Quotulatiousness

July 11, 2012

Crony Capitalism: the issue that unites the Tea Party and the Occupy movement

Filed under: Business, Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:17

Matthew Mitchell at the Mercatus Center:

Despite the ideological miles that separate them, activists in the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements agree on one thing: both condemn the recent bailouts of wealthy and well-connected banks. To the Tea Partiers, these bailouts were an unwarranted federal intrusion into the free market; to the Occupiers, they were a taxpayer-financed gift to the wealthy executives whose malfeasance brought on the financial crisis.[1] To both, the bailouts smacked of cronyism.

The financial bailouts of 2008 were but one example in a long list of privileges that governments occasionally bestow upon particular firms or particular industries. At various times and places, these privileges have included (among other things) monopoly status, favorable regulations, subsidies, bailouts, loan guarantees, targeted tax breaks, protection from foreign competition, and noncompetitive contracts. Whatever its guise, government-granted privilege is an extraordinarily destructive force. It misdirects resources, impedes genuine economic progress, breeds corruption, and undermines the legitimacy of both the government and the private sector.

[. . .]

… regulations can be especially useful to firms if they give the appearance of being anti-business or somehow pro-consumer. Regulations are often supported by strange bedfellows. Bruce Yandle of Clemson University has studied the phenomenon extensively:

The pages of history are full of episodes best explained by a theory of regulation I call “bootleggers and Baptists.” Bootleggers … support Sunday closing laws that shut down all the local bars and liquor stores. Baptists support the same laws and lobby vigorously for them. Both parties gain, while the regulators are content because the law is easy to administer.[25]

The moralizing arguments are often front and center in regulatory policy debates, while the narrow interests that stand to benefit from certain regulations are much less conspicuous.

July 2, 2012

Meet the new boss … of Mexico

Filed under: Americas, Government, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:47

After more than a decade in opposition, Mexico’s equivalent of the Natural Governing Party* has returned to power:

Mexico’s old rulers claimed victory in a presidential election on Sunday, ending 12 years in opposition after a campaign dominated by a sputtering economy and rampant drug violence.

After pledging to restore order and ramp up economic growth, Enrique Pena Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had a clear lead over his rivals in exit polls and a “quick count” conducted by electoral authorities.

Although his main rival said it was too early to concede defeat, the 45-year-old Pena Nieto delivered a late-night victory speech to cheering supporters, and a senior electoral official said the PRI candidate’s lead was “irreversible”.

“Mexicans have given our party another chance. We are going to honor it with results,” a visibly moved Pena Nieto told followers packed inside the PRI headquarters in Mexico City.

* For non-Canadians, the joke about the “Natural Governing Party” is that the Liberal Party of Canada had been effectively the permanent government in Canada for most of the 20th century, with only a few isolated interruptions by the Progressive Conservatives (aka the Forward-Backward party).

Update: The Economist has more:

The return of the PRI is not welcomed by everyone. The party ran Mexico for seven uninterrupted decades until it was ousted from the presidency in 2000. Back then few expected that the “perfect dictatorship”, as the PRI regime was dubbed by the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, would return to power just 12 years later. But the television-friendly Mr Peña ran a professional campaign and faced weak opposition from the fiery Mr López Obrador and from Ms Vázquez, whose poor result is in part a verdict on Mr Calderón’s disappointing six-year term in office.

Many have predicted that a close result would lead to a challenge by Mr López Obrador, who lost the 2006 election by less than 1% and mounted a months-long blockade of Mexico City’s main thoroughfare to protest that result, which he claimed (with thin evidence) was fraudulent. This year’s race looks to be nothing like as close as that of 2006. But if Monday’s final results show a narrower gap, Mr López Obrador’s committed followers could yet take to the streets again.

