Quotulatiousness

July 25, 2009

QotD: the last honest trash collector

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:18

There are lots of levels of fear and complaint about the government getting involved in business. First and foremost, of course, is incompetence. We actually have experiential evidence about this. In England, all the English car companies were beginning to circle the drain in a series of well-deserved failures and bankruptcies, earned by making lousy products with very poor production at high prices. So, the government, back in the ’70s, nationalized all the British car companies. The result was British Leyland, a name that perhaps doesn’t resonate much with you. Many of your friends probably drive Humber Super Snipers, or perhaps not. [Laughs.] That’s certainly one thing that we’re headed for. The other thing is that there’s a very good reason that governments aren’t supposed to compete with private-enterprise companies. Governments have monopolies on certain things, like eminent domain and deadly force. What’s another example of an organization that gets into the same business that you’re in, except that their guys have got guns? That would be the Mob. Ford is like the last honest trash collector in the New York metropolitan area, the last one that’s not mobbed-up. How long is that gonna go on for?

P.J. O’Rourke interviewed by Gregg LaGambina, A.V. Club, 2009-07-16

July 22, 2009

Tinkering with “the engine of poverty”

Filed under: Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:42

Jon sent me this link with the comment “Don’t know if the article is bloggable, but I liked the opening salvo”:

Natural disasters can cause enormous human misery, and require massive relief operations, to provide food and medical aid. To cause serious, long-term, grinding poverty, however, you need government involvement.

I have to agree with Jon, the opening to the post is quite good. After digging into some of the examples (the Ukraine under Stalin, Ethiopia in the 70s-80’s, and the US experiment with the “Great Society”), the first point at which an apolitical or undecided reader would say “Now, hold on there . . .”

Of course, the meaning of “poverty” has changed a lot over the years. The poor of the United States have a higher standard of living than the middle class in much of the rest of the world. They also have a higher standard of living than the filthy rich of a hundred years ago, or the crowned royalty of the centuries before that. This improved standard of living has very little to do with the government.

Poverty is something any civilized society wants to reduce and then eliminate, but it never seems to happen. The reason for that, aside from the vast amounts of time, effort, money, and resources being wasted through inefficiency, incompetence, and bureaucratic delay, is that the problem cannot be solved in most countries by definition. Most of the time when people use the term “poverty” they mean relative poverty. For most of the western world, absolute poverty affects a vanishingly small number of people (it’s not gone, but it’s lower than it’s ever been for any civilization in history). Relative poverty, however, is usually linked to a formula (like a set percentage of the average family income), which means that even as individuals’ and families’ financial situations improve, they will still be proportionally lower than the average (which will have improved over the same relative period of time). Statistically, no improvement will appear.

Popular belief, shaped by the official statistics, is that many people live in dire circumstances. Some do, but most who are technically below the poverty line are doing better than the average family from a few decades back. Proportionally, they’re still below the line, but from the standpoint of access to food, shelter, health care, and transportation, they’re better off.

If you are motivated by a humanitarian desire to help the poor – the ostensible mission of much of the modern liberal state – you must realize that nothing helps them more than the increased standard of living and economic opportunity brought about by the private sector.

However, the public perception is quite different: that it is the modern liberal state that has made these improvements against the active resistance of the private sector.

Here, in a nutshell, is the crucial difference between reality and the perception of most voters:

The value of every wasted government dollar must be judged by what free enterprise could have accomplished with it.

Most westerners think that General Motors, Chrysler, and AIG are the perfect exemplars of the free enterprise system, replacing the earlier capitalist icons of Enron and Worldcom.

When you say “capitalist”, most people hear a very different word than the one you’re using. “Free enterprise”, to far too many people, means vast corporations with dozens of legislators (or even legislatures) in their back pockets, using their tame politicians to obtain tax credits, advantageous labour codes, or “eminent domain-ing” their way through neighborhoods. The “private sector” decodes to “rich, secretive plutocrats”.

What you say and what they hear bear very little resemblance to one another. You’re not speaking the same language.

Then, the touching statement of hope:

If the six long months of this Administration serve any constructive purpose, it should be permanently dissolving the illusion that a small group of political appointees can predict what the economy will do, and control it to produce an improved outcome.

Most people, in times of stress, look for that man on the white horse. Most Americans still think they found one.

