Quotulatiousness

March 3, 2024

From bank robbery to church burning to welfare state collapse

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

Kulak talks about an old Canadian TV show episode and how the lessons learned could be (and arguably are already being) used to undermine any western welfare state:

In a show that had helicopter escapes, motorcycle chases, modded out James Bond spy cars, teenage money forgers, veteran jewel thieves, super hackers, aviation engineer super smugglers … This one stood out for its nigh stupid simplicity.

He treated bank robbery as a literal door to door business.

Gilbert Galvan’s great innovation wasn’t any innovation, it was stripping bank robbery itself down to its barest essentials. And then repeating it at scale. To the point where he could rob one bank, and then rob the bank across the street whilst police were still in the first investigating (literally! this was how they found out he existed).

He’d line up with the rest of the customers, wait his turn, approach the teller, and then quietly show her his pistol before demanding the money, and WALKING out the front door of the bank, the person behind him in line never knowing that the robbery had even happened.

The limitation was of course he never hit the safe, and only got one teller’s worth of cash, about 5-20k per robbery (1980s dollars, so double or triple modern dollars), but wearing elaborate theatrical disguises for every heist the chance of of him ever being tracked down were effectively Zero. And needing only one man, there was no accomplice to rat him out.

He carried out FIFTY heists this way, and to this day this remains the greatest lesson I’ve learned from the show… The devastating effect of simple marginally effective things, done at scale. It’s certainly served me well marketing this blog.

Now apply this lesson to the modern Cradle to Grave Total State

Since the Trudeau government funded media started promoting a blood libel against Christian church run Residential schools, falsely alleging ground penetrating radar had found “mass graves” at the site of the schools from the first half of the 20th century, over 100 churches have been attacked or burned in Canada.

Whilst the first few fires were probably set by the same person in British Columbia, once it became a national story with political valence disaffected copycats quickly sprung up around the nation. There is basically a zero percent chance the vandals on one end of the country know or have ever met the vandals on the other side. And basically no way that catching even one group of vandals or arsonists would stop the attacks.

Now I would like you to imagine the implications for civil strife in the US, and western welfare states, when this starts happening to government offices or schools which get embroiled in LGBTQ or Childhood transition scandals.

Remember that the average public elementary or high school has 1000+ students in it, the bottom 10-20% of whom absolutely despise the place. People always wonder at how many mass shootings there are in the US, I’m always shocked at how few there are. there are 40,000 suicides a year in the US, and while the numbers are hard to grab at least 10,000 of those are youth suicides. That so few decide to take classmates with them always struck me as bizarre, given human beings have killed 100s of millions of each other in the past 100 years, but then isn’t it also interesting the number of mass shootings has risen so rapidly since Columbine and the media cycle popularization of it public conciousness?

Likewise half a million Americans are treated for self inflicted injury every year, of which over 100k are Youth, and 424,000 youth are arrested on some crime or other every year.

I’m going to call it right now:

In the next 5 years someone out there, might be in America, might be Europe, is going to start burning down schools for some ideological reason, we might never even know why if they are never caught.

And At that point copycat school burnings will become one of the most dramatic and prominent trends in western life as it’s quickly copied around the western world. In the past 3 years of those 100 Canadian churches vandalized, 33 burnt right to the ground (10 per year). If you assumed the same number with no boost from all the students/parents who despise their school or maybe even feel mortal danger from them, that’d still be (population adjusted) something like 100 schools per year burning in America, probably til the end of time. Assuming those government buildings have the usual ludicrous construction costs of 20ish million … that’d be about 2 billion dollars per year in lost buildings, which lets be honest probably won’t get replaced in a timely manner.

There are 97,500 public schools in America, assuming just that Canadian Church burning rate of attacks that’d be more than 1% of American public schools gone in a decade.

January 2, 2024

Nobody will like the new rules

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

Chris Bray points out just how bad the “new rules” are going to be … and not just for the Bad Orange Man:

The danger is that you concede an argument about a personality or an event, then find at some future point that you’ve accepted new systems and structures that are far more broadly applicable than you noticed at the moment you accepted the new rules. Everyone of every political persuasion should see the weapon on the table, because it’s going to be pointed at you and yours: libertarians, anti-war leftists, populists, paleocons, others too weird to name. Outliers. If your votes and your views fall outside an extremely narrow band of corporate-state “centrism”, what follows is about you.

