Trade agreements are always about “concessions” in which foreign suppliers are grudgingly given — or, more often, indignantly denied — the right to sell Canadians goods and services at prices lower than what we pay now. Let’s be clear here: lowering the price of consumer goods and services has the exact same effect on household welfare as an increase in incomes. But I defy you to name an elected politician who will list “the ability to buy cheaper stuff” as the most compelling reason to support free trade: more than 200 years since Adam Smith wrote that paragraph, our trade agenda is still written by and for producer interests.
We’re stuck with a system in which producer interests — most notoriously the dairy cartel that operates under the name of “supply management” — hold the rest of us hostage. Dismantling the dairy cartel is an act that would significantly increase consumers’ buying power, but this is a measure that the Conservatives have all but ruled out under any circumstances, and the NDP has made maintaining the cartel a condition for supporting any sort of trade agreement.
Why would the [major parties] stubbornly insist on sticking to a policy that makes consumers worse off at the expense of producers? Because it’s a popular position. It’s one of the marvels of the Canadian electorate. Show Canadians a special interest group that uses its government-granted privileges to fleece consumers, and they’ll embrace it as a “national champion,” a “uniquely Canadian way of life” or some equally vapid catch-phrase.
This is from the Wikipedia entry for Stockholm Syndrome:
Stockholm syndrome, or capture–bonding, is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them.
What we suffer from is the economic policy equivalent. Call it “Canada Syndrome”: a tendency for consumers to identify with the producer interests that are holding them hostage.
Stephen Gordon, “Our Stockholm Syndrome about supply management”, Maclean’s, 2013-03-05.
November 24, 2020
QotD: Canada’s economic Stockholm Syndrome
November 23, 2020
QotD: The social poison of hypersensitivity
And yet, this hypersensitivity is absolute and complete social poison.
Read that again, please. This is a poison pill. When you read Drew’s piece, you will notice how everything is colored through the lens of racism. He literally cannot see anything without suspecting secret racism behind it. And, furthermore, I have no doubt his friends are fully cognizant of this. They, not wishing to anger him or appear racist themselves (who does?), almost assuredly feel a constant social pressure to micromanage their words, gestures, and behavior around their friend. This, in turn, makes interacting with him less pleasant. This becomes self-reinforcing. Drew detects his friends act different about him, which fuels an assumption that the difference is due to racism, which in turn is detected by the friends, who now act even more different in an effort to avoid this very thing.
Everybody gets caught in a spiral of stupidity that no one can escape from.
All until somebody, in the heat of the moment, not thinking, breaks out a slur. Whether driven by bad luck, too much to drink, or some other mechanism, the micromanagement of offense is broken. And not even knowing how to handle this, the relationship of the man and his friends entirely breaks down, requiring him to write a letter to his friend, and considering abandoning the friendship altogether.
See how this works? Drew, like many American blacks, has a wall between him and the rest of us. Piercing that wall takes extra effort. He may even be entirely justified in how he arrived at the notion that the wall was necessary, just as a Jewish person is quite justified in worrying about pogroms and other such things, given the course of history.
However justified, though, the hypersensitivity works against healing and normalization of relations. It poisons relationships.
Thales, “Hypersensitivity and Race”, Declination, 2018-08-08.
November 22, 2020
QotD: Winston Churchill
Footnote by Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, War Diaries, 1939-1945, 1957.
November 21, 2020
QotD: Using a “wokescreen”
It is, essentially, a new iteration of an old rule: the one stating that the person commonly to be found complaining most vociferously about a particular vice is the one disproportionately likely to be guilty of said vice.
Through decades past, this rule applied to people who were literally in the clerical class. It was, for instance (see the late Cardinal Keith O’Brien), the priest or bishop who denounced homosexuality in the most vociferous terms who would turn out to have their own peculiar interpretation of “the laying on of hands”, tending to revolve around the knees of young male seminarians.