QotD: Republican government

Filed under: Government, Law, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:04

Republican government is impossible in an age where not only are the bills too long for a reasonably engaged citizen to read, not only are they too long for a legislator to read, but they’re too long to write down before they’re passed into law. We just have to trust our rulers, and they just have to trust whichever aides negotiated whichever boondoggles with whichever lobbyists.

Mark Steyn, “Jacksonian America”, National Review, 2009-07-20

July 21, 2009

QotD: ” . . . Apollo was a government boondoggle”

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, Space — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:44

To keen spacenuts like yours truly, the moonshot was a brilliant climax. That was the problem, it was THE climax. Nothing since has some close in daring or accomplishment. The moon, the wisemen told us, was only the first step. Mars was next, by 1990 surely. 1990 came and went. Whatever the scientific merits of sending men rather than machines to the planets, the spacenuts wanted Captain Kirk to follow logically from Neil Armstrong. It was the future. It was progress. It was inevitable.

We didn’t notice, until rather late, the problem with Apollo. The clever crew cut men, hard cold and objective, gazing at their computer screens — ancient to modern eyes, but so beautiful — using mind boggling math to do the amazing. Beneath the math, the engineering and the hard science was the dismal science. Apollo was a government boondoggle, a creature of politicians it died when its political masters saw that it was no longer a vote getter.

Publius, “Destination Moon”, Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2009-07-20

July 20, 2009

I look forward to Gordon Brown’s “Paul Martin” moment

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:56

For those of you who have already forgotten the premiership of Paul Martin, one of the most striking moments of his term in office was his leaving of it. His final speech, after the election results were in, was the best speech I think he ever made. There was a jauntiness, a cheerfulness in his voice that had been totally lacking at any point before that. After a successful term as Finance Minister under Jean Chrétien, Martin, like Gordon Brown, couldn’t wait to get the current PM out the door.

Martin, for all his faults, was not the ongoing disaster for his party and country that Brown has been. Martin also knew when to bow out. Brown has not been willing to go — and has been unwilling to risk the opinions of the electorate in a general election. Yet.

Christopher Hitchens looks at the wreckage:

Early this past June it became hard to distinguish among the resignation statements that were emanating almost daily from Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Cabinet. The noise of collapsing scenery drowned out the individuality of the letters — one female minister, I remember, complained that she was being used as “window dressing” — but there was one missive from a departing comrade that caught my eye. It came from James Purnell, a man generally agreed to have done a more than respectable job as minister for work and pensions, and it began like this:

Dear Gordon,
We both love the Labour Party. I have worked for it for twenty years and you for far longer. We know we owe it everything and it owes us nothing . . .

I sat back in my chair. Yes, it’s true. One suddenly could recall a time when membership in the Labour Party (or “the Labour movement,” as it would call itself on great occasions) was a thing of pride. [. . .]

The true definition of corruption, it seems to me, is the diversion of public resources to private or politicized ends [. . .] There are other and lesser definitions, such as milking the public purse or abusing the public trust by “creative accounting.” The cloudburst of lurid detail about the expenses racket, which has made the current Parliament into an object of scorn and loathing, is a cloudburst that has soaked members of all parties equally. However, the Brownite style is by far the most culpable. It was Brown’s people who foisted a Speaker on the House of Commons who both indulged the scandal and obstructed a full ventilation of it. As if that weren’t bad enough, Gordon Brown still resists any call to dissolve this wretched Parliament — a Parliament that is almost audibly moaning to be put out of its misery and shame — because he still isn’t prepared to undergo the great test of being submitted to the electorate. Say what you will about Tony Blair, he took on all the other parties in three hard-fought general elections, and when it was considered time for him to give way or step down, he voluntarily did so while some people could still ask, “Why are you going?,” rather than “Why the hell don’t you go?” For the collapse of Britain’s formerly jaunty and spendthrift “financial sector,” everybody including Blair is to blame. But for the contempt in which Parliament is held, and in which a once great party now shares, it’s Blair’s successor who is the lugubrious villain.

H/T to Ghost of a Flea for the link.

July 16, 2009

Rephrasing Ben Franklin’s old aphorism

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:04

Benjamin Franklin is often quoted as having said “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety”. Here’s a modern rephrasing, “The more you cede your own well-being to an 800-pound gorilla, the more that 800-pound gorilla is going to act like a thin-skinned asshole.“.

(Cross-posted to the old blog, http://bolditalic.com/quotulatiousness_archive/005589.html.)

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