So.

Bill Mitchell, a media figure and DeSantis supporter, doesn’t see the big deal:

The problem is that Trump is “super toxic”, so whatever. Orange Man is bad, so the things you do to Orange Man are unobjectionable. Of course you can take him off the ballot — he’s a jerk. That’s, like, the Constitution.

But the constant background music for me in these discussions is that the government of Canada construed a peaceful protest against vaccine mandates as a national emergency, on par with a foreign invasion, and started freezing bank accounts and mobilizing force for mass arrests. A “Western democracy”, hearing dissent, started turning off the dissenters’ money, which means that government took away the ability of peaceful protesters to pay for things like housing and food. The patience of the global political class for disagreement is narrowing, fast and hard. (Cf. e.g. Ardern, Jacinda.)

So see what’s happening in the United States, and see where it points. On January 6, thousands of protesters turned into maybe hundreds of rioters; many people at the Capitol were peaceful and calm, while some weren’t. Almost none were armed, none used guns, and the question of law enforcement infiltration, provocation, and entrapment remains open.

But no one published a manifesto calling for the violent overthrow of the United States government, and the crowd didn’t line up at the Capitol with rifles and homemade bombs to launch waves of armed attacks on Congress. Compare: here’s Bernardine Dohrn of the Weather Underground declaring war on the United States, and announcing on the radio that “our job is to lead white kids into armed revolution”. Find me that moment on January 6, the explicit declaration of armed revolution aimed at the destruction of the federal government. No one has been charged under the Insurrection Act because no one has violated the Insurrection Act. The “insurrection” is a political construction, not a legal case.

So a riot can be an “insurrection”, in the complete absence of insurrection charges and convictions, if Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (D-Longhouse) feels like an insurrection happened. She can “rule” on that.

Lone officials can unilaterally declare that American citizens are ineligible for participation in elections, because the activities of [insert name of bad people here] can be politically construed as insurrectionist — in the absence of due process and a jury trial.

November 26, 2023

It’s apparently political earthquake season

Filed under: Americas, Europe, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Elizabeth Nickson wonders if you can feel the Earth shaking in your area:

Did you hear the roar on the streets when Milei won Argentina? It built and built, and then everyone was out on the streets shouting, from windows, inside shops, houses. It is the future, all over the world. The Netherlands on Friday. Same same. Universal rejoicing.

Absurdistan does a solid line in doom, but our firmly held first principle is that every single one of us should be two or three times as rich, with massively increased scope and ability to do the things we want to do. Defeating the criminal cartel that runs Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Government, Big Tech and Big Charity will light up the galaxy if not the universe. And … this. Especially this:

Unlike almost everyone in the media, Absurdistan knows regulation is the principal reason we are hornswoggled serfs. Even Trump’s team was surprised at the economic boom that came from his mild de-regulation; they thought tax relief was the key. It was important, none of us should be paying more than 25% in taxes, if that, but the regulation! You have no earthly idea how fiendish it has become until you start a business or require permission to create anything in the material world. Few journalists ever do that, the most they do is join a bank in “communications”, design an app or website, do PR, or “consult”. They are virtually, to a man or woman, children in the real world. So no one reports on the most brutal crippler of every man, woman and child on earth. Equally, virtually no writer I read has any grasp on the ingenuity, the creativity, the strength of the ordinary man. They all seem to think we need guidance from them, which is laughable. They have screwed up everything so utterly, we teeter daily on the edge of fiscal catastrophe.

Bloomberg reports on Milei victory

When Vivek Ramaswamy proposed instantly firing 50% of federal bureaucrats on Day One, I stood on my office chair and cheered.

When Javier Milei tore strips of paper representing government ministries off the whiteboard, I had to go out and run around the house a few times.

Africa is not limited by anything but confiscatory corrupt government, as asserted by Magatte Wade in her new book. Wade should be running things in Africa, which is polluted by commies, plutocrats, crooked multinationals, ravening bureaucrats, corrupt politicians and the brutalist green movement. The Chinese would stun the world if they could get rid of the vicious predatory communist regime that enslaves every man, woman and child. And not in the sense that they are “taking over”.

