Quotulatiousness

August 3, 2012

How “you didn’t build that” strikes at “Bourgeois Dignity”

Filed under: Books, Business, Economics, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:05

Virginia Postrel explains why President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” gaffe has lasted so long when usually politicians’ gaffes barely last a single news cycle, by outlining the arguments of a recent book by Dierdre N. McCloskey:

The president’s sermon struck a nerve in part because it marked a sharp departure from the traditional Democratic criticism of financiers and big corporations, instead hectoring the people who own dry cleaners and nail salons, car repair shops and restaurants — Main Street, not Wall Street. (Obama did work in a swipe at Internet businesses.) The president didn’t simply argue for higher taxes as a measure of fiscal responsibility or egalitarian fairness. He went after bourgeois dignity.

“Bourgeois Dignity” is both the title of a recent book by the economic historian Deirdre N. McCloskey and, she argues, the attitude that accounts for the biggest story in economic history: the explosion of growth that took northern Europeans and eventually the world from living on about $3 a day, give or take a dollar or two (in today’s buying power), to the current global average of $30 — and much higher in developed nations. (McCloskey’s touchstone is Norway’s $137 a day, second only to tiny Luxembourg’s.)

That change, she argues, is way too big to be explained by normal economic behavior, however rational, disciplined or efficient. Hence the book’s subtitle: “Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World.”

[. . .]

McCloskey’s explanation is that people changed the way they thought, wrote and spoke about economic activity. “In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” she writes, “a great shift occurred in what Alexis de Tocqueville called ‘habits of the mind’ — or more exactly, habits of the lip. People stopped sneering at market innovativeness and other bourgeois virtues.” As attitudes changed, so did behavior, leading to more than two centuries of constant innovation and rising living standards.

I’ve read McCloskey’s book and plan on reading the next one too. Earlier mentions of Bourgeois Dignity are here and here.

August 2, 2012

The real reason behind the war on the humble plastic bag

Filed under: Environment, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:54

Tom Bailey explains that the reasons we’ve been given for the renewed attacks on plastic bags are not the real reason for the ongoing struggle:

Individually, a plastic bag weighs about eight grams. In total, we use about 10 billion of them a year, adding up to around 80,000 tonnes of plastic bags. A large number, perhaps, but not when compared with total municipal waste. The total amount of household waste produced each year is 29.6million tonnes. This means that plastic bags make up a mere 0.27 per cent of what we all throw away every year. This percentage would become even smaller if we were to include commercial and industrial waste in our calculations.

The total amount of oil used to produce plastic bags is also exaggerated, considering that most plastic bags are made using naphtha, a part of crude oil that isn’t used for much else and would probably be burnt away otherwise.

So what’s going on here? Why the panic about a simple little bag? The assault on plastic bags is really an assault on consumerism. There is a prevailing view among the green and mighty that consumerism is bad. It is portrayed as being a modern-day vice, devoid of meaning, something which atomises society, corrupting us through crude materialism and distracting us from more important issues.

Plastic bags are an outward reflection of the ease with which people can buy goods and take them home. People now have the disposable income to enter a shop unexpectedly and buy a load of stuff, and plastic bags mean they can rest assured they they will have the means to carry their purchases. How often do people returning home from work decide, on a whim, to make a quick stop at Tesco Express to buy a few items of food? How frequently, perhaps on a journey past Oxford Street, are we drawn into a sale by a piece of attractive clobber? Such nonchalant consumption would be made more difficult, perhaps more expensive, without shops’ provision of handy, free plastic bags.

I guess I must be a puppet of “Big Plastic”, as I’ve posted about this issue a few times already.

August 1, 2012

It’s not congressional gridlock: it’s abdication of responsibility

Filed under: Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:23

We’ve all seen journalists refer to the situation in the US congress as being “gridlocked”: the Democrats and Republicans just can’t manage to get along at all, leaving the system constipated and unable to function. Nick Gillespie and Veronique de Rugy in The Hill point out that this is letting the members of congress off far too lightly:

Many observers and participants — including the entire GOP and Democratic leadership — are quick to cry gridlock and to blame inaction on some new awful hyper-partisan or ideological era.

