Quotulatiousness

July 6, 2018

“That’s what governments are for — get in a man’s way”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Veronique de Rugy says that the 4th of July is a good time to reflect on the American Founding Fathers fighting to gain independence from a distant tyrannical government … and the rest of the year is devoted to coping with a less-distant but no-less tyrannical government in Washington:

Consider the oil and gas industry. Over the years, the federal government has adopted many regulations meant to hinder the industry. As Nick Loris, an energy policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, reminds me, one such regulation is the Merchant Marine Act, also known as the Jones Act, which makes it more expensive to ship oil and natural gas from coast to coast. Then there are the past administrations’ outright moratoriums on drilling in certain areas of America’s coasts, which massively increases the cost of doing business. As Loris notes, there are many costly bureaucratic delays in issuing leases and processing applications for permits to drill (APDs), which stalls production on federal lands. On average, the federal processing of APDs in the last year of the Obama administration was 257 days, while state processing is typically 30 days or less.

Since Uncle Sam has a lot of regulations in place to make the operations of domestic oil and gas companies more costly, why is the biggest beneficiary of loans from the federal government export credit agency (the U.S. Export-Import Bank) the gigantic Mexico state-owned oil and gas company Pemex? Between 2007 and 2013 (the most complete data set we have), Pemex received over $7 billion in loans backed by American taxpayers to buy U.S. goods. Thanks to Uncle Sam, this discounted borrowing power gives Pemex a leg up on its competition with domestic oil and gas companies.

Then there’s the Trump administration tariffs. These import taxes on foreign goods coming from Europe, China, and other countries have not only raised the cost of doing business but also triggered retaliatory measures from foreign governments. For instance, the farm industry is paying a steep price from the tariffs on steel because they increase the cost of farm machinery, lowering profit margins. Farmers are also hurt by the European, Mexican, Canadian, and Chinese governments that have imposed retaliatory export restrictions on U.S. farm products. Many small farms are calling for help to survive. It’s so bad that the entire Iowa congressional delegation sent a letter to President Trump on June 25 in which it called the tariffs “catastrophic for Iowa’s economy.”

Quote in the headline from Firefly episode “Serenity, Part 1”.

July 5, 2018

The soon-to-be-announced target of the two-minute unceasing hate

Filed under: Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Reason, Jacob Sullum says Trump did well with his first Supreme Court pick, and the unwillingness of Trump’s opponents to acknowledge that shows how much blind partisanship has gripped the left:

Anthony M. Kennedy, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, swears in Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch on Monday, April 10, 2017, in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, D.C. Also shown, Gorsuch’s wife Louise stands on stage holding a family Bible. Justice Gorsuch is the Supreme Court’s 113th justice.
White House photo via Wikimedia Commons.

“We have to STOP the next Trump nominee!” says a pop-up solicitation on People for the American Way’s website. Before you rush to “donate now,” you might want to consider the organization’s assessment of Trump’s last Supreme Court nominee.

“Far from being a fair-minded constitutionalist,” PFAW says, Neil Gorsuch “has proven to be a narrow-minded elitist who consistently votes in favor of corporations and the powerful.” The gap between that description and Gorsuch’s actual performance on the Court speaks volumes about the blind partisanship of Trump critics who care more about scoring political points than defending civil liberties.

PFAW is echoing the criticism of Democratic senators who worried, before Gorsuch was confirmed in April 2017, that he was not inclined to stand up for “the little guy.” Gorsuch’s record during a decade on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit belied that claim, and his 15 months on the Supreme Court provide further evidence that he is not shy about defending the principles that protect politically disfavored individuals from the whims of the powerful.

In sharp contrast with the man who nominated him, Gorsuch worries about abuses of the government’s power to take people’s property “for public use.” In June 2017, when the Court declined to hear a case that raised the question of whether a state can impose limits on the “just compensation” it owes for takings under the Fifth Amendment, Gorsuch, joined by Clarence Thomas, urged his colleagues to address that issue at the “next opportunity.”

That pairing was notable because Gorsuch is on record as admiring Thomas’s passionate dissent from the widely condemned 2005 decision in which the Court approved the use of eminent domain to transfer property from one private owner to another in the name of economic development. Big businesses routinely use such arrangements to override the wishes of little people who get in the way of their plans.

July 4, 2018

The War of 1812 on the frontier

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Danny Sjursen on what he calls the “Forgotten and Peculiar War of 1812”, specifically the odd situation on the US/Canadian border:

A lithograph based on an E.C. Watmough painting titled “Repulsion of the British at Fort Erie, 15 August 1814.” It depicts an attack that occurred at the U.S.-Canadian border during the War of 1812.
Image via AntiWar.com

“The acquisition of Canada, this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching.” —Thomas Jefferson (1812)

“People speaking the same language, having the same laws, manners and religion, and in all the connections of social intercourse, can never be depended upon as enemies.” —Baron Frederick de Gaugreben, British officer, in 1815

No one seems to know this (or care), but the United States had long coveted Canada. In two sequential wars, the U.S. Army invaded its northern neighbor and intrigued for Canada’s incorporation into the republic deep into the 19th century. Here, on the Canadian front, the conflict most resembled a civil war.