The mop-up will take decades. But unpicking the bad regs and shooing the bad legislators off to permanent exile, prosecuting the army of government thieves, and creating a multi-polar world, will be more absorbing than our endless self-cherishing, self-indulgence. Have we not all shopped enough? We have powerful enemies, but they are fully aware of how destructive they have been, their guilt written on their exhausted pouchy faces.

Trump is a symptom, not a cause

People fighting the Borg wish for leaders but this is not a movement that requires leadership by anyone but each and every one of us. Trump is a symptom, not a cause. This is multi-headed, like Medusa, representing tens, hundreds of millions of individuals saying NO. Real politicians like Mike Johnson, Geert Wilders, Pierre Poilievre, Javier Milei, and Danielle Smith are listening to us and stepping up.

November 22, 2023

Another look at the “Great Divergence”

Filed under: Books, Economics, Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The latest book review from Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf features Patrick Wyman’s The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World:

This is a weird Substack featuring an eclectic selection of books, but one of our recurring interests is the Great Divergence: why and how did the otherwise perfectly normal people living in the northwestern corner of Eurasia managed to become overwhelmingly wealthier and more powerful than any other group in human history? We’ve covered a few theories about what’s behind it — not marrying your cousins, coal, the analytic mindset (twice) — but there are lots of others we’ve never touched, including geographic and thus political fragmentation, proximity to the New World, and even the Black Death. So this is also a book about the Great Divergence, but unlike many of the others it doesn’t offer One Weird Trick to explain things. Instead, Wyman approaches the period between 1490 and 1530 through nine people, each of whom exemplifies one of the many shifts in European society, and so paints a portrait of a changing world.

Of course, he does point to a common thread woven through many of the changes: culture. Or, more specifically, the institutions1 surrounding money and credit that Europeans had spent the last few hundred years developing. But these weren’t themselves dispositive: after all, lots of people in lots of place at lots of times have been able to mobilize capital, and most of them don’t produce graphs that look like this. Really, the secret ingredient was — as Harold Macmillan said of the greatest challenge to his government — “events, dear boy, events”.2 Europe between 1490 to 1530 saw an unusually large number of innovations and opportunities for large-scale, capital-intensive undertakings, and already had the economic institutions in place to take advantage of them. One disruption fed on the next in a mutually-reinforcing process of social, political, religious, economic, and technological change that (Wyman argues) set Europe on the path towards global dominance.

Some of Wyman’s characters — Columbus, Martin Luther, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V — are intensely familiar, but he presents them with verve, as interested in giving you a feel for the individual and their world as in conveying biographical detail. (This is an underrated goal in the writing of history, but really invaluable; the “Cross Section: View from …” chapters were always my favorite part of Jacques Barzun’s idiosyncratic doorstopper From Dawn to Decadence.) This is particularly welcome when it comes to the chapters featuring some lesser-known figures: you may have heard of Jakob Fugger, but unless you’re a Wimsey-level fan of incunabula you’re probably unfamiliar with Aldus Manutius. One-handed man-at-arms Götz von Berlichingen becomes our lens for the chapter about the Military Revolution not because he played a particularly significant role but because he wrote a memoir, and small-time English wool merchant John Heritage is notable pretty much solely because his account book happened to survive into the present. But even with the stories “everyone knows”, Wyman takes several large steps back in order to contextualize that common knowledge: for example, were you aware that while before 1492 Columbus didn’t take any particularly unusual voyages, he did take an unparalleled number and variety of them, making him one of the best-travelled Atlantic sailors of his day? Did you know that Isabella’s inheritance of the Castilian throne was far from certain?3

As the book continues, Wyman can reference the cultural and technological shifts he described in earlier chapters. For instance, much of the Fuggers’ wealth came in the form of silver from deep new mines in the Tyrol. Building the mines required substantial capital — for their new, deeper tunnels and the expensive pumps to drain them, as well as for the furnaces and workshops to separate the copper from the silver via the relatively inefficient liquation process — and while everyone knew all along that the metals were there, it took the combination of a continent-wide bullion shortage and a rising demand for copper to cast bronze cannon (look back to the chapters on state formation and the military!) to make it worth anyone’s while to get them out. But it wasn’t only the Fuggers who made their money in these new mines: the money for Martin Luther’s education came from his father’s small-scale copper mining concern in eastern Germany. Grammar school in his hometown, a parish school nearby, and then four years at university cost Luther pater enough that he couldn’t follow it up for his younger sons (and from his point of view the was probably squandered when Martin became a monk instead of the intended lawyer who would be an asset in the frequent mining disputes), but such an education for even one son would have been out of reach if not for the printed texts on grammar, philosophy and law that made it all far more affordable.