And there is sense in this of course. Through overt displays of moral opprobrium, the petitioner imagines that everyone’s attention will be diverted. Through stressing their virtue overmuch, however, such people raise a perceptible flag to anyone with an eye for human hypocrisy.
Today, of course, the clerical class is not the clergy. It is generally a rich, massively protected, metropolitan and often corporate or corporate-backed class which poses as the defender and then enforcer of all the easiest, least-controversial causes of the time. These shift, naturally, but today a person who wishes to cloak themselves in virtue will talk up their “anti-racism” credentials; will talk about “feminism” as though women’s rights have only just occurred to them; they will stress their green credentials; and of course they will rush to the defence of anyone who claims to identify as a tree or a hedgerow and assert that said person’s right to so identify is not just ancient and long-established but biologically incontrovertible. All give off immense warning-signs.
Douglas Murray, “Do you know what a wokescreen is?”, UnHerd, 2020-08-13.
November 20, 2020
QotD: Tolerance
Tolerance represents a mutual compact to which the state itself is a party. And its minimalism is an important feature. Tolerance does not ask you to approve of gay people, or to like atheists, or to appreciate a jaunty Sikh turban, or to trust a redhead. It insists only that you treat them as humans and fellow citizens — equal to yourself in legal endowments and social entitlements, and most particularly in the right to be left alone.
Tolerance means you do not persecute; you do not abuse; you do not commit or threaten violence. It is a restriction on behaviour, above all, or, more broadly, on conduct: it is not a test of one’s disposition, private opinions or feelings.
Colby Cosh, “‘Can we stop talking about tolerance?’ Lord, I hope not”, National Post, 2018-08-23.
November 19, 2020
QotD: The true purpose of quotations
Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night, 1935.
November 18, 2020
QotD: Feminism and gender equality
Thus the issue of Summers’s supposedly intimidating style of governance is really the issue of the political correctness by which Summers has been intimidated. Political correctness is the leading form of intimidation in all of American education today, and this incident at Harvard is a pure case of it. The phrase has been around since the 1980s, and the media have become bored with it. But the fact of political correctness is before us in the refusal of feminist women professors even to consider the possibility that women might be at any natural disadvantage in mathematics as compared with men. No, more than that: They refuse to allow that possibility to be entertained even in a private meeting. And still more: They are not ashamed to be seen as suppressing any inquiry into such a possibility. For the demand that Summers be more “responsible” in what he says applies to any inquiry that he or anyone else might cite.
Harvey Mansfield, “Fear and Intimidation at Harvard”, Weekly Standard, 2005-03-07.
November 17, 2020
QotD: Prejudice
Or just think about how much ink has been spilled arguing that it is unfair and unjust to assume that one black youth is a criminal or a threat just because he resembles in some way a negative stereotype. I’m not mocking this argument; I am agreeing with it.
As I’ve been saying until I’m blue in the face on my book tour, one of the greatest things about this country is the ideal — always in tension with the lesser devils of our natures — that says we should take people as we find them. My objection to identity politics is that it reduces millions of people to a single attribute or grievance. It assumes that, simply by accident of birth, some people are more noble or more evil than others.
If you think that all you need to know about an African-American person to size up his character or humanity is his skin color, then you’re a racist. […]
You can run similar thought experiments about virtually any group. If all you need to know about Oscar Wilde is that he was a gay dude, just like Richard Simmons or Milo what’s-his-name, you’re a bigot. If Meyer Lansky and Albert Einstein are merely two Jews to you, you’re an anti-Semite. If Margaret Thatcher, Joan of Arc, and Lizzie Borden are just three chicks, you’re a sexist.
And again, historically, this is mostly a left-wing or liberal (both in the classical and modern senses of the word) insight. But for some bizarre reason, for many people, this idea evaporates like water off a hot skillet when you replace any of these categories with “white” or, very often, “male.”
Suddenly fancy words and phrases fly like sawdust from a wood chipper: “structures of oppression!” “decontextualized!” “ahistoricized!” etc. It’s all so clever and complicated. The same people who take to the streets at the slightest suggestion that Muslims can be judged by the evil deeds of other Muslims will lecture and harangue you for hours, mob you on Twitter, or condescendingly dismiss you for not understanding that all white people have it coming.