But there isn’t gridlock, which usually results from Democrats and Republicans sharing power and clashing over alternative positions. Gridlock slows things down — almost always a good thing — but it doesn’t stop serious legislation from happening. Welfare reform, balanced budgets, defense cuts and capital-gains tax rate cuts in the 1990s were all the product of gridlock that slowly gave way to consensus.

And today’s Congress is more than happy to pass legislation when it suits members’ interests. In just the past few months, for instance, the ostensibly gridlocked Congress reauthorized the Export-Import Bank program that gives money to foreign companies to buy U.S. goods; extended sharply reduced rates for government-subsidized student loans; re-upped the Essential Air Service program that subsidizes airline service to rural communities; and voted against ending the 1705 loan-guarantee program that gave rise to green-tech boondoggles such as Solyndra and Abound. None of these were party-line votes — all enjoyed hearty support from both Democrats and Republicans.

[. . .]

What we’re actually witnessing — and have been for years now — is not gridlock, but the abdication of responsibility by Congress and the president for performing the most basic responsibilities of government. Despite the fiscal crisis that Washington knows will occur if it fails to deal with unsustainable spending and debt, it hasn’t managed to produce a federal budget in more than three years.

July 31, 2012

QotD: The crony capitalist Olympics

Filed under: Britain, Government, Politics, Quotations, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:17

The Olympics are a giant exercise in sports socialism — or crony capitalism, if you prefer — where the profits are privatized and the costs socialized. The games never pay for themselves because they are designed not to. That’s because the International Olympic Committee (an opaque “nongovernmental” bureaucracy made up of fat cats from various countries) pockets most of the revenue from sponsorships and media rights (allegedly to promote global sports), requiring the host country to pay the bulk of the costs. Among the very few times the games haven’t left a city swimming in red ink was after the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, when voters, having learned from Montreal’s experience, barred the use of public funds, forcing the IOC to use existing facilities and pick up most of the tab for new ones.

Even that’s far from fair. If anything, the Olympics should be compensating the host city for the hassle and inconvenience, not the other way around. The only reason they don’t is because the Cold War once stirred retrograde nationalistic passions, blinding the world to the ass-backwardness of the existing arrangement. Londoners are signaling that this can’t go on.

Shikha Dalmia, “Why London Is Yawning Over the Olympics: Have Western countries finally outgrown the sports socialism of the Olympic Games?”, Reason, 2012-07-31

July 28, 2012

Premier-speak for Dummies (that is, voters)

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:14

Andrew Coyne provides the beginnings of a Premierspeak-to-English dictionary:

When the premiers decry the absence of federal “leadership,” similarly, they do not mean they want the federal government to actually lead anything. They want it to follow: to do exactly as they say, notably in matters of funding. Some other terms in the provincial lexicon:

Unilateralism. “We are in a period of unilateralism on the federal government’s part,” Charest complained, citing the health care funding decision (in premierspeak: ultimatum). Ottawa is said to be acting “unilaterally” when it spends federal money as it pleases, that is without consulting the provinces. Provinces, on the other hand, insist on the right to spend federal money as they please. For example, when Charest took delivery of $700-million in federal funds offered up in the name of fixing the “fiscal imbalance” and used it instead to cut taxes, that was not unilateralism. See: federalism (profitable).

Negotiations. The federal government, says Ghiz, “did not want to sit down with the provinces to negotiate on health care.” But what was there to negotiate? Negotiations imply a give and take; each side brings something to the table, and offers them in exchange. The provinces bring nothing to these “negotiations.” They do not offer anything in exchange for more federal money. They simply demand it.

Co-operative federalism. When the feds agree to do as the provinces say (see: leadership), or more properly when the provinces agree to let them. Manitoba’s Greg Selinger: “We remain very committed to the notion of co-operative federalism.”

July 24, 2012

QotD: The totalitarian tendency

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

[…] This illustrates very well the totalitarian tendency which is implicit in the anarchist or pacificist vision of Society. In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by “thou shalt not”, the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by “love” or “reason”, he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.

George Orwell, “Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels“, Polemic, September-October 1946.

