undo the damage done to the country by leftist ideology, incompetence, and corruption, one of the many stables that most need cleaning up is academia – which is, of course, the source of virtually all of the most misbegotten ideas that have sent America astray.

To be sure, some parts of academia are more desperately in need of reform than others. As a rule, the elite universities, especially those in the Ivy League, are more poisoned by the new progressivism than most state schools, especially those in the heartland. Humanities and social science departments are worse off than STEM departments. And as Ilya Shapiro points out in his important new book, Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elite, the introduction of woke thinking into law schools is singularly damaging.

Yes, writes Shapiro, it’s unfortunate enough if, say, a sociology faculty is selling ideology rather than fact, for it represents “a loss to the richness of life and the accumulation of human knowledge”. But for a law school to head down the same road is far more perilous. For these schools turn out the lawyers, politicians, and judges who will serve as “the gatekeepers of our institutions and of the rules of the game on which American prosperity, liberty, and equality sit”.

And the sad fact, alas, is that in too many American law schools today, a preponderance of students are the products of classrooms in which, as Shapiro puts it, “the classical pedagogical model of legal education” has been abandoned in favor of “the postmodern activist one” – a process that has been underway for decades but that was greatly accelerated during the Covid pandemic and in the wake of the irrational nationwide hysteria over the killing of George Floyd. Hence those students swallow such dangerous notions as critical race theory and its corollary, critical legal theory, and therefore believe that colorblind justice, due process, and freedom of speech aren’t desiderata but tools of white supremacy.

Lawless has its roots in Shapiro’s own hellish encounter with this ideological leviathan. It happened like this: on January 26, 2022, the day that Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement, Shapiro tweeted that the “best pick” for a replacement was Sri Srinivasan, who, if appointed by President Biden, would be the “first Asian (Indian) American” on the Court. Yet because Biden had promised to name a black woman, lamented Shapiro, “we’ll get [a] lesser black woman”. After sending off the tweet, Shapiro went to bed – and awoke in the morning to discover that his comment had caused pandemonium in the legal community, where he was being viciously attacked as a racist and a sexist. Shapiro immediately deleted the tweet and issued an apology for expressing his opinion in such an “inartful” manner.

But that wasn’t the end of it. As it happened, Shapiro, who had just left the Cato Institute, was scheduled to take up a new position at Georgetown University’s school of law in five days. And unluckily for him, the dean of the law school, William M. Treanor, was a wimp of the first order, the kind of craven academic administrator who’s quick to cave to the noisiest and most radical elements. On January 27, Treanor issued a statement in which he represented Shapiro as believing that “the best Supreme Court nominee could not be a Black woman”.

This was the height of disingenuity: it was clear that Shapiro simply meant that Biden shouldn’t limit the pool of possible nominees on the basis of sex or race – a view shared by three-quarters of the American public. But as Shapiro would soon discover, under the current dispensation at woke law schools “what matters is not the objective meaning of a given statement or even its intent but its effect – not the facts but the feelings”.

So it was that Treanor ordered an elaborate and expensive “investigation” by a top-dollar law firm into Shapiro’s tweet – yes, an investigation into a tweet. Ludicrously, it took more than four months – during which Shapiro’s new job was put on hold. In the end, the “investigators” concluded that Shapiro had indeed expressed an offensive opinion but permitted him to start work at Georgetown. Wisely, Shapiro decided that, given everything that had happened, Georgetown would not be a comfortable fit for him – at least not with Treanor at the helm – and chose instead to accept a job offer from the Manhattan Institute, where he works today.

January 23, 2025

Do you want an imperial presidency, because this is how you get an imperial presidency

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Law, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On paper, prime ministers in Westminster parliamentary systems have more power, but the US president has more immediate, practical power to direct government activity using totally non-democratic executive orders. Democrats didn’t mind that when it was Obama wielding the pen, but they’re incandescent now that it’s the Bad Orange Man inking rules into existence. MAGA Republicans hated when Joe Biden’s ventriloquist was writing the orders, but suddenly it’s fine because it’s their president doing it. In neither case is democracy safe:

A quick image search turns up plenty of examples of Presidents proudly showing off freshly signed documents. Usually these will be laws passed by the legislators but sometimes (especially in January 2025) it’s rule-by-decree on steroids.