Canada was primarily (though sparsely) populated by two types of people: French Canadians and former American loyalists — refugees from the late Revolutionary War. Some, the “true” loyalists, fled north just after the end of the war for independence. The majority, however, the “late” loyalists, had more recently settled in Upper Canada between 1790 and 1812. Most came because land was cheaper and taxes lower north of the border. Far from being the despotic kingdom of American fantasies, Canada offered a life rather similar to that within the republic. Indeed, this was a war between two of the freest societies on earth. So much for modern political scientists’ notions of a “Democratic Peace Theory” — the belief that two democracies will never engage in war. Britain had a king, certainly, but also had a mixed constitution and one of the world’s more representative political institutions.

In many cases families were divided by the porous American-Canadian border. Loyalties were fluid, and citizens on both sides spoke a common language, practiced a common religion and shared a common culture. Still, if and when an American invasion came, the small body of British regular troops would count on these recent Americans — these “late” loyalists — to rally to the defense of mother Canada.

And came the invasion did. Right at the outset of the war in fact. Though the justification for war was maritime and naval, the conflict opened with a three-pronged American land invasion of Canada. The Americans, for their part, expected the inverse of the British hopes — the “late” loyalists, it was thought, would flock to the American standard and support the invasion. It never happened. Remarkably, a solid base of Canadians fought as militiamen for the British and against the southern invaders. Most, of course, took no side and sought only to be let alone.

It turned out the invading Americans found few friends in Canada and often alienated the locals with their propensity for plundering and military blunder. Though the war raged along the border — primarily near Niagara Falls and Detroit — for nearly three years the American campaign for Canada proved to be an embarrassing fiasco. Defeats piled up, and Canada would emerge from the war firmly in British hands. In the civil war along the border, the Americans were, more often than not, the aggressors and the losers.

[…]

The Treaty of Ghent, which ended the war, changed nothing. There was no change of borders, and the British said nothing about impressment — the purported casus belli! So just what had those thousands died for?

Certainly it was no American victory that forced the British to the peace table. By 1814 the war had become a debacle. Two consecutive American invasions of Canada had been stymied. Napoleon was defeated in April 1814, and the British finally began sending thousands of regular troops across the Atlantic to teach the impetuous Americans a lesson — even burning Washington, D.C., to the ground! (Though in fairness it should be noted that the Americans had earlier done the same to the Canadian capital at York.) The U.S. coastline was blockaded from Long Island to the Gulf of Mexico; despite a few early single ship victories in 1812, the U.S. Navy was all but finished by 1814; the U.S. Treasury was broke and defaulted (for the first time in the nation’s history) on its loans and debt; and 12 percent of U.S. troops had deserted during the war.

The Americans held few victorious cards by the end of 1814, but Britain was exhausted after two decades of war. Besides, they had never meant to reconquer the U.S. in the first place. A status quo treaty that made no concessions to the Americans and preserved the independence of Canada suited London just fine.

Northern theatre of the War of 1812 (note that Ottawa was not founded until 1826 and shouldn’t appear in this view, and the Niagara River is shown at least 45 degrees off its actual course)
Image via Wikimedia Commons

It’s never a good idea to expand the power of the state

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Francis Porretto on the problem of giving the state yet another tool for its already overflowing toolbox:

    The party in power is smug and arrogant. The party out of power is insane.” – Megan McArdle, a.k.a. “Jane Galt”

Among the older maxims of politics is to beware handing the State a new power without first reflecting on how your opponents could use it against you. For as sure as the Sun rises in the East, your opponents will return to dominance someday, and whatever powers you awarded the State will be in their hands.

Just now, the focus is on President Trump’s choice of a replacement for retiring Supreme Court Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy. The Democrats are tearing their collective hair out over this, as now that the filibuster is a dead letter for judicial appointees, their minority status in the Senate leaves them no way to block his selection. Yet it was Senate Democrats during the Obama Administration who first attacked the filibuster – when they were in the majority and sought to confirm Obama appointees. Coulda told ‘em then, but they weren’t in a mood to listen.

Today’s critical battles are over freedom of expression and “deplatforming.”

Some folks of sound mind and generally good will are exercised about how Silicon Valley giants such as Facebook and Twitter regulate their immensely popular social-media platforms to disfavor conservatives. The complaints have been many, and a great many of them are both accurate (i.e., the things complained about really happened) and valid (i.e., only persons of conservative or libertarian bent were silenced). However, they come up against a barrier that’s proved impassable to date: the right of private property.