July 19, 2012

Walter Olson: more red flags in the Regnerus study

Filed under: Health, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:00

Some studies provide results that challenge common beliefs and understandings. Others reinforce them. But some studies are designed from the desired results backwards. The Regnerus study on gay parents’ influence on their children appears to be one of the latter. Walter Olson points out that even in its own terms, the study shows something different from what it is intended to:

By now almost everyone has had a whack at the recent Mark Regnerus (University of Texas) study claiming that young adults who report having a gay parent score worse on a range of life-success indicators than children from intact biological families. According to the study, these kids as young adults have lower educational attainment, are arrested more often, and have more trouble in their own relationships, among other problems. Critics have pointed out that the story is mostly one of collapsed heterosexual families, not “same-sex parenting”: The great majority of the kids were born to male-female couples, most of the presumedly gay dads and many of the moms didn’t get custody of their kids after their relationships dissolved, and few of the kids were actually raised through long periods by gay couples. LGBT advocates point out that sociologist Mark Regnerus accepted $695,000 from the anti-gay Witherspoon Institute to carry out the study.

But many critics have missed one of Regnerus’ most unexpected findings, one that may illuminate his study’s shortcomings. Specifically, and feeding into pretty much all the other problems, the study diagnoses children of gay parents as having a huge problem with poverty. Here’s Regnerus:

    Sixty-nine (69) percent of LMs [respondents with lesbian mothers] and 57% of GFs [those with gay fathers] reported that their family received public assistance at some point while growing up, compared with 17% of IBFs [those with intact two-parent biological families]; 38% of LMs said they are currently receiving some form of public assistance, compared with 10% of IBFs. Just under half of all IBFs reported being employed full-time at present, compared with 26% of LMs.

Those are big gaps. And of course they’re much at odds with the affluent image of gay families presented in both pro- and anti-gay-parenting literature as well as Modern Family-style popular entertainment. What do they signify?

Probably the biggest single reason is the one cited at the outset: This is mostly a survey of what happens when heterosexual families crack up. (Interestingly, if a married couple stayed together, they were counted as an “IBF,” no matter whether one or both partners pursued same-sex liaisons.) Decades of data indicate that children of family breakup do worse than children whose parents stay together, on many variables related to adult success. One reason, though not the only reason, is that they grow up significantly poorer.

July 18, 2012

Who Exploits You More: Capitalists or Cronies?

Filed under: Business, Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:48

The “you didn’t build it” meme, inter-personal relations style

Filed under: Economics, Government, Humour, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:02

An amusing extension of President Obama’s “you didn’t build it” claim:

You Got Laid Last Night? That’s Nice, But . . .

somebody else made that happen. Sport.

You met this chick on the Internet, which DARPA invented, with money taken from taxpayers by the government, which printed the money after giving the concession to log national forests to produce the paper, lands stolen from the Indians by the government, aided by soldiers who were paid for with taxes paid by taxpayers through the government. The logging was opposed by ineffectual lawyers hired by environmentalist organizations which received grants from the government, who nevertheless received their legal fees from environmental agencies who still paid themselves liberal salaries underwritten by taxpayers, and which donate to liberal PACs.

The beer you plied her with was paid for with money paid to you by a corporation for whom you used to work, before you conspired to get fired to collect your 99 because you were tired of taking it from The Man, which is permitted to exist by the government, which taxes both its income and yours. On the way to meet your date, you withdrew money for the date at an ATM which charged you a $2 convenience fee, though it operates on a system paid for by taxpayers to the government. The government used taxpayer money to bail out the bank in question when its mortgage investments went bust-oh! largely because the government, in concert with government-subsidized political agencies and government lawyers, threatened the banks, who paid their executives lavishly for accepting the ridiculous loan standards demanded by the government-subsidized political agencies and government lawyers who performed their agitation on the taxpayer dime. Once again, the lawyers and the non-profit executives were well remunerated, and turned around to send some of their salaries to legislators who would vote them more grants and loans, and who were further rewarded by well-compensated positions at those institutions after they were forced to resign after scandals for which other people might have been sent to prison.

If you somehow missed the start of the “you didn’t build it” meme, try here.

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord.

