Quotulatiousness

February 26, 2012

Disaster preparedness, Wyoming style

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

Wyoming legislators are serious about their state being prepared for disaster:

State representatives on Friday advanced legislation to launch a study into what Wyoming should do in the event of a complete economic or political collapse in the United States.

House Bill 85 passed on first reading by a voice vote. It would create a state-run government continuity task force, which would study and prepare Wyoming for potential catastrophes, from disruptions in food and energy supplies to a complete meltdown of the federal government.

The task force would look at the feasibility of Wyoming issuing its own alternative currency, if needed. And House members approved an amendment Friday by state Rep. Kermit Brown, R-Laramie, to have the task force also examine conditions under which Wyoming would need to implement its own military draft, raise a standing army, and acquire strike aircraft and an aircraft carrier.

H/T to Hit & Run where they comment with just the right level of absurdity: “The aircraft carrier is a nice touch. I suppose if it’s a big enough disaster, Wyoming might become a coastal state.”

Update, 29 February: Sadly the bill failed on third reading, so Wyoming won’t be pursuing its own aircraft carrier:

It appears that, on reflection, the Wyoming House of Representatives has decided the risk of invasion by its neighbors is remote enough that it can do without its own armed forces for now, and in particular does not need to consider whether an aircraft carrier might come in handy. I was informed, I think by Rep. Brown himself, that the bill was “defeated on third reading and exists no more.”

[. . .]

Rep. Brown was not a sponsor of the bill, although he does seem to have voted for it on the first reading; he later offered the aircraft-carrier amendment, and then voted against the whole thing today. So, although he hasn’t confirmed it yet, it does look like he may be one of those relatively rare legislators with both a sense of humor and the will to express it in a piece of legislation (which he knew would be deleted). It’s nice to be able to get humor out of a legislature this way for once.

February 24, 2012

“[T]hose who pass for our leaders are largely anti-democratic, elitist and have little compunction about intruding into our private lives”

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:21

Daniel Ben-Ami at spiked! recommends reading Robert H Frank’s The Darwin Economy: not because it’s well-written (he says it’s not) but because it exposes the mindset of our would-be tyrants.

Everyone interested in contemporary society should read Robert H Frank’s The Darwin Economy or a book like it. It is not that it is amazingly astute or beautifully written. It is neither. But it does give readers an exceedingly important perspective: an inside view of how the current generation of politician-technocrats thinks.

Identifying some of the key themes of contemporary political debate is easy enough. A glance at the media reveals that those who pass for our leaders are largely anti-democratic, elitist and have little compunction about intruding into our private lives. Working out how they reach the conclusions they do, understanding the internal logic or their approach, is more difficult.

In many ways, economics is the discipline best suited to the technocratic mindset. This has nothing to do with its traditional subject matter. It is not about debating how to produce goods and services or how to distribute them. Instead, it relates to how economics has emerged as an approach that distances itself from democratic politics and provides little room for human agency.

[. . .]

Finally, the narrow vision embodied in technocratic approaches leads to a blinkered approach to problem-solving. For example, most economists discuss tackling climate change in terms of the optimum design of a market for carbon trading. There is little critical debate about the nature of the threat the world is facing or of the range of possible solutions. One alternative to tinkering with the demand for carbon might be to have a huge programme for building nuclear reactors. Such an initiative would also have the advantage of helping to tackle a vital but often forgotten problem: the need for massive amounts of additional energy to fuel economic development.

The technocratic approach to policymaking has become immensely influential and pernicious. Although it is often expressed in terms of economic arguments, it has an impact across the whole range of social life. It is anti-democratic, anti-political and anti-human. To counter the rise of technocracy, it is necessary to delve deep into how its arch-exponents think.

ESR’s open letter to Chris Dodd

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:18

Chris Dodd is apparently trying to get some kind of compromise or accommodation with the firms of Silicon Valley. ESR explains that this is not likely to yield the kind of returns he’s expecting:

Mr. Dodd, I hear you’ve just given a speech in which you said “Hollywood is pro-technology and pro-Internet.” It seems you’re looking for interlocutors among the coalition that defeated SOPA and PIPA, and are looking for some politically feasible compromise that will do something against the problem of Internet piracy as you believe you understand it.