Election day provided some ammunition for a challenge, with evidence of cheating by some parties and cock-ups by the electoral authorities—though the scale of both was unclear. There were reports of voters in poor areas being offered upwards of 500 pesos ($38) to hand over their voting cards, which prevented them from casting their votes and perhaps enabled someone else to cast them instead. The PRI featured most often in such reports. A ban on political advertising after the end of the campaign on Wednesday was flouted by the Green Party, a formal ally of the PRI. The Greens illegally sent text-messages and recorded phone calls to many people (including your correspondent) on the day of the election, urging them to vote for their candidates.

June 30, 2012

Writing the UN’s epitaph in advance

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:10

Conrad Black on the increasingly useless United Nations (although he urges reform instead of abandonment):

For the past 45 years the United Nations has become steadily over-populated by poor states, failed states, petty despotisms and militant Muslim counties chiefly preoccupied in diplomatic matters with the harassment and denigration of Israel. Most of the agencies have become sink-holes of patronage and corruption for poor countries paying themselves with the contributions of rich countries and polemically biting the hands that feed them.

It has become a source of payola windfalls for corrupt agency officials as well as a substitute for theatre and psychiatry for many of the world’s most disreputable regimes. Muammar Gadaffi’s Libya was elected to the chair of the Human Rights Commission (precursor of the present Human Rights Council), and the whole hierarchy of the UN was implicated in the scandalous misappropriation of many millions of oil dollars supposedly destined for humanitarian purposes in Iraq. The chief humanitarian beneficiaries were Saddam Hussein and crooked UN officials. Many of the peace-keeping missions are staffed by unqualified soldiers from very poor countries, which rent themselves out to the warring factions for cash; and thereby increase, rather than control, local violence.

Unfortunately, Canada was, for most of the UN’s history, far too indulgent of it. First, as a victorious ally and charter member, it was part of the Anglo-American governing consensus. Then, after Lodge gave Pearson the Suez peacekeeper idea (and Pearson forgot that it wasn’t his originally), the foreign policy establishment in Ottawa began to view the UN as a way for Canada to distinguish itself from the U.S. at little cost, and to allow itself, with a modest foreign aid budget, to pander to Third World countries without seriously annoying our traditional allies. This gradually developed into the Chrétien government’s endorsement of “soft power,” a phrase originated by former U.S. president Bill Clinton’s national security adviser Joe Nye, which was a soft alternative to the use of American military might. It is a concept that has any validity only when there is a hard power option, which Canada did not possess. As practised by this country, soft power was a fraud, it was just more softness.

[. . .]

Undoubtedly, there will be those in Canada who decry the Harper government’s comparative friendliness with Israel and call for appeasement of Pillay and her foaming claque. What we should do instead is lead agitation for a massive transformation of the United Nations — back to the defence of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Universal Declaration on Human Rights (which is not subject to Shariah law or any other such barbarities), jettison the antiquated Security Council and propose a variable system of voting in the General Assembly, where votes are accorded to countries and groupings of countries according to a combination of their population, economic strength and objectively assessed respect for human rights.

Canada is well placed to organize the support for such measures by the countries that pay most of the UN’s bills. This would be a much more appropriate stance for Canada, now that it has been so unjustly pilloried by the anthill of bigotry of a Human Rights Council, than continued reverence for this citadel of hypocrisy. The United Nations is both a mad cow and a sacred cow; it is in desperate need of radical reform.

June 28, 2012

The US Air Force faces its toughest opponents: the lobbyists

Filed under: Military, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:54

In a stunning outbreak of common sense, the USAF cancelled an order for an expensive UAV because it wasn’t as effective at the intended task as other methods. Battle would soon be joined with the fearsome lobbyists and their congressional minions:

Earlier this year, the U.S. Air Force cancelled existing orders for the RQ-4 Global Hawk UAV and withdrew 18 from service. The Global Hawk manufacturer (Northrop Grumman) unleashed their lobbyists and political supporters on the air force, demanding an explanation for (and reversal of) the decision. The air force responded that the RQ-4 was too expensive and the manufacturer too unreliable. Moreover, reconnaissance mission requirements had changed with the withdrawal from Iraq. High altitude, long duration missions were not needed as much. And those that were needed were better served by using the smaller and cheaper Reaper. Missions normally carried out by the RQ-4 were now handled more efficiently and cheaply by the U-2, which could carry more sensors to higher altitudes. Northrop Grumman insisted it could mount any U-2 sensors on an RQ-4. The air force replied that this had not been their experience. Northrop Grumman would offer to make modification which often went way over budget, took longer than specified and often didn’t work. The air force had been burned once too often by Northrop Grumman when it came to upgrades and fixes on the RQ-4.