July 17, 2012

The declaration of dependence

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:51

President Obama goes the extra mile to portray every successful person as being just a pawn in the hands of vast, impersonal forces of destiny:

Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

The “Leader of the Free World”, folks! Let’s give him a hand! (Applause.)

Elizabeth Warren may have said it first in this election campaign, but nobody will top Barack Obama’s reworking of her theme.

(more…)

July 16, 2012

Mitt Romney and the NAACP

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:46

Steve Chapman provides a bit of rare praise for Mitt Romney after his speech to the NAACP:

It may have been a bit surprising when the NAACP held its national convention and Mitt Romney showed up. Romney, as comedian Reggie Brown put it, is “what people who hate white people think of when they think of white people.” He’s likely to do about as well among black voters as he is among Wiccans.

But there he was, taking precious campaign time in a vain and even humiliating search for votes. Naive folly or an excess of ambition on his part? Not quite.

Candidates normally put a high priority on assuring enthusiastic receptions and supportive audiences. Campaign managers typically prefer to avoid the risk of making the boss look unpopular. Sometimes, however, that risk is not a bug but a feature.

[. . .]

By presenting himself to the nation’s premier civil rights group, Romney signaled his aversion to bigotry without embracing any policies favored by the Congressional Black Caucus. With a college-educated suburban woman who dislikes Rush Limbaugh, say, the gesture could only help his cause.

But things may have worked out even better than that. By condemning Obamacare, Romney offered doubters a rare sighting of the Romney backbone. By reaping a chorus of boos, he strengthened his standing among hard-line conservatives who regard the NAACP as anathema. It was political jiu-jitsu, turning a weakness to his advantage.

While Romney was confronting his foes, Obama was avoiding his friends. Though he has spoken at past conventions, including last year’s, the president sent Joe Biden in his stead. Press secretary Jay Carney cited scheduling conflicts and said cryptically that his boss was busy working to help “all Americans.”

The nation’s most prominent black group convenes, and a brother can’t be bothered? Maybe this is what actor Morgan Freeman was getting at the other day when he volunteered, “He’s not America’s first black president; he’s America’s first mixed-race president.”

July 15, 2012

What’s a waste of $180 million among politicians?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

Rex Murphy explains just why Ontarians are so justifiably cynical about politics and politicians:

Add all these up and I think we have a good notion of why politics are so little regarded, why so many politicians are abused or scorned and why public life holds so little invitation for those of delicate moral scruple, or a functioning conscience.

But now I’d like to add one particular item to that list: the Dalton McGuinty campaign’s decision to cancel an already-in-progress, contract-guaranteed gas-fired electricity plant outside Mississauga, Ont. It was cancelled, according to the current Ontario Energy Minister’s own words, by the Liberal campaign during the last election. (Everyone who is either sentient or not an absolute Liberal partisan — and pardon the redundancy — realizes that happened because opposition to the plant threatened a Liberal seat or two in the election.)

The cost of that “campaign” choice is now acknowledged to be $180-million.

Now if even a million of the amount had gone into some private pocket, or a bank account of someone close to the Ontario Liberals, the scandal would be nuclear. But because the money is merely wasted — because the whole $180-million just got thrown away, effectively doled out just for partisan advantage — people don’t quite reach white-hot anger.

But something else may be going on. People’s contempt for actions of this sort may be so deep that for a while it remains unspoken. Arrogance and self-interest on this level leaves most normal people speechless. They resign themselves to the sleaziness and corruption of the game. They learn to quietly despise politics. At that point, in a democracy, all are losers. And make no error: It was the Ontario Liberals this time, but once in power, every party, from the Tories to the Greens, is capable of acting in the same way.

July 13, 2012

Wake up kids: it’s your folks that are screwing you over

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:28

Nick Gillespie on the many, many ways that the baby boomers are screwing their own kids:

Hey kids, wake up! Stop playing your X-Box while listening to your Facebooks on the iPod and wearing your iPad with the cap turned backwards with the droopy pants and the bikini underwear listening to Snoopy Poopy Poop Dogg and the Enema Man and all that!

Take a break from getting yet another tattoo on your ass bone or your nipples pierced already! And STFU about the 1 Percent vs. the 99 Percent!