There isn’t any one person who can answer your concerns. But I can speak for one element of the coalition that blocked those two bills; the technologists. I’m not talking about Google or the technology companies, mind you — I’m talking about the actual engineers who built the Internet and keep it running, who write the software you rely on every day of your life in the 21st century.

[. . .]

The difference matters because the businesspeople rely on us to do the actual technical work — and since the rise of the Internet, if we don’t like where a firm’s strategy is going, it tends not to get there. Wise bosses have learned to accommodate us as much as possible and pick the few fights they must have with their engineering talent very, very carefully. Google, in particular, got its huge market capitalization by being better at managing this symbiosis than anyone else.

I can best introduce you to our concerns by quoting another of our philosopher/elders, John Gilmore. He said: “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

February 22, 2012

Peter Gleick’s career self-destruction

Filed under: Environment, Law, Media, Politics, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

Megan McArdle’s post yesterday at The Atlantic on the further revelations in the Heartland Institute caper, where Peter Gleick’s confession of wire fraud is the central bit of news:

You receive an anonymous memo in the mail purporting to be the secret climate strategy of the Heartland Institute. It is not printed on Heartland Institute letterhead, has no information identifying the supposed author or audience, contains weird locutions more typical of Heartland’s opponents than of climate skeptics, and appears to have been written in a somewhat slapdash fashion. Do you:

A. Throw it in the trash

B. Reach out to like-minded friends to see how you might go about confirming its provenance

C. Tell no one, but risk a wire-fraud conviction, the destruction of your career, and a serious PR blow to your movement by impersonating a Heartland board member in order to obtain confidential documents.

As a journalist, I am in fact the semi-frequent recipient of documents promising amazing scoops, and depending on the circumstances, my answer is always “A” or “B”, never “C”.

It’s a gross violation of journalistic ethics, though perhaps Gleick would argue that he’s not a journalist — and in truth, it’s hard to feel too sorry for Heartland, given how gleefully they embraced the ClimateGate leaks. So leave ethics aside: wasn’t he worried that impersonating board members in order to obtain confidential material might be, I don’t know, illegal? Forget about the morality of it: the risk is all out of proportion to the possible reward.

[. . .]

Gleick has done enormous damage to his cause and his own reputation, and it’s no good to say that people shouldn’t be focusing on it. If his judgement is this bad, how is his judgement on matters of science? For that matter, what about the judgement of all the others in the movement who apparently see nothing worth dwelling on in his actions?

When skeptics complain that global warming activists are apparently willing to go to any lengths — including lying — to advance their worldview, I’d say one of the movement’s top priorities should be not proving them right. And if one rogue member of the community does something crazy that provides such proof, I’d say it is crucial that the other members of the community say “Oh, how horrible, this is so far beyond the pale that I cannot imagine how this ever could have happened!” and not, “Well, he’s apologized and I really think it’s pretty crude and opportunistic to make a fuss about something that’s so unimportant in the grand scheme of things.”

After you have convinced people that you fervently believe your cause to be more important than telling the truth, you’ve lost the power to convince them of anything else.

February 19, 2012

Building a football stadium: corporate welfare at its most grotesque

Filed under: Football, Government, Media, Politics, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

Patrick Reusse writes for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He’s a sports columnist, so his job — to some degree anyway — depends on the local professional sports teams (the Vikings, the Twins, the Wild, and the Timberwolves) sticking around and being competitive. Part of the sticking around these days is finding a new home for the Minnesota Vikings, who are at the end of their 30-year lease on the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in downtown Minneapolis. Reusse is critical of those who don’t want their tax money going into the pockets of billionaire owner Zygi Wilf:

We so easily could be another decayed downtown, if not for the corporations, and the law firms and the accounting firms, and the retailers that remain committed to being in the city, when everything could be cheaper and more convenient by joining the sprawl in Maple Grove or Eden Prairie or Eagan.