Well before President Donald Trump returned to office, his supporters boasted that he would start the second term with a flurry of executive actions. The new president exceeded expectations with an avalanche of pardons, orders, and edicts on matters great and small. Some should be welcomed by anybody hoping for more respect for liberty by government employees. Others extend state power in ways that are worrisome or even illegitimate. All continue the troubling trend over the course of decades and administrations from both parties for the president to assume the role of an elected monarch.

From an Interoffice Memo to “Shock and Awe”

“When President Trump takes office next Monday, there is going to be shock and awe with executive orders,” Sen. John Barrasso (R–Wyo.) predicted last week.

The president signed some of those orders as he bantered in the Oval Office with members of the press, engaging in more interaction than we saw from his predecessor over months. Wide-ranging in their scope, Trump’s orders “encompassed sweeping moves to reimagine the country’s relationship with immigration, its economy, global health, the environment and even gender roles,” noted USA Today.

Executive orders, which made up the bulk of Trump’s actions (he also pardoned and commuted the sentences of participants in the January 6 Capitol riot), are basically interoffice memos from the boss to executive branch agencies. “The President of the United States manages the operations of the Executive branch of Government through Executive orders,” according to the Office of the Federal Register of the National Archives and Records Administration.

That doesn’t sound like much — and at first, it wasn’t. Executive orders as we know them evolved into their modern form from notes and directives sent by the president to members of the cabinet and other executive branch officials. Nobody tried to catalog them until 1907.

But because executive branch officials interpret and enforce thickets of laws and administrative rules under which we try to live, guidance from the boss is powerful. Interpreted one way, a rule regulating unfinished gun parts leaves people free to pursue their hobbies; interpreted another, and those owning the parts are suddenly felons. The president can push interpretations either way.

They Can Be Used Correctly, or Abusively

So, some of Trump’s executive orders are very welcome, indeed, for those of us horrified by federal agencies pushing the boundaries of their power.

“The vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end,” Trump said in his inaugural address regarding an order intended to punish politically motivated use of government power. “I also will sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America,” he added of another.

January 20, 2025

“You can’t have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn’t mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Kat Rosenfield shares her concerns about what the accusations against Neil Gaiman indicate about the problems with allowing women to be legally unreliable narrators:

There’s a moment in the Gaiman exposé where the main accuser, Scarlett Pavlovich, sends him a text message asking him how he’s doing. Gaiman says he’s struggling: he’s heard from people close to him that Pavlovich plans to accuse him of rape. “I thought that we were a good thing and a very consensual thing indeed,” he writes.

“It was consensual (and wonderful)!” she replies.

Except: she doesn’t mean it. We know this because Lila Shapiro, the author of the piece, breaks in to tell us as much:

    Pavlovich remembers her palms sweating, hot coils in her stomach. She was terrified of upsetting Gaiman. “I was disconnected from everybody else at that point in my life,” she tells me. She rushed to reassure him.

But also, we know this because she didn’t mean it is sort of an ongoing theme, here. And that’s what I want to talk about.

By this point in the article we’ve been instructed, explicitly and repeatedly, that you can’t assume a relationship was consensual just because all parties involved gave consent. “Sexual abuse is one of the most confusing forms of violence that a person can experience. The majority of people who have endured it do not immediately recognize it as such; some never do,” Shapiro writes in one section. In another, she explains that it doesn’t matter if the women played along with Gaiman when he asked them to call him “master” or eat their own feces because “BDSM is a culture with a set of long-standing norms” to which Gaiman didn’t strictly adhere (as the meme goes, it’s only BDSM if it comes from the BDSM region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling feces-eating sadomasochism.)

Shapiro spends a lot of time thumbing the scale like this, and for good reason: without the repeated reminders that sexual abuse is so confusing and hard to recognize, to the point where some victims go their whole lives mistaking a violent act for a consensual one, most readers would look at Pavlovich’s behavior (including the “it was wonderful” text message as well as her repeated and often aggressive sexual overtures toward Gaiman) and conclude that however she felt about the relationship later, her desire for him was genuine at the time — or at least, that Gaiman could be forgiven for thinking it was. To make Pavlovich a more sympathetic protagonist (and Gaiman a more persuasive villain), the article has to assert that her seemingly self-contradictory behavior is not just understandable but reasonable. Normal. Typical. If Pavlovich lied and said a violent act was consensual (and wonderful), that’s just because women do be like that sometimes.