[. . .]

Increasingly over the last decade, the air force and the manufacturer of the RQ-4 found themselves feuding over design, cost, and quality control issues. The latest issue was the unreliability of the new Block 30 models. This renewed Department of Defense threats to cancel the program. But Northrop Grumman lobbyists have made sure the key members of Congress knew where Global Hawk components were being built and how many jobs that added up to. While that delayed the RQ-4 Block 30 cancellation it did not stop it. The air force was placated for a while when Northrop Grumman fixed some of the problems (some of which the manufacturer said don’t exist, or didn’t matter). The Block 30 was supposed to be good to go, but the air force was not convinced and decided that Block 30 was just more broken promises. Congress was also tired of all the feuding and being caught between Northrup lobbyists and exasperated air force generals. Then there was politician’s decision to cut the defense budget over the next decade. Something had to go.

Meanwhile, the manned U-2 has continued to operate as expected and, despite its age, with predictable costs. Moreover, the U-2 carries a larger load than the RQ-4 and that means it can do more when it is up there. The U-2 also has its supporters in Congress. So the RQ-4 took a hit so the popular U-2 could keep flying for another decade or so.

[. . .]

There has been plenty of competition for RQ-4 work. In addition to the manned U-2, there is a longer (42 hours) endurance version of the five ton Reaper as well as the jet powered version of the Reaper called Avenger. This aircraft can do 85 percent of what the RQ-4 can, but costs half as much. Moreover, the Avenger is 29 percent faster, although it only has endurance of 20 hours, compared to 35 for the RQ-4. Most importantly, the Avenger and Reaper come from a manufacturer (General Atomics) that has been much more dependable than Northrop Grumman.

June 27, 2012

John Kay on the evils of rent-seeking

Filed under: Economics, Germany, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:08

Broadly speaking, wealth can be accumulated in two distinctly different ways. It can be earned through hard work, innovation, and competition, or it can be extracted from the public by use of coercive methods, corruption, and misappropriation:

Whatever the true extent of the Mubarak family fortune, it stands in stark contrast to the lot of most Egyptians. Gross domestic product per capita in Egypt is a mere $2,500. In western Europe and North America GDP per capita is about $40,000, yet the capacities of Egypt’s intellectual and entrepreneurial elite are the rival of any state in the world.

The real damage imposed by men such as Mr Mubarak is not the money they might have stolen. The tragedy is that the system that enables them to steal it destroys opportunities for others to generate wealth — not only for themselves but for the whole population.

The price of requiring a potential Mark Zuckerberg or Mr Gates to pay a $100 bribe to each of 10 officials before he can establish his new business is not the $1,000 creamed off by corrupt bureaucrats. It is the far greater one of lost businesses that never came into being because the licensing process that makes such corruption possible was not navigated. In the meantime, people who might be successful entrepreneurs choose instead to seek political power. If business is endlessly frustrating and politics endlessly rewarding, the career choice for able and enterprising people is obvious.

Institutions are the key influence on economic prosperity — West Germany did not outperform East Germany because of its excellent monetary policies. And, as Daron Acemoglou and James Robinson point out in their book, Why Nations Fail, a critical feature of successful economic institutions is that they limit the scope for what these authors call “extractive activity” — others have described it as predation or rent-seeking — which appropriates the wealth created by other people.