Last month, Sandra Colvin Roy, another of the dedicated lefties on the Minneapolis City Council, announced opposition to the plan for a new Vikings stadium in downtown Minneapolis without a citywide referendum (that she knows would fail).

[. . .]

And yet it’s not only Roy and her lefty colleagues who offer a roadblock to Minneapolis coming up with its stadium share. There are righties in the Legislature with equally mysterious thoughts on the city’s entertainment tax.

“You know who pays for this?” Rep. Sarah Anderson of Plymouth said. “The citizens in my district, my constituents that decide to go to Minneapolis, maybe go out to a restaurant for the night.”

Some way, we have wound up with politicians who would put the cleaver to a great asset for the state’s largest city, and then offer the silliest of explanations, like 1) several score of people sleeping outside on government property, and 2) a few guys from Plymouth who would rather not pay an extra 3 percent for a Dewars and water at the Seville.

What stands in the way of a stronger heartbeat for downtown Minneapolis are the collections of the nearsighted that we have elected.

As you’ll know if you’ve read the blog for any length of time, I’m a big fan of the Minnesota Vikings, despite never having lived there or even visited the state. I’d be very upset if they became the L.A. Vikings. But I also totally sympathize with Minnesotans who don’t want their taxes being used to give corporate welfare to the billionaire owner of the football club. Pouring money into facilities for professional sports teams is one of the very worst ways to use tax dollars, as the lads at Reason.tv explain:

And from an article last year at Hit & Run:

To put it bluntly, regardless of how much money the state treasury might be rolling in, a public stadium is not a good use of money. Indeed, sports economists Dennis Coates and Brad Humphries estimate the presence of a major-league franchise reduces overall GDP by about $40 per resident in a given metro area.

The Vikes’ ownership has graciously offered to put up $400 million and the state is looking at ponying up $300 million, which means county and local taxpayers (read: suckers) would be on the hook for the remaining $400 million. So generous of the owners, don’t you think? Needless to say, the team would get all naming rights and a host of other related goodies.

[. . .]

Here’s a real surprise: Almost 75 percent of local residents don’t think public money should be used for a new stadium but the folks literally invested in the team and the building of the stadium are all for it!

February 18, 2012

“Somewhere in the near-eternal labyrinth of the Drummond report there must be evidence that the McGuinty’s Liberal government did something right over the last decade. If there is, I haven’t found it yet.”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Terence Corcoran brings the gloom on the Ontario government’s most likely response to the Drummond report:

Ontario, get ready for The Big McGuinty. The 562-page report from the government-appointed Commission on the Reform of Ontario’s Public Services, chaired by economist Don Drummond, has all the makings of a diversionary shell game in which everybody is directed to follow the pea of spending cuts while the real game is something else.

With attention now focused on carving Mr. Drummond’s 362 recommended slices off the great Ontario spending bologna, the real bait-and-switch objective, The Big McGuinty of this giant exercise in fiscal self-flagellation, is something else altogether: tax increases.

Does anybody seriously think the Liberal government of the Rev. Dalton McGuinty, after a decade of installing feel-good spending increases and extravagant policy schemes, is suddenly going to roll it all back and reverse a decade of ideological commitment to government intervention and liberal spending programs?

The Drummond report would require policy-backtracking on a vast scale. Somewhere in the near-eternal labyrinth of the Drummond report there must be evidence that the McGuinty’s Liberal government did something right over the last decade. If there is, I haven’t found it yet.

February 17, 2012

Gary Johnson is “the candidate that the Left once hoped Barack Obama would be”

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

Theo Anderson thinks that Gary Johnson is the candidate that should terrify the Democrats:

Gary Johnson is, in some important ways, the candidate that the Left once hoped Barack Obama would be. He vocally opposes the death penalty, the use of torture by the U.S. military, and the indefinite detention of people charged with a crime–even suspects charged with terrorism.