Obviously, this paradigm imposes a very weird, circular trap on men (#BelieveWomen, except the ones who say they want to sleep with you, in which case you should commence a Poirot-style interrogation until she breaks down and confesses that she actually finds you repulsive.) But I’m more interested in what happens to women when they’re cast in this role of society’s unreliable narrators: so vulnerable to coercion, and so socialized to please, that even the slightest hint of pressure causes the instantaneous and irretrievable loss of their agency.

The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they’ll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it’s not just sex they can’t reasonably consent to. It’s medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs. If half the world’s adult population are actually just smol beans — hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy — everything starts to fall apart, including the entire feminist project. You can’t have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn’t mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes.

January 6, 2025

QotD: The right to bear arms

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Thomas Jefferson’s question, posed in his inaugural address of 1801, still stings. If a man cannot be trusted with the government of himself, how can he be trusted with the government of others? And this is where history and politics circle back to ethics and psychology: because “the dignity of a free (wo)man” consists in being competent to govern one’s self, and in knowing, down to the core of one’s self, that one is so competent.

And that is where ethics and psychology bring us back to the bearing of arms. For causality runs both ways here; the dignity of a free man is what makes one ethically competent to bear arms, and the act of bearing arms promotes (by teaching its hard and subtle lessons) the inner qualities that compose the dignity of a free man.

It is not always so, of course. There is a 3% or so of psychotics, drug addicts, and criminal deviants who are incapable of the dignity of free men. Arms in the hands of such as these do not promote virtue, but are merely instruments of tragedy and destruction. But so, too, are cars. And kitchen knives. And bricks. The ethically incompetent readily (and effectively) find other means to destroy and terrorize when denied arms. And when civilian arms are banned, they more readily find helpless victims.

But for the other 97%, the bearing of arms functions not merely as an assertion of power but as a fierce and redemptive discipline. When sudden death hangs inches from your right hand, you become much more careful, more mindful, and much more peaceful in your heart — because you know that if you are thoughtless or sloppy in your actions or succumb to bad temper, people will die.

Too many of us have come to believe ourselves incapable of this discipline. We fall prey to the sick belief that we are all psychopaths or incompetents under the skin. We have been taught to imagine ourselves armed only as villains, doomed to succumb to our own worst nature and kill a loved one in a moment of carelessness or rage. Or to end our days holed up in a mall listening to police bullhorns as some SWAT sniper draws a bead …

But it’s not so. To believe this is to ignore the actual statistics and generative patterns of weapons crimes. “Virtually never”, writes criminologist Don B. Kates, “are murderers the ordinary, law-abiding people against whom gun bans are aimed. Almost without exception, murderers are extreme aberrants with lifelong histories of crime, substance abuse, psychopathology, mental retardation and/or irrational violence against those around them, as well as other hazardous behavior, e.g., automobile and gun accidents.”

To believe one is incompetent to bear arms is, therefore, to live in corroding and almost always needless fear of the self — in fact, to affirm oneself a moral coward. A state further from “the dignity of a free man” would be rather hard to imagine. It is as a way of exorcising this demon, of reclaiming for ourselves the dignity and courage and ethical self-confidence of free (wo)men that the bearing of personal arms, is, ultimately, most important.

This is the final ethical lesson of bearing arms: that right choices are possible, and the ordinary judgement of ordinary (wo)men is sufficient to make them.

We can, truly, embrace our power and our responsibility to make life-or-death decisions, rather than fearing both. We can accept our ultimate responsibility for our own actions. We can know (not just intellectually, but in the sinew of experience) that we are fit to choose.

Eric S. Raymond, “Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun”.

January 4, 2025

Can Javier Milei Make Argentina Great Again?

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Government, History, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Adam Smith Institute
Published 3 Jan 2025

In November 2023, Argentina elected Javier Milei, a libertarian economist armed with a chainsaw and a bold plan to rescue the country from decades of decline. Facing 142% inflation, a crumbling peso, and 40% poverty, Milei slashed spending, deregulated markets, and delivered a historic budget surplus — all within a year.

Sam Bidwell dives into Milei’s radical reforms, exploring the challenges that have made them necessary. He traces the country’s rise as a global economic powerhouse in the early 20th century, its decline through years of government intervention and Peronism, and its resurgence under Milei’s leadership.

Discover how this fiery libertarian turned Argentina’s economic fortunes around — and what the world can learn from his audacious blueprint for recovery.