I am not denying the history of white racism in America. I’m more than eager to acknowledge it. But what these people are basically saying is that you can say bigoted things about all white people based on things other white people have done. And spare me the argument that some 70-hour-a-week truck driver in Appalachia has it coming because he’s a grand beneficiary of white supremacy.
Jonah Goldberg, “The G-File”, National Review, 2018-08-03.
November 16, 2020
QotD: India’s civil service
Now, one good thing about the Indian civil service is that it carries on the old British practice of entry being by competitive examination. This at least loosens the possibility of influence and bribery determining who gets hired. But now think of the incompetence with which the process is being carried out. We’ve at least 7 months here just to mark the exam papers!
And that is really what ails India. The snail’s pace of the bureaucracy. It would actually be far better if the place had near no government rather than the one it has. Anarchy is indeed preferable to a system which allows near nothing to happen officially. Because what happens when a bureaucracy is so slow that it strangles the ability to do anything legally is that it is all done in illegal anarchy anyway. Some 85% of the Indian economy is over in the unregistered, untaxed and informal sector. Precisely and exactly because the official sector is run by that bureaucracy that cannot even hire the occasional accountant. A bonfire of the babus would improve the place immeasurably.
Tim Worstall, “What’s Wrong In India – All 8,000 Fail Goa’s Exam To Be Government Accountants”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-08-23.
November 14, 2020
QotD: “Modern” liberalism
My second was to find that he was now brainwashed by ideologies and slogans; that it was impossible to argue with him from reason or fact; that faced with any difficulty he would present himself as the helpless victim of forces he would not even try to define coherently.
My third was the discovery that he was now, instinctively, on the side of the criminal; that he identified with the lawless; that he admired “the transgressive,” trespass, violation. Without acknowledging it to himself, he now had a conception of “human rights” which consistently excused the wrongdoer, and consistently ignored the consequences to those who had done nothing wrong.
This “modern” liberalism, I came to understand, was the development — not over months and years but over centuries — of a mortal flaw in the “classical” liberal worldview. It was avoiding God. The liberal mind was persuaded that humans must “make their own beds.” Its great strength was that it took responsibility; its great weakness was that it had no reason to do so. Faith and reason are mutually dependent; when one goes the other eventually goes, too.
Or put this another way: the Devil gets in when we make room for him.
David Warren, “Crime without punishment”, Essays in idleness, 2018-08-03.
November 13, 2020
QotD: Military allies
And guess what? Militarily speaking, Canada was a far bigger player back then than Britain is today: the Royal Canadian Navy was the world’s third-biggest surface fleet, the Canucks got the worst beach at Normandy — but hey, why bore you with details? In those days that still wasn’t enough to get you a seat at the table.
Mark Steyn, “The Brutal Cuban Winter”, The Spectator, 2002-01-26.
November 12, 2020
QotD: It’s impossible to plan the economy
Government is so ill-equipped to judge the future that it sold €6 billion’s worth of property off for £1.6 billion – that’s what we need to be true for that £4.5 billion loss, no? This is not a world in which we can trust government to plan our economy, is it?
And which government exists in reality? Well, the complaint is that second. And the people complaining are largely those who insist that we should act as if we’ve government of the first type. No, they don’t note the discord in that logic either. Governments aren’t very good at economic decisions therefore governments must make more economic decisions for us all. If you can manage to believe that you too can join the Labour Party.
Tim Worstall, “That Ministry Of Defence Housing Deal Proves It’s Impossible To Plan The Economy”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-07-13.
November 11, 2020
QotD: Appeasement and shifting allegiances between the wars
George Orwell, “Who are the War Criminals?”, Tribune, 1943-10-22.