He’s pro-choice. He calls for deep cuts in the defense budget and an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and from many of our military bases around the world. He unequivocally supports marriage rights for gays and believes that legalizing marijuana — rather than building a wall — is the key to solving illegal immigration. He also favors a two-year grace period for immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally, so that they can obtain work visas and continue living and working here.

[. . .]

What’s striking about Johnson isn’t just the fact that he’s to the left of Obama and most other elected Democrats on many issues. It’s also his boldness in comparison with the Democrats’ timidity. He’s been a fierce critic, for example, of the warmongering and civil-liberties abuses by both major parties over the past decade. In January, when he spoke the ACLU’s National Staff Conference, he called for repeal of the Patriot Act.

“Ten years ago,” he said, “we learned that the fastest way to pass a bad law is to call it the ‘Patriot Act’ and force Congress to vote on it in the immediate wake of a horrible attack on the United States. The irony is that there is really very little about the Patriot Act that is patriotic. Instead, it has turned out to be yet another tool the government is using to erode privacy, individual freedom and the Constitution itself.”

February 16, 2012

How long will it take for McGuinty to “lose” the Drummond report?

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:24

Yesterday, the Drummond report was released, containing literally hundreds of recommendations for getting Ontario’s government back on the fiscal straight-and-narrow. Perhaps half a dozen of the recommendations will be welcomed by Dalton McGuinty and his ministers. The rest will be anywhere from mildly unwelcome to outright anathema. In the National Post, Linda Nguyen has an overview:

The Ontario government needs to “swiftly and boldly” implement all of the hundreds of recommendations in a massive report released Wednesday if it wants to eliminate a projected $30.2 billion deficit by 2017, warns economist Don Drummond.

“Unfortunately, we’re dealing with a harsh reality in identity here,” said Mr. Drummond, author of the 543-page report and former chief economist with TD Bank.

The audit, which could be an example to other jurisdictions struggling to control spending, offered 362 recommendations in various sectors including health care, education, social programs, justice and labour relations.

[. . .]

In its 2011 budget, the Ontario government had projected its deficit to climb to $16-billion, but Mr. Drummond says his projects peg it at more than double that if the province continues its current spending.

To reach the target, Ontario must decrease its total program spending to 0.8% for the next seven years.

It’s been an item of faith among Liberals and NDPers that former Premier Mike Harris carpet-bombed the provincial economy during his two terms in office. As Scott Stinson points out, however, “Ontario’s projected spending needs a 17% cut. Mike Harris only cut 3.9%”:

“Avoid across-the-board cuts. Such a blunt tool treats equally a valuable efficiently run program and one that is outdated and sloppily managed. This is dumb.”
Dumb? Such plain speaking! We are used to government reports that prefer to say a measure “fails to properly realize efficiencies by ensuring its actions are in line with forward-looking goals and objectives.”

“This is not a smorgasbord from which the government can choose only the tastiest morsels and ignore the less palatable.”
Eat your brussels sprouts, Dalton McGuinty! But despite the pleasant analogy — who doesn’t enjoy a good buffet? — this is one of the more stark lines in the whole report. Implement it all, or it won’t work, the Commission says. Yikes.

“In budget planning, do not count chickens before they are hatched.”
We’ll say this for Mr. Drummond: he’s not afraid to use the folksy language.

“Kicking the can down the road is no solution.”
See?

“Do not hang onto public assets or public service delivery when better options exist. Consider privatizing assets and moving to the private delivery of services wherever feasible.”
Also, when preparing discussions with public-service unions, bring a helmet.

[. . .]

“The province should, in future discussions with the Ontario Teachers’ Federation, reject further employer rate increases to [pension plans] beyond the current rate.”
Another one sure to be a hit with the unions. Did you know that on average a teacher retires at 59, having worked 26 years, and collects a pension for 30 years? Me neither.

“The government should work to discuss, in particular, the overproduction of teachers with Ontario’s 13 universities offering teacher education programs.”
The term “overproduction” of teachers makes them sound kind of like widgets.