🔗 Subscribe for more insights on global economics, history, and leadership!
🔗 Check out our website for more economics content: https://www.adamsmith.org/

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Start
00:53 Golden Years
02:59 Decline of Argentina
05:20 Peron
08:47 The Legacy of Peronism
11:56 After the Falklands
15:38 Javier Milei
18:17 Challenges
24:31 Lesson for the UK and the wider world

December 30, 2024

RIP Jimmy Carter, “The Great Deregulator”, 1924-2024

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Liberty, Politics, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published 29 Dec 2024

Nobel-Winning Economist Vernon Smith says the 39th president radically improved air travel, freight rail, and trucking in ways that still benefit us immensely.
______

Jimmy Carter was perhaps the most successful ex-president in American history, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his work promoting human rights and economic and social development.

But his single term as president (1977–1981) is largely remembered as a series of failures and missteps, sometimes literally. Gas lines, a record-high combination of unemployment and inflation on the “misery index”, and Americans being held hostage by Iranian revolutionaries for over a year all fueled the perception that Carter was a weak and ineffective leader. When he collapsed during a six-mile run, it personified for many the exhaustion of the country under his leadership.

But there was at least one way in which Carter excelled as president. He was, in the words of 2002 Nobel–winning economist Vernon Smith, the great deregulator. Carter forced the airline industry, along with interstate trucking and freight rail, to compete for business, with powerful and positive effects that continue to this day.

I talked to Smith about Carter, whom he met at a White House event for American Nobel Prize winners, and what it was like to fly in the days when the government controlled air travel.

December 8, 2024

QotD: Who invented the vending machine?

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Law, Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This one surprised me: the vending machine was invented not for Coca-Cola or cigarettes or snack foods, but for books.

Richard Carlile was a shit-disturbing English bookseller. He insisted on selling Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason despite it being seditious and blasphemous for its attacks on organized religion, particularly the Church of England. Impressively stubborn, Carlile was arrested in 1819, imprisoned, and fined a massive £1,500 for selling Paine’s work. While a guest of the state, his wife, Jane, and other associates kept selling The Age of Reason, leading to more arrests.

Sometime around his release in 1822, Carlile came up with the idea of automating sales. His device was crude, but effective. A person inserted coins and pulled a lever that opened a compartment from which a copy of The Age of Reason could be retrieved without human intervention. Police had no one to arrest for selling seditious material.

The book vending machine didn’t keep Carlisle out of jail — he would spend nine years locked up for acts of political rebellion. Nor was he able to patent his device. I admire the hell out of him, tho.

Jump ahead to the early twentieth century and vending machines were being used in France and Germany to sell newspapers, postcards, maps, as well as books. The idea crossed the English Channel in 1937. Allen Lane, who single-handedly invented the modern paperback and founded Penguin Books with his brothers in 1935, launched the Penguincubator two years later. Based on the German machines, it was described by the Times as “an unfamiliar contraption of metal and glass”. Lane installed it at 66 Charing Cross Road, outside Collet’s bookshop.

Lane’s contraption was no more successful than Carlile’s. It got wheeled out of Collet’s shop at closing time every night and wheeled back in every morning when the shop opened. Another Charing Cross bookseller recalled seeing letters shoved under the shop’s door each morning complaining of coins lost in the machine. Customers also learned that you only had to pound the side of the box in order for it to disgorge about a third of its inventory. The Bookseller reported that when this was pointed out to the manager of Collet’s, he “gave his incontinent robot a terrific thrashing. As a result of this all the rest of the Penguin’s promptly fell out.”

That perhaps explains why I couldn’t find a mention of the Penguincubator in Stuart Kells’ otherwise excellent book, Penguin and the Lane Brothers: The Untold Story of a Publishing Revolution.

Ken Whyte, “Have I got a business for you!”, SHuSH, 2024-09-06.

November 28, 2024

“Fly the flag, you bigoted rural cis scum!” said the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Apparently just failing to vote for a “voluntary” observation of Pride season is enough to get the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario to impose fines and mandatory re-education sentences on elected municipal officials here in the most tolerant province in Canada:

Emo is a township of about 1,300 people located in the far west of Ontario, along the border with Minnesota.

In a decision handed down last week, the Human Tribunal of Ontario ruled that Emo, its mayor and two of its councillors had violated the Ontario Human Rights Code by refusing to proclaim June as “Pride Month”.