So a lot of those folks have embraced the notion that those platforms could be regulated by the federal government as public accommodations. That’s the conception under which the Civil Rights Acts were deemed to hold legitimate authority over restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, and other nominally private properties. If you present your facility as “open to the public,” the logic runs, then you can be forbidden to discriminate – i.e., to provide your services to some members of the “public” but not others.

(For those who remember the “nationwide Bell System,” the phrase common carrier might rise to mind. The concept is essentially the same, as was the federal government’s assertion of authority over it. However, in that particular case, the rationale was that the Bell System was a monopoly, protected by that same federal government. Telecom deregulation and the breakup of the Bell System put paid to that scheme, thank God.)

Those in the Right who favor this notion are asking for trouble. Someday the balance of power will shift leftward once again. What would the Democrats – an increasingly totalitarian bunch who’ve never seen a law, a regulation, or a tax it didn’t love – do with the precedent that an Internet platform can be regulated as a public accommodation, despite being private property?

H/T to Bill St. Clair for the link.

July 2, 2018

The holy book of Marx and the religion of progress

Filed under: Europe, History, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt discusses the religious nature of progressive thought in the western world:

While the left not only filled every nook and cranny of twentieth century “narrative industries” to the point the only way a conservative could work in one of those was under deep, deep cover, the engineers made the internet.

The left didn’t even know it really had any serious opposition left. You can’t blame them too much. Even those of us who were very opposed and very disgusted kept it polite in public and treated them as retarded children who couldn’t take opposition.

Would it have made any difference if we’d talked back, say 30 years ago?

I doubt it.

You see, leftism is as much as anything else a religion. The crazy Marx with his vision of the future created an entire narrative from paradise (pre-capitalism, i.e. it never existed, guys, not even as apes. Apes, as we now know, trade) through fall into capitalism to eventual paradise again, where the New Man (what used to be called the Soviet Man) will be so altruistic and communally oriented that a government isn’t needed. (Like the peace of Islam, there’s only one way to obtain that, and no. Just no. Worldwide species extinction is as fantastical as the idea of that primordial paradise. Humans are humans, and someone will survive. I’m just not interested in letting them send us back ten thousand years.)

You hear it in the talk of the left — particularly the rather intellectually inbred fourth generation, who ate the pap the older people fed them and never had an original thought in their lives — stuff like calling us “reactionaries” (when they’re the ones in power, and have been for a long time, and the ones knee-jerk reacting) and talking about “the future” as belonging utterly to them, and the arrow of history, as though history were the chart in their book, with an arrow beneath.

Their faith doesn’t align particularly well with reality. For instance there’s the whole thing of them talking about us — always — as though we were the ones in power, when they have all the gatekeeping positions and all the contacts.

This dissonance has required them to make up invisible monsters that give us all the power: Patriarchy (a laughable idiocy in America and weak everywhere in the west. While they refuse to see it in the Middle East and Latin America where it actually exists in spades.) Micro aggressions. White privilege (which is so strong that it gives an edge to concentration camp survivors.)

All the while they refuse to admit the real privilege: Leftist privilege. The fastest way to rise in the narrative fields is to be lefter-than-thou. Because they’re in charge and that’s how the system is setup, so they can stay in charge.

Unfortunately this has created their isolation. You see, every song, every movie, ever history book, every fictional book, assures them they’ll win. They know that “the people united shall never be defeated.” They also know that though held back by patriarchy, racism, sexism and all the micro aggressions, the people really are with them. HAVE TO BE, because they’re ideology of the future, and history’s arrow points to their paradise. Every book, movie, etc. says so either subtly or openly. So they KNOW. Everybody knows.

QotD: Perverse incentives, death penalty edition

Filed under: Economics, Law, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

People cheered when, in the 1990s, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich advocated mandatory executions for drug dealers. But economists wondered why Gingrich wanted to decrease the penalty for murder. How does the death penalty for drug dealers decrease the penalty for murder? Think about it this way: Suppose that Gingrich’s bill becomes law and the police bust into an apartment where three drug dealers have hidden their stash. What happens? The drug dealers know that if they give up, they will be put to death. So why not try to kill the police? If the dealers are lucky, they get away. If the dealers are unlucky, they are no worse off than if they didn’t fight because when drug dealing is a capital offense, drug dealers face no additional penalty for murder.

Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, Modern Principles: Microeconomics (3rd Edition), 2015.

June 29, 2018

The Run For The Baku Oil Fields I THE GREAT WAR Week 205

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Middle East, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 28 Jun 2018

While the Ottoman Army of Islam is marching on Baku and the Caspian Sea, multiple other players are trying to stake their claim of the Baku oil fields.

Honduran refugees and the hellhole they’re fleeing

Filed under: Americas, Business, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Justin Raimondo on the plight of Honduras, and how it got to be the hellhole it is:

Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador
Image via Google Maps.

As tens of thousands gather at our southern border, roiling US politics, the question arises: why are so many of the asylum-seekers and migrants crossing the border illegally from three Central American countries in particular: El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala?