“Reshape student financial assistance, including the newly announced 30% Off Ontario Tuition grant, to target more of the assistance to low-income students.”
Say, remember that key plank of your election platform? Yeah, you need to totally rethink that.

“Protocols of the Elders of Climategate”

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:08

James Delingpole on the Heartland Institute caper:

I wasn’t going to write about yesterday’s Heartland Institute shock-horror revelations in the Guardian because I thought it was a non-story. “Independent libertarian think-tank spends trifling* sums of money to counter the state’s liberal-left propaganda”. Gosh, hold the front page. Run it next to the story about the Pope being caught worshipping regularly in Rome and the photograph of a bear pooping behind a tree…

Since then, though, it has got much more interesting. Turns out that at least some of the “leaked” documents purporting to show the round, unvarnished face of capitalist, anti-science evil may have been faked.

[. . .]

We climate realists don’t think of ourselves as anti-science.

No, really. We think we’re pro-science. That’s what we want science teachers to teach kids in schools: hard science — physics, chemistry, biology. Stuff that’s empirical. Theories that are falsifiable. Not the kind of junk science they teach in places like the school of “environmental” “science” at comedy institutions like the “University” of East Anglia. Because that’s not science at all. It’s computer-modelling, projection, which is more akin to necromancy.

So, next time you try to fake your Protocols of the Elders of Climategate document, guys, at least try to credit the people you’re trying to smear with a bit of integrity. Not everyone is like you, you realise?

February 15, 2012

American consulate chooses not to give asylum to Wang Lijun, former Chongqing City official

Filed under: China, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:08

I got an emailed link to this story at the Epoch Times, providing an account of former vice-mayor and chief of police Wang Lijun’s attempt to claim political asylum in the American consulate in Chengdu:

What exactly happened on the day Wang Lijun fled to the U.S. Consulate is not yet clear; but speculation and comments abound on China’s Internet. U.S. officials are also leaking information about what happened, and a congressional investigation into the affair has been promised.

Wang is the former vice-mayor and chief of police of the southwestern China megapolis of Chongqing City, and was the right-hand man of Bo Xilai, the city’s Communist Party chief who is known as an ultra-leftist hardliner, and who has been wrangling to win a position on the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the group of nine men who stand at the top of the Party’s hierarchy.

Wang was unexpectedly demoted on Feb. 2 from his posts and reassigned to handle “culture, education, and environmental protection.” On Feb. 5 he talked about the importance of his new job responsibilities at Chongqing Normal University and elsewhere. No one suspected that he would flee to the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu the next day.

[. . .]

While what exactly happened in the consulate in Chengdu cannot be confirmed, Bill Gertz of the Washington Free Beacon, citing an unnamed U.S. official, has reported that the Obama administration denied Wang Lijun asylum for fear of upsetting the Chinese regime.

U.S. Congressman Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on oversight and investigations, has promised his subcommittee will investigate the handling of Wang’s case, Gertz also reports.

Justin Trudeau: soft separatist

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:22

Josée Legault is busily trying to walk back her scoop, as she claims now that the information being presented in English is distorted and a false characterization of what Justin Trudeau actually said. Colby Cosh isn’t convinced:

Legault goes on to gripe about the “honesty” of this characterization. In fact, it is perfectly honest and in perfect concord with what Trudeau said, and Legault was correct to recognize it as news in the first place, even if she does not now like the result (perhaps because she has lost ownership of the scoop).

Justin Trudeau did say he was willing to contemplate separation under real-world circumstances. “One day, who knows?” is more or less exactly what he told the interviewer. This is a legitimate surprise. And while I believe that a forty-year-old man is entitled to his own opinions — not that any Quebecois baby boomer can stand to think of Justin as a person entering the era of back pain and prostate problems — the contrast with his father’s extreme anti-sovereigntist position really is worth remarking upon, if only because Justin’s surname is the source of much of his influence.

[. . .]