June 26, 2012

The “Draft Andrew Coyne” movement

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:49

I’ve met Andrew Coyne. We had a pleasant chat about political matters a few years ago (although I was one of dozens of Toronto-area bloggers he talked with that night: I doubt he remembers me). I often agree with his writings (and even when I don’t, he’s usually quotable). But how would he fare as a candidate for the Liberal leadership? Abacus ran the numbers:

Nationally, most Canadians told us they didn’t know enough about Mr. Coyne to say whether they had a favourable or unfavourable impression of him. Sixty-four percent were not sure of their opinion while 15% said they had a favourable impression while 21% had an unfavourable impression. Unfortunately for Mr. Coyne, the percentage of respondents who had “very unfavourable” was higher than those who had a “very favourable” impression of him (9% very unfavourable vs. 3% very favourable).

Nonetheless, there are “pockets” of Coynemania out there.

  • Men are slightly more likely to have a favourable impression of him than women (men 18% favourable, women 12% – women were also much more likely to be unsure).
  • There was no significant age difference although older Canadians (no surprisingly) were more likely to be aware of Mr. Coyne.
  • Regionally, he is more popular in Manitoba and Saskatchewan (25% favourable) than in other regions of the country. He is a tough sell in Quebec where his favourable rating is a mere 8%.
  • Considering his occupation and the audience likely to read and watch him, it is no surprise that respondents with a university degree were most aware and favourable to Mr. Coyne. 24% of those with a bachelor’s degree and 29% of those with a post-graduate degree had a favourable impression of the National Post columnist.
  • He is also more likely to be viewed favourably by those who live in urban communities (urban 18% favourable, suburban 13% favourable, rural 12% favourable).
  • Mr. Coyne is also viewed more favourable by those who own stocks, bonds, or mutual funds: 20% favourable vs. 10% among those who don’t own those kinds of investments.
  • Finally, there isn’t a significant partisan difference. Those who voted Liberal in 2011 are only slightly more likely to view him positively than NDP and CPC voters but the differences are marginal. He is a post-partisan candidate!

I don’t know if he’s actually interested in a political career, but he’d at least be a different kind of candidate than the Liberals have had in decades. I’ve never voted Liberal in my life, but I could imagine voting for a Liberal if Andrew Coyne was the Liberal leader. He appears to actually believe in smaller government and free markets — which is why he’d never be able to run as a Conservative. He’s on the record as being almost libertarian in his views on individual rights (especially on Nanny State issues) — which is why he couldn’t run as a New Democrat.

It’s not clear whether there are any members of today’s Liberal Party of Canada who could cope with a classical liberal as leader. But it would create a viable third choice in federal politics: that’s worth a lot in my books.

Update: There’s a Twitter hashtag for the movement: #coyne4lpc, and Jesse Helmer points out that there’s a Facebook group, too:

Update, the second: Apparently Andrew Coyne is getting into the swing of being a big-time politician, having already fired his first campaign manager:

June 25, 2012

QotD: Working with the PQ

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Humour, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:44

For some reason it is being treated as news that the Prime Minister said he would work with a Parti Quebecois government in the unfortunate circumstance of a PQ victory.

What else was he supposed to say? The PQ has held power several times since Rene Levesque’s first victory in 1976. It’s a democratic country, and provinces can elect whoever they want. Ottawa doesn’t have a choice whether it wants to work with the victor or not. Harper worked with Danny Williams — well, he tried, anyway — when the Newfoundland caudillo declared himself the supreme power of El Rocko Independanto and waged a personal war against his Canadian oppressors. Pauline Marois, the PQ leader (at least until the next revolt) can’t be half as annoying as Danny was.