To begin with, it’s no coincidence that these are the three “most invaded” countries south of the Rio Grande – that is, invaded by the United States and its proxies.

[…]

So what are these “refugees” fleeing? Is it so bad that parents are justified in paying smugglers to guide their underage children – traveling alone! – across the US-Mexican border?

Unlike the rest of the media, which has routinely ignored most of what goes on in Latin America since the end of the cold war, I’ve been covering the region regularly. […] As I wrote last year:

    “Honduras has always been an American plaything, to be toyed with for the benefit of United Fruit (rebranded Chiquita) and the native landowning aristocracy, and disciplined when necessary: Washington sent in the Marines a total of seven times between 1903 and 1925. The Honduran peasants didn’t like their lands being confiscated by the government and turned over to foreign-owned producers, who were granted monopolistic franchises by corrupt public officials. Periodic rural revolts started spreading to the cities, despite harsh repression, and the country – ruled directly by the military since 1955 – returned to a civilian regime in 1981.”

That column was about the Hillary Clinton-endorsed coup against the democratically elected President, Manuel Zelaya. The popular conservative-turned-reformer had pushed through a number of measures designed to alleviate the peasantry’s hopeless poverty and shift power from the military to the presidency, which angered the Honduran elite. They were triggered, however, when Zelaya joined the ALBA alliance of Latin American countries allied with Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. While ALBA never really amounted to much, either economically or militarily, the symbolism of this move was too much for the Honduran military, which was trained in the US and generously subsidized by Washington. The generals soon had Zelaya on a plane out of the country – while still in his pajamas. Washington issued a perfunctory scolding, but Hillary’s State Department had approved the coup in advance. It’s always been done that way, and this time was no exception.

[…]

So is the Honduran hegira to the Rio Grande a direct result of US foreign policy: is it “blowback,” to utilize CIA parlance for the unpleasant consequences of US actions abroad? It would be easy to say this is yet another example of how our foreign policy of global intervention comes back to haunt us, because that is partially true. Yet the old familiar story of the Ugly Americans backing the even uglier Local Despot doesn’t quite fit the most current facts: there has been an amazing drop in US military aid to Honduras. In 2017 it was over $19 million. This year it’s a mere $750,000!

The history of Honduras before the rise of American hegemony has done more to shape the country than any other single factor: the vital question of land ownership is the central issue here and in the entire South. Feudalism was never really abolished, and the feudalist remnants that persist to this day in the region delayed economic and technological development and kept the vast majority in penury. US foreign policy helped to sustain the life of this systemic repression: it didn’t create it. Whatever the “root causes,” the blowback from all this history has created something very close to a failed state.

This is why tens of thousands are making the long trek to the US-Mexican border: the social and institutional basis of human civilization is breaking down, not only in Honduras but throughout Latin America. Yet this is neither new nor is it primarily attributable to the actions of the US. Yes, our “war on drugs” has created a criminal class that is rivaling the power of the local governments to keep order, but hard drugs are illegal everywhere, not just in North America.

June 28, 2018

US Supreme Court rules on the Janus case

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Eric Boehm reported soon after the decision was announced on Wednesday morning:

More than four decades after the Supreme Court ruled that public sector workers could be required to pay dues to unions even if they do not join one, a 5–4 majority on the high court overturned that precedent in a closely watched case that could have major ramifications for the future of public sector unions.

“Under Illinois law, public employees are forced to subsi­dize a union, even if they choose not to join and strongly object to the positions the union takes in collective bar­gaining and related activities,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion. “We conclude that this arrangement violates the free speech rights of nonmem­bers by compelling them to subsidize private speech on matters of substantial public concern.”

In the short-term, the ruling in Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees means that plaintiff Mark Janus was successful in his decade-long fight to prevent the union from taking $50 out of his paycheck every two weeks. Over the years, Janus estimates, he’s contributed more than $6,000 to the union.

More broadly, Wednesday’s ruling could end the automatic deduction of union dues from millions of public employees’ paychecks, forcing unions like AFSCME to convince workers to voluntarily contribute dues — something workers would do, presumably, only if they have a reason to do so.

“So many of us have been forced to pay for political speech and policy positions with which we disagree, just so we can keep our jobs. This is a victory for all of us,” said Janus in a statement. “The right to say ‘no’ to a union is just as important as the right to say ‘yes.’ Finally our rights have been restored.”

The ruling is “a landmark victory for rights of public-sector employees,” said Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which supported Janus’ lawsuit.

While today’s ruling certainly shifts the balance towards worker freedom, groups like the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which represented Janus, say they are already prepared for additional rounds of litigation. In states that previously have embraced right-to-work policies, unions have often tried to make it as difficult as possible for workers to renounce their membership.