The town was also cited for failing to fly “an LGBTQ2 rainbow flag”, despite the fact that they don’t have an official flag pole.

The dispute began in 2020 when the township was approached by the group Borderland Pride with a written request to proclaim June as Pride Month.

Attached to the letter was a draft proclamation including clauses such as “pride is necessary to show community support and belonging for LGBTQ2 individuals” and “the diversity of sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression represents a positive contribution to society”.

Emo was also asked to fly an “LGBTQ2 rainbow flag for a week of your choosing”.

Borderland Pride then asked Emo to “email us a copy of your proclamation or resolution once adopted and signed”.

[…]

The claim of discrimination ultimately hinged on a single line uttered by Emo Mayor Harold McQuaker. When the proclamation came up for consideration, McQuaker was heard to say in a recording of the meeting, “There’s no flag being flown for the other side of the coin … there’s no flags being flown for the straight people”.

As Human Rights Tribunal vice-chair Karen Dawson wrote in her decision, “I find this remark was demeaning and disparaging of the LGBTQ2 community of which Borderland Pride is a member and therefore constituted discrimination under the Code”.

Dawson also ruled that given the “close proximity” of McQuaker’s comment to his nay vote — that too “constituted discrimination under the Code”.

[…]

The Human Rights Tribunal ultimately ordered the Township to pay $10,000 to Borderland Pride, and for McQuaker to personally pay them another $5,000.

This was lower than what Borderland Pride had been seeking; they wanted $15,000 from the township and $10,000 each from the three councillors who voted no.

But McQuaker and Emo’s chief administrative officer were also ordered to complete an online course known as “Human Rights 101” and “provide proof of completion … to Borderland Pride within 30 days”.

The course is offered by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and their latest edition opens with an animated video telling viewers that the Human Rights Code “is not meant to punish”.

How is Argentina doing after a year under Javier Milei?

Filed under: Americas, Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I don’t normally follow South American news all that closely, as despite being in the same hemisphere, little that happens there has much importance to us here in Canada or the United States. The election of Argentinian President Javier Milei, however, has made Argentina a much more interesting place to watch as Milei valiantly attempts to turn the economy around from its near-century-long decline. Here, Dan Mitchell provides his assessment of Milei’s efforts so far:

… let’s focus today on Milei’s goal of maximizing economic liberty.

The bad news is that if he wants Argentina to become the new Hong Kong, Milei has a long journey. According to Economic Freedom of the World, Argentina ranked a lowly #159 out of 165 nations in 2022.

As you can see from the EFW rankings, Milei’s country gets especially bad scores for Sound Money, Trade and Regulation (dead last for Sound Money and in the bottom-10 percent of the world for the other two categories!).

The good news is that you don’t have to be libertarian Nirvana (or even Liberland) to make a big jump in the rankings.

You don’t even need to be Hong Kong (which used to be very good with scores above 9 but has now declined to 8.58 thanks to Beijing’s intervention).

Heck, almost every country in the western world has experienced a significant decline in economic liberty this century.

Milei actually could put Argentina in first place today merely by achieving the same level of economic liberty (8.67) that the United States had in 2004.

For what it’s worth, I think it would take several years of good reforms to climb that high.

That being said, dramatic improvements are nonetheless possible in a very short period. Here’s my back-of-the-envelope estimate of where Argentina could be by the end of next year.

November 26, 2024

Orwell is more relevant now than at any time since his death

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’m delighted to find that Andrew Doyle shares my preference for Orwell the essayist over Orwell the novelist:

It is not without justification that Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) have become the keystones of George Orwell’s legacy. Personally, I’ve always favoured his essays, more often quoted than read in full. I recently wrote an article about his essays for the Washington Post, focusing on their relevance to today’s febrile political climate. You can read the article here. I would draw particular attention to the multitude of comments from left-wing readers who are apparently outraged at my argument (actually, Orwell’s argument) that authoritarianism is not specific to any one political tribe. They seem oddly determined to prove the point.

Orwell is unrivalled on the topic of the human instinct for oppressive behaviour, but his essays are far more wide-ranging than that. In these little masterworks, one senses a great thinker testing his own theses, forever fluctuating, refining his views in the very act of writing. The essays span the last two decades of his life, offering us the most direct possible insight into this unique mind.