Kelly McParland, “Why is it news that Stephen Harper would recognize a PQ government?”, National Post, 2012-06-25

The rot began at the top: Britain’s rotten state

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:06

David Conway reviews The Rotten State of Britain by Eamonn Butler:

In fourteen pithy, well-documented chapters, Butler guides the reader through the maze of political, economic and social changes to which New Labour subjected Britain during their period in office. After noting that ‘the rot starts from the top’, Butler summarize the main political changes the country was made to undergo so:

‘From Magna Carta in 1215, our rights and liberties have been built up over the centuries. Trial by jury, habeas corpus, the presumption of innocence — all these and more grew up to restrain our leaders and prevent them from harassing us. Yet within a decade almost all these protections have been diluted or discarded. Our leaders are no longer restrained by the rule of law at all [22]…The Prime Minister and colleagues in Downing Street decide what is good for us and then it’s nodded through Parliament. It’s hardly democracy: it’s a centralist autocracy.’ [31]

One by one, Butler explains how each of the country’s traditional constitutional restraints on uncurbed executive power was deliberately weakened, if not altogether discarded, by New Labor in pursuit of their master political project which was, having come to equate the national good with that of their own party, to perpetuate their hegemony indefinitely. Their first step was to effect a massive centralization of power in the hands of the Prime Minister and a small clique of unelected advisors that led to a systematic downgrading of Parliament, the Cabinet and civil service.

To observers of the Canadian system, this critique sounds hauntingly familiar: change “Downing Street” to “Sussex Drive” and it’s equally valid here. Some of the centralization was already well underway before 2001, but it was accelerated by terrorist attacks and governments’ response to them:

9/11 also served New Labor, Butler argues, as a pretext for making a power-grab in the name of security that turned Britain into ‘a surveillance state’ where ‘freedom exists only in name’. [106] He chillingly observes:

‘Of course, the terrorism threat is real… But in response, we seem to have given our government powers to track us anywhere, stop and search us in the street, arrest us for any imagined offense, imprison us for peaceful protest, hold us without charge for 28 days, extradite us to the United State without evidence, ban us for being members of non-violent organizations that they don’t happen to like, export us to other EU countries to stand trial for things that aren’t a crime here, take and file our DNA samples before we’ve been convicted, charged or even cautioned for any offense — and much more as well. In the name of defending our liberties against terrorism, we seem to have lost them.’ [92-93]

June 24, 2012

Paul Wells: What is behind the easy ride for Thomas Mulcair?

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:41

In Maclean’s, Paul Wells ponders what could be preventing Stephen Harper from bringing down the hammer on Thomas Mulcair the way he did on Stéphane Dion, Michael Ignatieff, and Bob Rae:

For six years Stephen Harper’s opponents have wondered when he would stop spending millions of dollars to whale the tar out of them. Apparently the answer was that he’d stop as soon as his opponent stopped being Liberal.

[. . .]

The surprise is that Harper is not yet using his old tricks to change it.

His old tricks would consist of a heavy, sustained advertising campaign against the man who has risen highest against him. That’s what he did against Stéphane Dion, Michael Ignatieff and then, three months ago, against Bob Rae. Now, one of these things is not like the others. In minority government parliaments where an election always loomed, Dion and Ignatieff were present dangers. But going after Rae looks like a concession to instinct—and a mistake. The money spent has been lost, the neutralized enemy is now gone, and if the Liberals manage to find somebody more impressive to lead them, Harper will wish he’d let Rae limp to the next election.

Meanwhile, apart from the odd bit of ineffectual Conservative sass-talking, Mulcair rises unhindered. Why? Three possibilities. Maybe Harper is lost in the face of superior opposition. Maybe his minions are preparing ads that will take Mulcair apart in 2013.

Or maybe Harper is happy to see Mulcair rise. The Liberals, who governed Canada for most of the 20th century while the Conservatives didn’t, are left squeezed from both sides but too stubborn to disappear. The left-of-Conservative vote remains split. With the Liberals dominant in the centre, Conservative parties won three elections between 1963 and 2004. With the NDP dominant on the left, Conservatives would win more. Harper doesn’t control all of Canadian politics or anywhere close, but if he left a landscape like that behind him, he could retire a happy man.

Do your media outlets suffer from ADD?