November 10, 2020
QotD: The Smartphone, the Eater-of-Gadgets
[…]
But in an entertaining inversion, one device of the future actually works on smartphones now. Because I thought it would be funny, I searched for “tricorder” in the Android market. For those of you who have been living in a hole since 1965, a tricorder is a fictional gadget from the Star Trek universe, an all-purpose sensor package carried by planetary survey parties. I expected a geek joke, a fancy mock-up with mildly impressive visuals and no actual function. I was utterly gobsmacked to discover instead that I had an arguably real tricorder in my hand.
Consider. My Nexus One includes a GPS, an accelerometer, a microphone, and a magnetometer. That is, sensors for location, magnetic field, gravitational fields, and acoustic energy. Hook a bit of visualization and spectral analysis to these sensors, and bugger me with a chainsaw if you don’t have a tricorder. A quad- or quintcorder, actually.
And these sensors are already completely stock on smartphones because sensor electronics is like any other kind; amortized over a large enough production run, their incremental cost approaches epsilon because most of their content is actually design information (cue the shade of Bucky Fuller talking about ephemeralization). Which in turn points at the fundamental reason the smartphone is Eater-of-Gadgets; because, as the tricorder app deftly illustrates, the sum of a computer and a bunch of sensors costing epsilon is so synergistically powerful that it can emulate not just real single-purpose gadgets but gadgets that previously existed only as science fiction!
[…]
I specified “personal” radios because radios have something in common with personal computers; their main design constraints are actually constraints on a peripheral stage. For a computer you’ll be using for hours at a time you really want a full-sized hard keyboard and a display bigger than a smartphone’s; for a really good radio, the kind you supply sound for a party with, you need speakers with resonant cavities that won’t fit in a smartphone enclosure.
Digital cameras are another diagnostic case. The low-end camera with small lenses is already looking like a goner; the survivors will be DSLRs and more generally those with precision optics too large and too expensive to fit in a phone case.
These two examples suggest Raymond’s Rule of Smartphone Subsumption: if neither the physics nor the ergonomics of a gadget’s function require peripherals larger than will fit in a smartphone case, the smartphone will eat it!
Eric S. Raymond, “Smartphone, the Eater-of-Gadgets”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-07-16.
November 9, 2020
QotD: The Children of Men becomes disturbingly real in Japan
In Lady James’ speculative fiction, pets are doted on as child-substitutes, and churches hold christening ceremonies for cats. In contemporary Japanese reality, Tokyo has some 40 “cat cafés” where lonely solitary citizens can while away an afternoon by renting a feline to touch and pet for a couple of companiable hours.
In Lady James’ speculative fiction, all the unneeded toys are burned, except for the dolls, which childless women seize on as the nearest thing to a baby and wheel through the streets. In contemporary Japanese reality, toy makers, their children’s market dwindling, have instead developed dolls for seniors to be the grandchildren they’ll never have: You can dress them up, and put them in a baby carriage, and the computer chip in the back has several dozen phrases of the kind a real grandchild might use to enable them to engage in rudimentary social pleasantries.
P.D. James’ most audacious fancy is that in a barren land sex itself becomes a bit of a chore. The authorities frantically sponsor state porn emporia promoting ever more recherché forms of erotic activity in an effort to reverse the populace’s flagging sexual desire just in case man’s seed should recover its potency. Alas, to no avail. As Lady James writes, “Women complain increasingly of what they describe as painful orgasms: the spasm achieved but not the pleasure. Pages are devoted to this common phenomenon in the women’s magazines.”
As I said, a bold conceit, at least to those who believe that shorn of all those boring procreation hang-ups we can finally be free to indulge our sexual appetites to the full. But it seems the Japanese have embraced the no-sex-please-we’re-dystopian-Brits plot angle, too. In October, Abigail Haworth of The Observer in London filed a story headlined “Why Have Young People in Japan Stopped Having Sex?” Not all young people but a whopping percentage: A survey by the Japan Family Planning Association reported that over a quarter of men aged 16–24 “were not interested in or despised sexual contact.” For women, it was 45 per cent.
Mark Steyn, The [Un]documented Mark Steyn, 2014.