[…]

I find Orwell’s disquisitions on literature to be among his most rewarding. “All art is propaganda”, he declares in his extended piece on Charles Dickens (1940) [link]. This conviction, flawed as is it, accounts for his determination to focus less on Dickens’s literary merits and more on his class consciousness, which is found wanting. Even better is Orwell’s rebuttal to Tolstoy’s strangely literal-minded reading of Shakespeare (1947’s “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” [link]), which is so rhetorically deft that it seems to settle the matter for good.

Another impressive essay, “Inside the Whale” (1940) [link], opens with a glowing assessment of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1935) but soon broadens its range to cover many contemporary novelists and their approach to social commentary. The title is a reference to Miller’s remarks on the Biblical tale of Jonah, suggesting that life inside the whale has much to recommend it. Orwell puts it this way:

    There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly fits you, with yards of blubber between yourself and reality, able to keep up an attitude of the completest indifference, no matter what happens.

Orwell invites us to imagine that the whale is transparent, and so writers of Miller’s ilk may snuggle contentedly within, observing without interacting, recording snapshots of the world as it bounces by. This kind of inaction is anathema to Orwell, whose every written word seems to be driving towards the enactment of social change.

Orwell’s essays often serve as a cudgel to batter his detractors. He dislikes homosexuals, or those “fashionable pansies” who lack the masculine vigour to take up arms in defence of their country. He displays a similar lack of patience for the imperialistic middle-class “Blimps” and the anti-patriotic left-wing intelligentsia, or indeed anyone who adheres slavishly to any given political ideology. His work bears much of the stamp of the old left; that mix of social conservatism and economic leftism that we see most powerfully expressed in his 1941 essay “The Lion and the Unicorn” [link]. Bad writing is also a recurring bugbear; Orwell’s loathing of cliché and “ready-made metaphors” is one of the reasons his own prose style is so effervescent.

[…]

When Orwell pessimistically refers to “the remaining years of free speech”, one cannot help but be reminded of the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of today’s British government. He expresses irritation that more writers are not wielding their pens in the service of improving society. His own work, by contrast, is what he would term “constructive”, profoundly moral, and purposefully crafted in the hope of actuating real-world change. While other writers resigned themselves to a life inside the whale, Orwell was determined to cut his way out.

November 21, 2024

“If the Federal Court of Appeal greenlights that standard for freedom of peaceful assembly … then governments would have the power to ban virtually every large protest”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Line, Josh Dehaas explains why Justice Mosley’s Federal Court decision earlier in 2024 didn’t go far enough to protect Canadians’ rights, specifically their right to assemble in large numbers where the government claims to think that things might get violent:

Arms of the Federal Court of Canada

Earlier this year, Justice Mosley of the Federal Court of Canada ruled that the invocation of the Emergencies Act in response to the Freedom Convoy protests was illegal.

There was a lot to like in that ruling, not least of which because it agreed with the official position of my organization, the Canadian Constitution Foundation.

First, Mosley agreed that the definitions of “national emergency” and “threats to the security of Canada” weren’t met by the federal government, thus invalidating their use of the Emergencies Act. Second, the Justice agreed that freezing bank accounts without a warrant violated the Charter right against unreasonable searches. Third, he agreed that the regulations that banned travelling to, participating in, and funding certain assemblies under threat of up to five years in prison violated freedom of expression.

But not all of Mosley’s ruling was commendable, from our point of view. What we didn’t like was a finding that the same regulations that violated expression because they banned a person from “merely going onto Parliament Hill waving a placard” regardless of whether that person had blockaded or breached the peace, didn’t also violate the Charter guarantee of freedom of peaceful assembly. How could that be? The CCF is asking the Federal Court of Appeal to overturn that finding when it hears the government’s appeal, most likely in early 2025.

This week, we got the government’s stunning and frankly, disturbing, response to that very point of contention. We expected the government to argue that the limitations to individuals’ rights to peaceful assembly were reasonable, given the need to deal with the protest writ large. That wasn’t their only claim.

Instead, the government pulled out an entirely novel line of reasoning, arguing that the Charter doesn’t protect assemblies if they might turn violent or breach the peace. If the Federal Court of Appeal greenlights that standard for freedom of peaceful assembly — establishing a new precedent on when Charter freedoms can be subject to limits — then governments would have the power to ban virtually every large protest. The federal government’s view that assemblies are not Charter-protected and can be blocked in advance if someone in the crowd might reasonably be expected to breach the peace cannot stand if we’re to have any meaningful right to peaceful assembly at all.

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