At Hot Air, Jazz Shaw highlights a few of the key points:

Justice Alito wrote the decision and it followed along with the expectations of those who watched the case play out before the court. Also as expected, this was a 5-4 decision, split along partisan lines. At the heart of Janus was the question of whether or not unions can forcibly extract dues from workers’ paychecks without the worker proactively volunteering to contribute. In parallel to that, the court had to determine whether or not those extracted fees, being put toward lobbying efforts, constituted involuntary political speech on the part of the worker. The ruling answers both questions definitively.

You can read the full decision here [PDF] but I’ve extracted a couple of the key points from the syllabus. First is the issue of whether the previous ruling in Abood (which went in the unions’ favor) erred in allowing the forcible extraction of dues. Alito leaves no room for doubt.

    The State’s extraction of agency fees from nonconsenting public sector employees violates the First Amendment. Abood erred in concluding otherwise, and stare decisis cannot support it. Abood is therefore overruled.

The second question was the one about subsidizing the speech of others when it runs contrary to your personal beliefs. Again, Alito is definitive.

    Forcing free and independent individuals to endorse ideas they find objectionable raises serious First Amendment concerns. E.g., West Virginia Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624, 633. That includes compelling a person to subsidize the speech of other private speakers.

A union official, Paul Shearon, the IFPTE Secretary-Treasurer, put out an immediate statement saying that this was based on, “a bogus free speech argument.” He went on to say that the justices voting in the majority “are little better than political hacks.” That was followed up by a threat to take it to the streets.

    In the short run, the Janus decision may hurt some unions financially, but in the long run it will serve to make unions and their members more militant and force a stronger culture of internal organizing. The recent statewide teacher strikes demonstrate that when public sector workers face limitations on their bargaining rights they take their case to the streets.

This is going to send shockwaves through not just the unions, but the Democratic Party at large. The amount of money that the unions flush into Democratic coffers every year is likely more than most of you imagine.

Steven Malanga in City Journal provides some rough figures on how much money was at stake for the unions and their political activities:

With the appointment of Justice Neil Gorsuch, unions feared the outcome of the Janus case. After all, many union members have stated that they would give up their memberships if the court ruled that compulsory fees were illegal. An officer of the Communications Workers of America, which represents government employees in New Jersey, told an AFL-CIO convention last fall that only 54 percent of its 60,000 members said that they would remain in the union if they could opt out of paying fees. The California Teachers Association, meanwhile, crafted a 2019 budget that anticipated that as many as 23,000 members would leave if the court overturned the Illinois law. The union will also suffer from the loss of revenues from 28,000 nonmembers who’ve been paying agency fees, and will presumably stop doing so now that they’re no longer compelled. The union, according to a published report, estimated it could suffer a loss of some $20 million annually as a result.

Even before the ruling, government unions were reeling. Their membership has declined from a peak of 7.9 million in 2009 to 7.2 million today — a drop of nearly 9 percent. The portion of government workers in unions, which peaked in the mid-1990s at 38.7 percent, is now down to 34.4 percent, according to unionstats.com. Some of the decline is due to a significant reduction in the number of government workers after the 2008 financial crisis; even today, nine years into a recovery, the total number of government workers remains 10 percent lower than before the recession — a loss of 233,000 positions. But unions have suffered an even bigger falloff, because when government employment began trending back upward in 2014, union membership stayed flat. Many of the gains in government jobs since then have been in nonunion positions.

Unions have suffered big losses in Wisconsin, which banned compulsory unionization in the public sector in 2011. Some 140,000 union positions have dried up as workers chose not to retain their memberships. But other states that continued to compel workers to join a union or pay agency fees have also seen major losses, including New York, where union membership has fallen by 150,000, Illinois (down 88,000), Pennsylvania (down 54,000), and New Jersey (down 50,000). Those declines are reflected in union numbers, too. The National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union, has lost nearly 250,000 members, or about 8 percent of its membership, since 2009. AFSCME’s national membership has shrunk by 200,000, or 13 percent.

QotD: Some positive aspects of the Great Depression

Filed under: Food, History, Quotations, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… one fascinating thread about the Depression era in American food is the hunger, the poverty, the disruption to American households. But even at the height of the Depression, when a quarter of the workforce was unemployed, most people were not on relief, and most were not suffering malnutrition. Those people were, however, seeing some pretty remarkable transformation in how they produced, purchased and consumed food.