And yet, as sane and worthy of imitation as he seems in these respects, does anybody recognize the “Canada of Stephen Harper” Trudeau ranted against so excitingly today in front of a scrum in Centre Block? Harper’s party has not only accepted the legal fact of same-sex marriage, but has promised to shore it up against the disrepair in which the prior Liberal regime left it. The pro-life agitators in the Conservative caucus are a few barely-detectable grains of pepper amidst a kilogram of salt; on the whole, they are little more numerous and noisy than the pro-lifers in the pre-2011 Liberal caucus (who were, in one of history’s petty ironies, disproportionately victims of Conservative gains in non-metro Ontario).

February 14, 2012

Santorum is “libertarianism’s sweater-vested arch-nemesis”

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:40

For pretty much any position you could name, if you mapped the libertarian opinion on it, diametrically opposed on the chart you’d find Rick Santorum. Gene Healy explains why there’s no libertarian case for voting Santorum:

To borrow from Mitt’s rhetorical stylings, I’m not severely conservative, but I do have a case of Stage IV libertarianism. And anyone who shares that condition will find Santorum’s rise particularly vexing. The former senator from Pennsylvania is libertarianism’s sweater-vested arch-nemesis.

In a Pennsylvania Press Club luncheon in Harrisburg last summer, Santorum declared, “I am not a libertarian, and I fight very strongly against libertarian influence within the Republican Party and the conservative movement.”

In that regard, Santorum has a pretty impressive record. By voting for the No Child Left Behind Act, he helped give President Obama the power to micromanage the nation’s schools from Washington; and by supporting a prescription drug entitlement for Medicare, he helped saddle the taxpayers with a $16 trillion unfunded liability.

Santorum voted for the 2005 “bridge to nowhere” highway bill, has backed an expanded national service program, and his compassionate conservatism has the Bono seal of approval: “On our issues, he has been a defender of the most vulnerable.” Rick Santorum: He’s from the government, and he’s here to help.

[. . .]

A recent Time magazine symposium asked leading thinkers on the Right, “What Is Conservatism?” Anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist offered this answer: “Conservatives ask only one thing of the government. They wish to be left alone.”

Tell that to Santorum, whose agenda rests on meddling with other people, sometimes with laws, sometimes with aircraft carrier groups.

“This idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do,” Santorum complained to NPR in 2006, “that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues … that is not how traditional conservatives view the world.”

The surreal world of international aid

Filed under: Britain, India, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:16

Brendan O’Neill on the ludicrous display of a donor literally begging the intended recipient to continue accepting the offering:

The debate about whether Britain should continue giving aid to India will surely rank as one of 2012’s most ‘Alice in Wonderland’ political moments. An outsider to the world of international aid probably imagines that it is cash-strapped countries in the South who do the pleading, sometimes having to humiliate themselves by asking Western nations for financial assistance. Yet in the surreal affray over aid to India, it was the well-off giver — Britain — which was on its knees, begging, beseeching the Indians to continue accepting our largesse because if they didn’t, it would cause the Lib-Con government ‘great embarrassment’.

This unseemly spat sums up the problem with modern aid: it’s all about Us, not Them. The reason British ministers were prostrating themselves before India, effectively begging the Indians to remain as beggars, is because aid is now more about generating a moral rush in the big heads of politicians and activists over here than it is about filling the tummies of under-privileged people over there. It is designed to flatter and satisfy the giver rather than address the needs of the receiver, which means ‘aid to India’ is way more important to Britain than it is to India. And for that reason, because aid has been so thoroughly corrupted by the narrow needs of its distributors, it would indeed be a good thing to stop foisting it upon India and other nations.

There was something almost Pythonesque (and I never use that word) in the sight of British politicians saying ‘We must continue giving aid to India’ while Indian politicians were saying ‘We do not require the aid. It is a peanut in our total development spending.’ Those were the words of India’s finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee, who told his parliament that the nation should ‘voluntarily’ give up the £280million it receives from Britain each year. Cue outraged — and panicked — ministers and do-gooders in London kickstarting a PR campaign to show that the Indians are wrong — they do need British aid, because otherwise, according to Britain’s minister for international development Alan Duncan, in an article illustrated with a photograph of him accepting flowers from grateful little Indians, ‘millions could die’.