Of course, the relationship between Luther and printing goes both ways. While Luther’s very existence as an educated man was enabled by the printing press, it was the intellectual and religious ferment he would kick off that made printing work.

    1. Wyman glosses the term as “a shared understanding of the rules of a particular game … the systems, beliefs, norms and organizations that drive people to behave in particular way”, but it’s more or less what I’ve elsewhere called bundles of social technologies.

    2. Apparently he may not have said this, but he should have so print the legend.

    3. Isabella’s opponent, her half-niece Joanna, was married to King Afonso V of Portugal, so perhaps some degree of Iberian unification might still have followed. On the other hand, Afonso already had an adult son (King João II, widely admired as “the Perfect Prince” — Isabella always referred to him simply as el Hombre, “the Man”) who would have had no personal claim to Castile. Joanna and Afonso’s marriage was annulled on the perfectly true grounds of consanguinity — he was her uncle — after they lost the war, so they never had children, but if she had won perhaps João (who died without legitimate issue) could have been succeeded by a much younger half-Castilian half-brother. Certainly an Isabella relegated to Queen-Consort of Aragon would still have been a force to be reckoned with, but losing the knock-on effects of her reign (Columbus, Granada, the fate of the Sephardim, not to mention the eventual unification of most of Europe under Ferdinand and Isabella’s Habsburg grandson) makes all this a pretty good setup for an alternate history!

    Even more fun: before she married Ferdinand of Aragon, there was discussion of Isabella’s betrothal to Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Yeah, that one.

October 18, 2023

The greatest sin of Twit-, er, I mean “X” is that it allowed us hoi polloi to peek behind the curtains of governments, universities, and major corporations

Filed under: Books, Education, Government, Health, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The latest book review at Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf begins with a brilliant explanation for the coming fall of western civilization at the hands of Twit-, er, I mean “X”:

The greatest gift bestowed by admittance to elite institutions is that you stop being overawed by them. For instance, there was a time when upon hearing “so-and-so is a Rhodes Scholar”, I would have assumed that so-and-so was a very impressive person indeed. Nowadays I know quite a lot of former Rhodes Scholars, and have seen firsthand that some of them are extremely mediocre individuals, so meeting a new one doesn’t phase me much. My own cursus honorum through America’s centers of prestige has been slow and circuitous, which means I’ve gotten to enjoy progressive disenchantment with the centers of power. Trust me, you folks aren’t missing much.

I have a theory that this is why Twitter has been so destabilizing to so many societies, and why it may yet be the end of ours. Twitter offers a peek behind the curtain — not just to a lucky few,1 but to everybody. We’re used to elected officials acting like buffoons, but on Twitter you can see our real rulers humiliating themselves. Tech moguls, four-star generals, cultural tastemakers, foundation trustees, former heads of spy agencies, all of them behaving like insane idiots, posting their most vapid thoughts, and getting in petty fights with “VapeGroyper420.” There’s a reason most monarchies have made lèse-majesté a crime, there’s a level at which no regime can survive unless everybody pretends that the rulers are demigods. To have the kings be revealed as mere men who bleed, panic, and have tawdry love affairs is to rock the monarchic regime at its foundations. But Twitter is worse than that, it’s like a hidden camera in the king’s bedroom, but they do it to themselves. Moreover it seems likely that regimes like ours which legitimate themselves with a meritocratic justification are especially fragile to this form of disenchantment.

This is also why the COVID pandemic was so damaging to our government’s legitimacy. I’ve been inside elite institutions of many different sorts, and discovered the horrible truth that most of the people in them are just ordinary people making it up as they go along, but one place I hadn’t quite made it yet was the top of our disease control agencies.2 So in a bit of naïveté analogous to Gell-Mann amnesia, I just assumed that there was some secret wing of the Centers for Disease Control which housed men-in-black who would rappel out of helicopters and summarily execute everybody in Wuhan who had ever touched a bat. And I was genuinely a little bit surprised and disappointed when instead they were caught with their pants down, and a bunch of weirdos on the internet turned out to be the real experts (the silver lining to this is that now we all get to be amateur scientists).