  • The tractor. Between 1930 and 1940, despite the fact that credit had dried up and farms were failing left and right, tractors became the majority of the horsepower available on American farms. Tractor technology itself improved during the decade, but the most remarkable advance was simply the number of draft animals who were replaced. This had far-reaching effects on American farms: It meant that more land could be put into cash crops or pasturage for food animals (because an enormous amount of available land had previously been needed simply to grow food to feed the draft animals). It increased the amount that a farmer could produce. It also meant that farmers were more exposed to market forces; you cannot grow diesel fuel on a spare field, and two amorous tractors do not make a new tractor every spring. And the capital required to buy a tractor favored larger farms, one of the first steps along the road to modern agribusiness.
  • The supermarket. The grocery store as we now know it — with open shelves where the customers gather their own goods — is a relatively recent innovation. A&P, generally regarded as the first modern grocery chain, entered the 1930s well-positioned to benefit from the Depression, because it had financed expansion out of retained earnings rather than debt. Its ability to offer low prices through bulk purchasing, low labor costs and good logistics helped it to grow even as other stores were failing. Naturally this triggered a backlash, culminating in some rather exciting legislative battles in Congress, and a law, the Robinson-Patman Act, that is still on the books today.
  • Commodity markets. Like stock exchanges, commodity markets — where things got a little hairy when farm prices collapsed — got a big new regulatory bill in the mid-1930s, the Commodity Futures Act. Even if you don’t care about commodity exchanges — and you should! — it’s worth knowing that there’s always something crazy going on when people are trading commodities.
  • Farm policy. The New Deal programs designed to deal with the crisis in American agriculture had vast and enduring effects on the nation’s food supply, changing how people farmed, what they grew and how they got paid for it.
  • Frozen food. Don’t sniff. Yes, frozen vegetables are not as good as vegetables picked at the peak of freshness and taken straight to your table from the garden or farmer’s market. This is the wrong comparison. What frozen vegetables and fish replaced was the usually inferior alternatives like canning, drying or salt-preserving, because most people could not afford to get fresh produce from a hothouse or a farm thousands of miles away. When General Foods debuted the Birds Eye line, it became possible for people to have tasty vegetables out of season or out of region at a reasonable price.
  • The refrigerator. There were other technologies that made inroads during the decade thanks to falling prices, improving design and rural electrification. The waffle iron and the toaster, among others, probably deserve at least a glancing mention, as does the electric range. But indisputable pride of place goes to the refrigerator, which had penetrated 20 percent of American homes by 1932, and 50 percent by 1938. That bears a second look: In the depths of the Great Depression, people are purchasing a major expensive appliance, which suggests just how great refrigerators are. The early models were primitive, but still represented an order-of-magnitude improvement over the icebox, which couldn’t maintain an even temperature, couldn’t freeze anything, and had to have its drain periodically scrubbed with a wire brush to get rid of the disgusting accumulation of green slime. The refrigerator was complementary to other developments, like the supermarket and the frozen food case, allowing less frequent marketing and a wider variety of temperature-sensitive foods.
  • Nutrition science. This almost always gets attention in histories of the era; most of that attention is not very nice. Yes, the concoctions that home economists came up with look awful to the modern eye. (I, for one, never want to find out what “cornstarch pudding” tastes like.) Yes, they got a bunch of stuff wrong. Yes, they were a little overintoxicated with idea of scientifically managing every aspect of human life, leaving no room for small matters such as, erm, flavor. But they were also coming out of an era when people frequently died of food-borne illness, or were permanently debilitated by vitamin deficiencies. And modern writers give far too little credit to the constraints that home economists were working under. Until the 1960s, just making sure you had enough calories on the table was a major part of the American household budget. Limited food supply chains did not offer the rich array of exotic ingredients we now take for granted, and cooking was something that every woman had to do a lot of, even if she had no interest or skill for the task. Providing calories with limited means (and limited cooks) took precedence over learning how to concoct the perfect pot-au-feu. The innovators who tackled these challenges did some harm, but they also did a fair amount of good, and they deserve better than the amused condescension they usually get.
  • Convenience foods. Obviously, the development of convenience foods was not limited to the 1930s. We got powdered gelatin, which is to my mind the first major convenience food, in the late 19th century; cake mixes, invented in the 1930s, properly belong to the 1940s as a mass phenomenon. But the 1930s had some notable contributions: Jiffy Biscuit Mix and Bisquick, refrigerator rolls, dry soup mix, and of course, that notorious old standby, Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup. For good or for ill, these things transformed American cookery.

We often think of these developments narrowly: A tractor can plow a few more furrows, a refrigerator lets you keep food a little longer, a biscuit mix lets you have bread on the table 30 percent faster. But these sorts of changes are not just shifts in degree, but changes in kind. The tractor changed not just how fast a farmer could work, but the kinds of work he could do; the supermarket and the frozen pea and the refrigerator worked in concert to revolutionize what a housewife could do, how she could do it, and therefore, what other things she could do with the time and energy she had freed up.

And all of these things, working in concert, made radical alterations to the kind and amount of food that we put into our mouths. The Great Depression left a lot of lasting legacies on the American landscape. But the most ubiquitous, and perhaps least noticed, is the way we eat.

Megan McArdle, “The Depression Was Great for the American Kitchen”, Bloomberg View, 2016-09-23.

June 27, 2018

QotD: Male homosexuality in ancient and modern times

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Most educated people in the U.S. and Europe have a default model or construction of homosexual behavior which I will call “romantic homosexuality”. Romantic homosexuality is homoeroticism between equals; men or women of roughly the same age and social position, with the relationship having affective elements similar to the emotional range in heterosexual relationships (from one-night stand through lifetime marriage).