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

Okay, it’s a trick question: they all do. Gerard Vanderleun pulls out an older piece (originally posted in 2003) that explains how and why your mainstream media became afflicted with ADD:

Recently I became acquainted with a young boy, just turned nine. He’s a brilliant and happy kid, but he has a problem with cleaning up and organizing his room. It isn’t that he can’t do it, he simply has to be told about every five minutes to continue the process. In the course of picking things up to put away he discovers anew their potential to fascinate him.

The Gameboy? “Oh, here’s where I saved that last stage of Turoc. Let’s see if I can get the flame-thrower and…”

Any one of the 3,000 + Lego units? “Gee, I never did get the moon base hemi-dome set up, just let me put these 400 blocks in place and…” Books? “Sure thing and, hey, did Horton ever hatch that egg…”

On it goes until, after the sixth or seventh cajoling instruction, a path has been cleared for the vacuum cleaner. After which, he promptly begins taking everything he has put away out and strews it about the floor once again.

Today’s pop psychologists, addlepated educators and the marketing departments of large drug companies are hard at work trying to convince me children who behave like this have “Attention Deficit Disorder” or ADD. But I know enough to know it is the companies who are obsessed, confused and greedy in about that order.

What this young boy suffers from is no more than being a normal, heedless and all around great nine-year-old boy. He doesn’t have ADD anymore than I have an elephant chained in my back yard. (Yes, I just checked.)

The only group that I can see in the United States that, as a group, is seriously afflicted with ADD is a group of would-be adults — the group we call collectively “The Mainstream Media.” For members of this group ADD is not an option, it is a requirement. Far from being a means to informing and enlightening the public, the primary role of the MSM is to distract it. At this they are very good since they are “Distracted from distraction by distraction” by their very nature. They are “the ADD professionals.” They actually get paid for doing this. Paid well for having a disease.

June 23, 2012

Autobiography as fiction, lightly dusted with personal history

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

Mark Steyn on America’s first Invented-American president:

Courtesy of David Maraniss’ new book, we now know that yet another key prop of Barack Obama’s identity is false: His Kenyan grandfather was not brutally tortured or even non-brutally detained by his British colonial masters. The composite gram’pa joins an ever-swelling cast of characters from Barack’s “memoir” who, to put it discreetly, differ somewhat in reality from their bit parts in the grand Obama narrative. The best friend at school portrayed in Obama’s autobiography as “a symbol of young blackness” was, in fact, half Japanese, and not a close friend. The white girlfriend he took to an off-Broadway play that prompted an angry post-show exchange about race never saw the play, dated Obama in an entirely different time zone, and had no such world-historically significant conversation with him. His Indonesian step-grandfather, supposedly killed by Dutch soldiers during his people’s valiant struggle against colonialism, met his actual demise when he “fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes.”

David Maraniss is no right-winger, and can’t understand why boorish nonliterary types have seized on his book as evidence that the president of the United States is a Grade A phony. “It is a legitimate question about where the line is in memoir,” he told Soledad O’Brien on CNN. My Oxford dictionary defines “memoir” as “an historical account or biography written from personal knowledge.” And if Obama doesn’t have “personal knowledge” of his tortured grandfather, war-hero step-grandfather and racially obsessed theater-buff girlfriend, who does? But in recent years, the Left has turned the fake memoir into one of the most prestigious literary genres: Oprah’s Book Club recommended James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” hailed by Bret Easton Ellis as a “heartbreaking memoir” of “poetic honesty,” but subsequently revealed to be heavy on the “poetic” and rather light on the “honesty.” The “heartbreaking memoir” of a drug-addled street punk who got tossed in the slammer after brawling with cops while high on crack with his narco-hooker girlfriend proved to be the work of some suburban Pat Boone type with a couple of parking tickets. (I exaggerate, but not as much as he did.)

[. . .]