[. . .]

British historian William Hutton once said, ‘The charity that hastens to proclaim its good deeds ceases to be charity, and is only pride and ostentation’. That is pretty much all that remains in the world of aid: pride and ostentation. Indeed, it is striking that, in 2010, when DFID announced cuts to spending on the publicity side of ‘fighting global poverty’, various NGOs went ballistic, slamming the focus on ‘output-based aid’ over important things such as ‘increas[ing] public understanding of the causes of global poverty’ — that is, who cares about providing on-the-ground stuff, when there’s so much awareness-raising about the wonderfulness of NGOs to be done? Britain’s aid budget should be slashed, not because it costs the taxpayer too much money, as Daily Mail moaners argue, but because it costs too much in terms of the self-respect of nations in the South. Britain should have an emergency aid budget, of course, so that, like all civilised nations, it can assist quickly and generously when people are immediately threatened by starvation or disease, such as after the Haiti earthquake or the Pakistani floods. But the rest of the time, even sometimes struggling peoples don’t need the massive side orders of moralism and fatalism that come with Britain’s ‘peanuts’.

February 13, 2012

How Greece got into their predicament

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government, Greece, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:18

Anita Acavalos wrote this article in 2010. It’s still relevant — perhaps even more so today:

Although at first glance the situation Greece faces may seem as simply the result of gross incompetence on behalf of the government, a closer assessment of the country’s social structure and people’s deep-rooted political beliefs will show that this outcome could not have been avoided even if more skill was involved in the country’s economic and financial management.

The population has a deep-rooted suspicion of and disrespect for business and private initiative and there is a widespread belief that “big money” is earned by exploitation of the poor or underhand dealings and reflects no display of virtue or merit. Thus people feel that they are entitled to manipulate the system in a way that enables them to use the wealth of others as it is a widely held belief that there is nothing immoral about milking the rich. In fact, the money the rich seem to have access to is the cause of much discontent among people of all social backgrounds, from farmers to students. The reason for this is that the government for decades has run continuous campaigns promising people that it has not only the will but also the ABILITY to solve their problems and has established a system of patronages and hand-outs to this end.

Anything can be done in Greece provided someone has political connections, from securing a job to navigating the complexities of the Greek bureaucracy. The government routinely promises handouts to farmers after harsh winters and free education to all; every time there is a display of discontent they rush to appease the people by offering them more “solutions.” What they neglect to say is that these solutions cost money. Now that the money has run out, nobody can reason with an angry mob.

[. . .]

Greece is the perfect example of a country where the government attempted to create a utopia in which it serves as the all-providing overlord offering people amazing job prospects, free health care and education, personal security and public order, and has failed miserably to provide on any of these. In the place of this promised utopian mansion lies a small shack built at an exorbitant cost to the taxpayer, leaking from every nook and cranny due to insufficient funds, which demands ever higher maintenance costs just to keep it from collapsing altogether. The architects of this shack, in a desperate attempt to repair what is left are borrowing all the money they can from their neighbours, even at exorbitant costs promising that this time they will be prudent. All that is left for the people living inside this leaking shack is to protest for all the promises that the government failed to fulfil; but, sadly for the government, promises will neither pay its debts nor appease the angry mob any longer. Greece has lost any credibility it had within the EU as it has achieved notoriety for the way government accountants seem to be cooking up numbers they present to EU officials.

H/T to Steve Baker MP for the link.

February 12, 2012

Daniel Hannan at CPAC 2012

Filed under: Britain, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:11

If you want to hear from someone who unmistakably understands the profound impact of America’s founding and believes there is still time for its citizens to take hold of its bureaucratic laden government and return it back to the will of it’s founding, then you must hear this speech from Daniel Hannan. You’ll appreciate America all the more afterwards, I assure you.

H/T to John Ward for the link.

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