[…]

Over and over again, the pattern of male homosexual behavior in pre-modern sources is overwhelmingly one of pederasty and domination sex. And not just in pre-modern sources but in most of the present-day world as well. […] We may further note that there are, broadly speaking, two contending models of “normal” — acceptable or semi-acceptable male homosexual behavior — observable in human cultures. In one model, that of the modern West, romantic homosexuality is relatively tolerated, while pederasty and domination sex are considered far more deviant. I’ll call this the homophilic construction. It’s what most of my readers accept as normal.

But in the other, older model, pederasty and domination sex are considered more “normal” than romantic homosexuality. In cultures with this model, the “top” in an episode of pederasty or domination sex is not necessarily considered homosexual or deviant at all; any stigma attaches to the passive partner. Romantic homosexuality is considered far more perverse, because it feminizes both partners. I think of this as the “classical” construction of homosexuality, as it describes the attitudes of ancient Rome – but it persists in cultures as near to our own as South America and the Mediterranean littoral.

It’s the classical construction that is the rule in human cultures. The homophilic one is the exception; in fact, I am not able to identify any culture which held to it until after the Industrial Revolution in Europe. And not all of Europe has acquired it yet. Even in the English-speaking countries, where the homophilic construction is most entrenched, the connotations of sexual insults and threats in our language still reflect the older model.

To put it another way, the male homosexuals of the last two centuries in our culture have engaged in a massive reinvention of homosexuality that is still underway. Specifically the male homosexuals; lesbians began the game with romantic homosexuality as their dominant mode. I have not identified any culture in which it was considered more normal for lesbians to have sex with prepubescent girls or with dominated inferiors.

[…]

This analysis raises two interesting questions. The first one is about the past: what changed? That is, how did the homophilic construction replace the classical one, where it did? I’m only speculating here, but I think the proximate cause may have been the sentimentalization of family life around the turn of the 19th century in Europe, which in turn was enabled by a sharp fall in infant mortality rates. Both processes started earlier and moved faster in England and the Anglosphere than they did elsewhere.

The other interesting question is whether this reinvention is sustainable in the longer term. If my analysis is correct, modern homosexuals are bucking a pretty strong biological headwind. How strong can be judged by a chilling little statistic I picked up years ago from a how-to manual written by homosexual SM practitioners for newbies, er, learning the ropes; it noted that, adjusted for population size, male homosexuals murder each other at a rate 26 times that of the general population.

That suggests to me that a tendency for male homosexuals to drift into the darker corners of domination sex is still wired in beneath the modern homophilic construction. It might take actual genetic engineering, of a kind we don’t yet have, to fix that wiring. Until then, I wish them luck. Because (and here I make the first and only value claim in this essay) whatever one’s opinion of homophilic homosexuals might be, the behaviors associated with the pederastic/dominating classical style are entangled with abuse and degradation in a way that can only be described as evil. Modern homosexuals deserve praise for their attempt to get shut of them.

Eric S. Raymond, “Reinventing Homosexuality”, Armed and Dangerous, 2009-06-17.

June 26, 2018

Henry Johnson And The Harlem Hellfighters I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 25 Jun 2018

The 369th Infantry Regiment from Harlem, New York was an all-black unit that served on the Western Front. But not under American command, but loaned tot he French Army.

QotD: Writing essays in school

Filed under: Education, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

To find their way in American life, high-­schoolers need to be able to speak English, to read, to listen to and respect other people’s opinions, to have a command of the basic elements of courtesy and, to a lesser extent, to write. (They do not need to know how to write a thesis sentence. More injury is done to high-school essays by the imposition of the thesis-­sentence requirement than by any other means. The trick, kids are sometimes told, is to begin with a word like “although.” No.)

Nicholson Baker, “Fortress of Tedium: What I Learned as a Substitute Teacher”, New York Times Magazine, 2016-09-07.

June 25, 2018

Differences between the United States and the “idealized” United States of Europe

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tim Worstall, in the Continental Telegraph:

There are those who think – urge, wish for perhaps – the European Union is or should become the United States of Europe. Lots of central bureaucratic control, the nation states left as just the remnants of once independent countries like the US states are these days. In some ways the two systems are very much the same already. No US state has any control at all over trade across its own border. Nor does any EU one. Trade is an issue solely the competence of the central organisations, respectively Washington DC and Brussels. Equally, both systems use this central control of trade and trade only to expand that central control.