So much for public health. But if there’s one institution which still manages to shroud itself in mystery while secretly pulling all the strings, surely it’s the Federal Reserve. You can tell people take it seriously because of all the conspiracy theories that surround it (conspiracy theories are the highest form of flattery). And there’s a lot to get conspiratorial about — the Fed manages to combine two things that rarely go together but which both impress people: technocratic mastery and arcane ritual. The Fed employs a research staff of thousands which meticulously gather and analyze data about every aspect of the economy, and they have an Open Market Committee whose meeting minutes are laden with nuanced double-meanings that would make a Ming dynasty courtier blush, and which are accordingly parsed with an attention to detail once reserved for Politburo speeches.

And they also control all of our money! Is it any wonder that people go a little bit crazy whenever they think about the Fed? I can’t think of a more natural target for the recurring cycles of ineffectual populist ire that characterize American politics. So it is with great regret that I’m here to report that they, too, are making it all up as they go along.

    1. And that lucky few have much to gain by maintaining the charade. A stable ruling class is one that has much to offer potential class traitors, so they don’t get any ideas. It’s when the goodies dry up, whether due to elite overproduction or to a real reduction in the spoils available, that things fall apart.

    2. That’s not quite true: I did once attend an invite-only conference at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. The food was awful, and I wasn’t even able to find the lab where they created crack cocaine, HIV, and Lyme disease.

October 4, 2023

Douglas Murray – “Canada today looks like a nation of ignoramuses”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Politics, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Writing in the National Post, Douglas Murray flays the Canadian Parliament for their shameful ignorance put on display by publicly honouring a former Waffen SS officer:

Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler (in the foreground) visiting the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen SS “Galizien” in May 1943.
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Perhaps I should say straight away that I love Canada. Some of my best friends are Canadian. That minimal throat-clearing aside, let me say — as a friendly outsider — that Canada today looks like a nation of ignoramuses.

The incident in Parliament the other week is just one case in point. Standing ovations are very rare things. They should be very special things. When a whole House stands to applaud someone they had better be very sure who they are applauding.

I know that Speaker Anthony Rota has now resigned. But here is the thing. Anybody who knows anything about the Second World War knows that if you were fighting the Soviets in Ukraine in the 1940s you were most likely fighting with the Nazis. It does not require a fine-tuned expert in the era to know this. Almost anybody could have guessed this. If almost anyone knew anything.

It seemed to be the assumption not just of Speaker Rota but of the whole Canadian Parliament that there existed in the 1940s some proto-anti-Putin fighting force and that the great cause of this moment has some direct lineage back to the fight of the 1940s. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy almost certainly guessed this. But it was the Canadian Parliament who was hosting him, the Canadian Parliament who embarrassed him and the Canadian Parliament who have handed the most magnificent propaganda victory to the Kremlin. In a war which Putin pretended to start in order to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, how much help has Canada given by your entire Parliament standing to applaud an actual Nazi?

What makes this worse is that this all comes after a period in which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been perfectly happy to call decent, ordinary Canadians Nazis. To use measures like the de-banking of his critics in moves that have horrified most of the other democracies in the West. When a bank in my country of birth — Britain — was recently found to have de-banked a politician (Nigel Farage) for what turned out to be political reasons not only did the head of the bank resign, but politicians in Britain from across the political system condemned the bank. Such moves are unlikely to be taken by another bank in Britain again. But in Canada it seems to be perfectly acceptable, because at any time the Canadian prime minister and deputy prime minister can claim that their critics are homophobes, xenophobes, racists, Nazis, misogynists and all of the rest.

The world — especially America — has looked on in horror as the Canadian government has tried to curtail speech in the country, and looked on with ever-more horror as Canadians seem willing to go along with this. It seems to be the view of the Canadian authorities that they are capable of deciding at the merest glance who is and is not allowed to speak, what is and is not acceptable speech, what any Canadians can and cannot read and who is and who is not a “Nazi”. These being the same authorities who apparently cannot even perform the most basic Google searches on their guests.

I know that Canadians often like to look down on Americans. But as someone who spends most of his time in America I can tell you that it is the American public who now wonder at what on earth is happening with our neighbour in the north.