In an inspired line of argument, Ben Smith of the website BuzzFeed suggests that the controversy over “Dreams From My Father” is the fault of conservatives who have “taken the self-portrait at face value.” We are so unlettered and hicky that we think a memoir is about stuff that actually happened rather than a literary jeu d’esprit playing with nuances of notions of assumptions of preconceptions of concoctions of invented baloney. And so we regard the first member of the Invented-American community to make it to the White House as a kinda weird development rather than an encouraging sign of how a new post-racial, post-gender, post-modern America is moving beyond the old straitjackets of black and white, male and female, gay and straight, real and hallucinatory.

June 21, 2012

Addressing society’s hypocrisy on drugs

Filed under: Britain, Health, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

There’s apparently a call in Britain for the police to be given discretionary powers in certain cases where they could push civil rather than criminal penalties for drug offences. A better solution would be to fix the massive disconnect between the law and reality:

‘Ease drug penalties on the young,” a government adviser has urged. And of course, Professor Les Iversen, chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, is absolutely right. After all, if every young man who had dabbled with drugs had felt the fullest penalty of the law, then David Cameron would not be prime minister nor Barack Obama US president.

But in my view, Les Iversen doesn’t go nearly far enough. He talks of police being granted the discretion as to whether to press for civil rather than criminal penalties in certain drugs cases. This, however, is a fudge that doesn’t address the real issue. If our drugs laws are antiquated, expensive, inconsistent, socially damaging, draconian and counterproductive — and they are — then the solution is not to give the police more leeway to turn a blind eye. The solution is to change the laws.

[. . .]

What’s the thing I’m scared of most about my children and drugs? Not the drugs themselves, that’s for sure. The way we class drugs bears almost no relation to their relative degrees of harmfulness, as Professor David Nutt, the former government drugs adviser and Cambridge-educated neuropsychopharmacologist, made himself extremely unpopular by explaining. Alcohol and tobacco, Nutt infamously pointed out, are more dangerous than LSD; Ecstasy is safer than horse riding.

No, what worries me far more about my kids and drugs is the grubby illegality of that culture: the fact that whoever supplies them will, by definition, come from the criminal underworld; the fact that, there being no consumer protection or quality control, their drugs could be cut with any quantity of rubbish; the fact that they risk being imprisoned and having their futures blighted for the essentially victimless crime of seeking an altered state.

There are some authoritarian types, I know, who reading this will say: “And serve them bloody right!” It was a similar warped mentality that, at the height of Prohibition, led the US government to poison the nation’s supply of industrial alcohol (used to make moonshine) with a contaminant called Formula No 5. As Christopher Snowdon notes in his book The Art of Suppression, this resulted in as many as 10,000 needless deaths.

June 19, 2012

Robert Fulford: 1963-74 was a period where “everything connects in a web of deceit, paranoia and distorted ambition”

Filed under: Government, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:03

An interesting article by Robert Fulford in the National Post, discussing the time between the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the resignation of Richard Nixon. I was too young to pay any attention to politics in those days, and I only started being aware of how weird it was through reading Hunter S. Thompson’s political writings of the time — and I still think it’s a great encapsulation of the bottled insanity of the US political system of that era.

For 11 years, 1963 to 1974, tragedy and shame were the most persistent themes of American politics. That period has never been given a name, but after four decades it feels like a distinct unit in history. From the death of John Kennedy to the resignation of Richard Nixon, everything connects in a web of deceit, paranoia and distorted ambition.

[. . .]

Even after ultimate power fell into Johnson’s hands, it left him squirming in frustration and rage. He was triumphant for a brief moment, pushing through Congress laws that opened society to black Americans. But he felt surrounded by enemies. Although he asked Kennedy’s men to stay on, he never trusted them. When Malvolio leaves the stage he threatens, “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.” That was how Johnson felt about Bobby Kennedy. Caro is especially good on the bitter 15-year struggle that consumed these two men, both smart but both hopelessly lacking in self-awareness.

Johnson’s second downfall, the swiftly increasing Vietnam war, was also America’s tragedy, a fruitless enterprise that cost many lives and wrecked American confidence in Washington. As Caro now says, “Everyone thinks distrust of government started under Nixon. That’s not true. It started under Johnson.” On Vietnam he lied so consistently that Americans ceased to believe anything he said. Journalists spoke euphemistically of his “credibility gap.” Trust in the political class never 
returned.