You’re not getting screwed by billionaires and plutocrats. You’re getting screwed by Mom and Dad.

Systematically and in all sorts of ways. Old people are doing everything possible to rob you of your money, your future, your dignity, and your freedom.

Here’s the irony, too (in a sort of Alanis Morissette sense): You’re getting hosed by the very same group that 45 years ago was bitching and moaning about “the generation gap” and how their parents just didn’t understand what really mattered in life.

[. . .]

Oddly, back in the actual 1960s, one of the few things that hippies and Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan could all agree on was that conscription was a really bad thing. For god’s sake, Richard Nixon created a commission to end the draft. But that was then, and this is now.

And right now, old people are not going gentle into that good night. They know they’re going to need younger people to change their diapers and pay their bills for them, literally and figuratively. As Hillary Clinton put it in 1999, nobody’s going to do that if they have any option not to. Speaking to a National Education Association meeting, she explained one of the great benefits of old-age entitlements was that they meant you didn’t have to live with your goddamn parents.

The only long-term answer to road congestion: real-time tolls

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:04

I know, I know … I hate paying road tolls as much as the next driver. But the current road pricing scheme is broken and getting broken-er. Andrew Coyne points out the unpleasant realities:

… the demand for road use — traffic — is not a fixed quantity. Like anything else, it fluctuates with the price. And the price to use the roads, under present policies, is denominated in time: that is, by how long people are prepared to stew in traffic. This is, when you think about it, perverse. The people who get first claim on the roads are the ones who put the lowest value on their time. Or in other words, the people who need them the least.

That’s why analysts have long recommended pricing roads in more conventional terms, i.e. dollars and cents. But there are lots of ways of getting even this wrong, so we need to eliminate a couple more alternatives, such as:

More taxes. Many people’s first response to the notion of pricing roads is to say “but I already pay a gas tax.” The more knowledgeable will point to statistics showing that revenues from gas taxes more than pay for the cost of building and maintaining the roads.

But these are far from the only costs at issue, or even the most important. As far as congestion is concerned the cost that matters is not the cost of building the road, but the cost of using it. Every time you use the road, you impose a cost on other drivers, so far as you make the roads that much more crowded — as they, of course, do you. Add up those costs over millions of drivers every day — costs measured not only in delays, but in more collisions, more wear and tear, more pollution, and so on — and we are well into the billions, according to several estimates.

[. . .]

What’s really needed, then, is a more comprehensive approach. With modern technology, there’s no reason to toll only some roads and not others. Using GPS-style in-car transponders and satellites, it’s now possible to charge drivers to use the roads generally, with the highest charges applying in downtown centres and at rush-hour — just as you pay a higher charge to use your cellphone depending on the location and time of day. You’d even get a monthly bill in the mail.

Far-fetched? Britain and the Netherlands have each been on the verge of adopting similar schemes in recent years. That each backed down in the end tells you something of the political sensitivities involved: It’s always hard to get people to pay for things they are used to getting for free. But the roads aren’t free. We’re paying more and more to use them every year.

Pay in congestion, in time and noise and aggravation — or pay by credit card. Once you think of it that way, the choice should be easy.

July 11, 2012

President Hollande “dwarfed” by Coldstream Guards

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Media, Military, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:08

So much for a honeymoon period in office for French President Francois Hollande:

Francois Hollande was ridiculed today after allowing himself to look like a ‘dwarf’ alongside a British regiment which won battle honours at Waterloo and then occupied Paris.

During an official visit to London on Tuesday, the French President inspected a guard of honour from the 1st Battalion of the Coldstream Guards at the Foreign Office.

He then appeared in hugely embarrassing photographs alongside Major James Coleby, who looked around two feet taller than the Gallic head of state.

Comments alongside the image on a website of pictures taken by AFP, France’s national news agency, suggested Hollande had fallen into a ‘trap’ made to make him look ridiculous.

‘Poor France,’ wrote Jean-Marc Rameau, from Paris, while Dmitri Kovaley mocked Mr Hollande, who is 5ft 7ins, with the words ‘Dwarfs rule the world’.

H/T to Nicholas Packwood for the link.

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