August 18, 2023

When your friendly local bank turns into a branch of the Stasi

Filed under: Britain, Business, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theodore Dalrymple on the British bank — probably not the only one to do things like this — that compiled a “dossier” of information on one of their long-term clients with a view to de-banking him, his family, and associates. It might have worked if the client was a private citizen with no particular public profile, but the client was someone who absolutely is not that kind of man:

The following day, [National Westminster Bank CEO Alison] Rose resigned, admitting to “a serious error of judgment”. The value of the bank fell by more than $1 billion.

The weasel words of Ms. Rose and the bank board are worth examination. They deflected, and I suspect were intended to deflect, the main criticism directed at Ms. Rose and the bank: namely, that the bank had been involved in a scandalous and sinister surveillance of Mr. Farage’s political views and attempted to use them as a reason to deny him banking services, all in the name of their own political views, which they assumed to be beyond criticism or even discussion. The humble role of keeping his money, lending him money, or perhaps giving him financial advice, was not enough for them: they saw themselves as the guardians of correct political policy.

It was not that the words used to describe Mr. Farage were “inappropriate”, or even that they were libelous. It is that the bank saw fit to investigate and describe him at all, at least in the absence of any suspicion of fraud, money laundering, and so forth. “The error of judgment” to which Ms. Rose referred was not that she spoke to the BBC about his banking affairs (it is not easy to believe that she did so without malice, incidentally), but that she compiled a dossier on Farage in the first place — and then “error of judgment” is hardly a sufficient term on what was a blatant and even wicked attempt at instituting a form of totalitarianism.

This raises the question of whether one can be wicked without intending to be so, for it is quite clear that Ms. Rose had no real understanding, even after her resignation, of the sheer dangerousness and depravity of what the bank, under her direction, had done.

As for the board’s somewhat convoluted declaration that “after careful consideration, it concluded that it retains full confidence”, etc., it suggests that it was involved in an exercise of psychoanalytical self-examination rather than of an objective state of affairs: absurd, in the light of Ms. Rose’s resignation within twenty-four hours. The board, no more than Ms. Rose herself, understood what the essence of the problem was. For them, if there had been no publicity, there would have been no problem: so when Mr. Farage called for the dismissal of the board en masse, I sympathised with his view.

July 22, 2023

“… no-one has a ‘right’ to a bank account …”

Filed under: Britain, Business, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Unlike in Canada, where the extra-legal debanking of an unknown number of what Justin Trudeau described as a “small fringe minority … holding unacceptable views” had all the bien-pensants in and out of the legacy media nodding along, British opinion is not so friendly toward the extra-legal debanking of Nigel Farage and his family and friends:

An acquaintance of mine on Facebook, a hardline capitalist (so he says) made a comment that no-one has a “right” to a bank account, as they don’t have “rights” (those inverted commas are doing a lot of work here) to healthcare, education, paid-for holidays, etc. He was, of course, writing about the Nigel Farage/Coutts saga that has seen the CEO of NatWest, Coutts’ parent firm (39% owned by the taxpayer) issue a sort-of apology to the former UKIP leader.

[…]

When a person is “debanked” today, they can have a problem opening an account anywhere else if the bank asks them why they left a bank in the past. As a result, we have almost a sort of “cartel” system operating.

In time, hopefully, competition will swing back, and some of the nonsense going on will disappear. In the meantime, while I agree with you that the idea of having a “right” to a bank account is as bogus as many of the other “rights” that people talk about today, the fact that banking is such an embedded form of life in a modern economy means this issue hits hard in a way that, say, isn’t the case if you are banned from a pizza restaurant or candy store for holding the “wrong” views. Of course, it may be that the Farage case might encourage a firm to go out of its way to court business from those who have been targeted. Let’s hope so. For example, a bank could, without incurring wrath from the “woke” or regulators, say something like “Banking is all we do. No politics. No agendas. Just finance.”

And as I have said before, the outrageous Nigel Farage case, and that of others, surely demonstrates that a central bank digital currency idea must be resisted. This would be the end of any financial autonomy at all.

As you’d expect, Brendan O’Neill isn’t a fan of this latest attempt to make certain political viewpoints effectively illegal:

So there you have it. Nigel Farage really was given the boot from the prestigious private bank Coutts because of his political views. Because he is very pro-Brexit, is fond of Donald Trump and has been critical of Black Lives Matter. Because, in the words of an extraordinary internal dossier compiled by Coutts, his views “do not align’ with the bank’s values”. For the past fortnight the chattering classes have been chortling over Farage’s claim that Coutts was persecuting him for his political beliefs. How dumb – worse, how complacent in the face of corporate tyranny – those people look now.