With Johnson so dishonoured that he couldn’t run for re-election in 1968, Nixon succeeded him. He brought with him a style darker and more paranoid even than Johnson’s. In covering up a break-in by his party’s operatives at the Watergate complex, he revealed that everything said about him by his worst enemies was true.

[. . .]

From beginning to end, Schlesinger despised Nixon. In 1962, when Nixon brought out his self-revealing memoir, Six Crises, demonstrating that his main interest in life was judging how others saw him, Schlesinger wrote in his diary “I do not see how his political career can survive this book.” Schlesinger, while he served power-mad leaders, didn’t understand them. He couldn’t imagine that just six years later, in 1968, Nixon’s furious ambition would make him president and then get him re-elected to a second term, the one he failed to complete because Watergate made him the first American president ever to resign in disgrace, a fate even worse than Johnson’s.

Schlesinger’s book provides an accompaniment to this heartbreaking era of shame. It never fails to remind us that, no matter what theories the historians construct, the course of history is usually shaped by a few frail, frightened and often deeply damaged human beings.

June 18, 2012

Rerun of the Greek election

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Greece, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

The Economist summarizes the results of yesterday’s election in Greece:

WHEN deciding whether to grant citizenship to an outsider, the Ancient Greeks would put the matter to a vote, tossing coloured pebbles into a clay jar. On June 17th almost 29.7% of voting Greeks picked the colours of New Democracy, a centre-right party that broadly supports the country’s EU bail-out agreement. It was seen as a vote to remain citizens in good standing of the single currency. New Democracy narrowly beat Syriza, the “coalition of the radical left”, which was threatening to rip up the bail-out agreement. That would have resulted in ejection from the euro area or at least ostracism (another Ancient Greek practice) from its fellow members.

On the face of it, this do-over election has generated the kind of result euro-officials were hoping to see in the first election on May 6th. The leader of New Democracy, Antonis Samaras, will now seek to form a coalition with other parties that broadly support the bail-out. The Greek people can look forward to the sweat of fiscal austerity, not the tears of financial chaos. They can expect chronic misery rather than acute disaster.

[. . .]

What about the economy? As our piece last week reported, it has spent the last six weeks in suspended animation. Unfortunately, economies do not keep well in the freezer. The hesitation has wreaked great and irreparable harm. The banks have lost more deposits. The government’s arrears have grown. Erik Nielsen, chief economist of UniCredit, reports that pharmacists have suspended credit to the government, hampering the supply of medicines. The pebbles cast in May have spread damaging ripples through world markets, which have not reversed themselves. They “introduced yet another round of uncertainty” that the second bail-out programme “was not built to deal with.”

June 17, 2012

Narrow specialization, but very wide assumed knowledge

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:11

Tim Worstall on the problem when specialists in one area pretend deep understanding of radically different areas:

Regular readers will know that I’m perfectly happy to take what the climate scientists tell me about climate science. Where I start to stray from the path of green orthodoxy is those same scientists then tell us the economics of what we ought to do about it all. Something they are not competent to comment upon as they really don’t understand the economics. I do accept the economics of climate change as laid out by the economists who have studied the economics of climate change. William Nordhaus, Nick Stern and so on, tell us that if the climate science is right then a simple revenue neutral carbon tax will be the solution.

That’s fine by me. But it does still puzzle me as to why the not economists feel competent to pronounce on the economics of climate change. Are they intellectual supermen who can master two widely different subjects? Simply succumbing to politics: something must be done, this is something, do this? [. . .]

Which leads us to our conclusion. The reason the scientists are so in conflict with what the economists of climate change are saying about the economics of climate change is simply that the scientists are entirely ignorant of what the economists are saying. And I’m afraid that, despite the popularity of the stance among politicians, ignorance is not a notably successful form of governance.

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