In the US there was a case that Federal control of trade meant that the Feds got to decide who could grow wheat where and when. The usual sort of planning idiocy led to the Feds telling farmers who could grow how much and when. One farmer claimed he was only growing for his own consumption and this shouldn’t be limited. The centre (the Supreme Court) disagreed, the crux being that if he didn’t grow for his own consumption he would buy, this affected inter-state commerce, he had to obey the Feds. The EU takes this a step further. The Single Market rules are nominally about trade. Anything legal to be buying and selling in one place is such in all is a reasonable explanation of the nub of the matter. Sure, exceptions and all that. But this then smuggles into all law that continental (Roman Law really) idea that what is legal to do is something that the legislation defines. Instead of that Common Law idea that legislation, the law even, defines what it is illegal to do all other things being legal.

Once this is accepted then of course the next step is that there must be regulation of all things so as to tell people what it is legal to do. In this manner all sorts of things get smuggled in. Vacuum cleaner motors must be limited to a certain size or power. Because those whose lives are unfortunate enough that they’ve time to spare to be concerned about legislation on such matters note that they can be and thus incorporate their trivialities into legislation. The extent of this reach is larger than you think. The underlying legal, not political, justification for recycling targets is that some countries – Holland, where digging a hole gains nothing but wet boots – don’t have space for landfill. This would put them at a disadvantage if other countries do have the space, therefore all must recycle.

Giving the centre power always, but always, means an extension of the centre’s power. The two systems aren’t so different then.

June 23, 2018

“An extraordinary thing happened in internet culture this week: Godwin repealed Godwin’s Law”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mike Godwin obliterates his own legacy:

An extraordinary thing happened in internet culture this week: Godwin repealed Godwin’s Law. Godwin’s Law is the idea that the longer an internet discussion thread drags on, the more likely it is that one of the discussants will mention Hitler. Rashly and inappropriately. They’ll compare their opponent to Der Fuhrer or say, ‘This is how Nazism started!!!!’. Reductio ad Hitlerum, as some call it. The law was invented by Professor Mike Godwin, an American attorney. And this week he scrapped it. To the delight of virtual leftists and Trump-bashers who are chomping at the bit to say ‘TRUMP IS LITERALLY A NAZI’, Godwin tweeted in relation to the Trump administration and its child-migrant policy: ‘By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis. Again and again. I’m with you.’

The response was one of glee. ‘Godwin has officially suspended Godwin’s Law’, tweeters crowed. The ‘actual, literal creator of Godwin’s Law’ has okayed Hitler comparisons, they whooped. They could now crack on with their hysterical likening of Trump to Hitler, and everything he does to what happened in 1930s Europe, without having to worry about someone shouting, ‘Godwin’s Law!’ at them. It so perfectly sums up the arrogance of the Twitterati and opinion-forming set: for years they mocked the Hitler-obsessed ‘below the line’ (BTL) commenters on their Tumblr blogs or Guardian columns, and even instituted an internet law to paint them as vulgar idiots, and now they themselves embrace mad Hitler blather and have scrapped the law that said such online talk was wrong. One online law for thee, another for me.

They can dress up their adoption of the Reductio ad Hitlerum worldview as a legitimate political position as much as they like. They can carry on saying, ‘Ah, but Trump’s policies really are like Hitler’s, which means my Nazi comparisons carry more weight than those of the non-Oxford-educated blowhard I had to block on Twitter because he kept saying “Hillary is Hitler”’. But they’re not fooling anyone. Except themselves. The rest of us know they are now just like the BTL people they once slagged off: confused, angry, rash and willing to exploit the greatest crime in history if it helps them to register and advertise their emotional fury with political developments. They are BTL people now, though they’re above the line, still all over the media, busily making it acceptable to talk shit about the Holocaust in public.

This week, with the controversy over Trump’s separation of families arriving illegally from Mexico, has represented a turning point in their popularisation of the Hitler comparisons they once chided. They refer to the places in which the children of illegal migrants are being housed as ‘concentration camps’. The former director of the CIA, Michael Hayden, tweeted a photo of Auschwitz with the words, ‘Other governments have separated mothers and children’. Pre-empting the suspension of Godwin’s Law, a writer for the New Statesman said: ‘Stop talking about Godwin’s Law – real Nazis are back.’ Twitter buzzes with Trump-as-Hitler talk. ‘This is how the Holocaust started’, they all say.

I’m not a Trump fan … for the first few months of his administration (and during the election campaign), I labelled him as Il Donalduce, but I mostly meant that as a visual reference: watch any of Mussolini’s speeches and you’ll see some resonances with how Donald Trump speaks. The Hitler equivalence is wish-fulfilment by those who oppose him … it’s not an accurate or useful way to portray him, unless your goal is to make Adolf Hitler seem less demonic. I literally do not understand why anyone in pursuit of a modern political goal would try to make Hitler’s crimes seem more acceptable in an attempt to blacken the reputation of a living politician, unless you are clinically insane.

As a libertarian, Trump is far, far from my ideal of the “leader of the free world” (as the western media tends to portray the US president), but he’s not even close to the evil genius that created the “Thousand-year Reich“, and any attempt to portray him that way is historically illiterate and politically tone-deaf.

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