Last month, Farage went public about the closure of his Coutts account. I’ve been given the heave-ho for political reasons, he said. He also said that nine other banks have since rejected his custom. Now he has published a dossier that was distributed at a meeting of Coutts’ “reputational risk committee” on 17 November 2022. It is a truly chilling read. It runs to 36 pages. There is a strong case for “exiting” Farage from the bank, it says, because his publicly stated views are “at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation”. The Stasi once compiled dossiers on dissident activists and artists whose views ran counter to those of the GDR regime. Now Coutts seems to be doing similar on customers who dare to bristle against the regime of woke.

The dossier basically finds Farage guilty of wrongthink. It highlights his renegade views not only on Brexit and Trump but also on Net Zero and even on King Charles – he has had the audacity to criticise His Majesty. Like dissidents in East Germany, his friendships are held against him, too. His links with Trump and tennis champ Novak Djokovic make him suspect, apparently. The dossier quotes the Independent‘s description of Farage’s visit to Djokovic’s trophy room in Belgrade, during which he criticised Australia’s expulsion of Djokovic for failing to get vaccinated against Covid, as “the spineless, chaotic behaviour of a chancer”.

[…]

The Farage / Coutts story is important because it highlights what a huge threat woke capitalism poses to freedom and fairness. Let’s be clear about what has happened here: a man has been economically unpersoned for having the supposedly wrong views. He’s been blacklisted for being a little too dissenting on the big issues of the day. And it’s happening to others, too – including people who do not have access to the same media platforms as Farage and thus have little leeway to protest against their expulsion from economic life by unelected, unaccountable banks and businesses. We acquiesce to this capitalist policing of thought at our peril. It is surely time for the government to act and clip the wings of banks and companies that believe they have the right to penalise citizens for the contents of their conscience. It might be Farage today, it could be you tomorrow.

Theodore Dalrymple sees it as a sign of the rise of woke totalitarianism:

It isn’t a question of whether Mr. Farage is always right or sometimes horribly wrong; when the bank says that it “uncovered” something that he said, as if he had recorded saying it by secret microphones, it makes itself ridiculous. Not even his worst enemies, or perhaps his best friends, would accuse him of hiding his light under a bushel.

The question is whether it’s the role of a bank to examine its clients’ views and deny them service if those views don’t accord with those of the chief executive, as if the latter were indisputably true and from which it were heresy to dissent. Is a bank an inquisition?

The chief executive of the parent bank, Alison Rose, said soon after her appointment that “tackling climate change would be a central pillar” of her work, and on the occasion of the so-called Pride month last year said that “our focus on diversity, equity and inclusion is integral to our purpose of championing the potential of people, families, and businesses”. This year, the company headquarters were covered in the rainbow colors of the LGBT flag, with lettering the height of humans declaring the “Championing the power of Pride”. Under her leadership, staff may “identify” as women and men on alternate days, should they so wish.

Of course, when she said that “diversity” and “inclusion” was “integral to our purpose”, she was using these terms in a strictly technical sense to mean “everyone who thinks as I do and has a fair bit of money”. The diversity “integral” to the “purpose” of Coutts doesn’t include those persons with less than $1 million to deposit, who even in these days of currency depreciation remain a small minority. People bank with Coutts because it’s exclusive, not inclusive.

The chief executive, however, is safely within what we might call the Coutts Community, because she was paid about $5.2 million last year. The prospect of being barred from the bank will no doubt inhibit anyone who banks with her banks from suggesting in public that she’s paid too much.

July 10, 2023

“De-banking” is the financial world’s version of cancelling someone

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

At the Free Life blog, Alan Bickley considers the recently reported rash of prominent (and not-so-prominent) critics of the British government being refused service by their banks and further refused permission to open new accounts with any other chartered bank. Being “cancelled” by social media companies is bad, but being “de-banked” in a modern economy is worse than being declared a “non-person” by a totalitarian regime:

In the past month, we have heard that various rich and well-connected people have had their bank accounts closed, seemingly because of their dissident political opinions. The same has happened to other people who are much poorer and without connections. Twenty years ago, the same happened to the British National Party. There is a simple libertarian response to this.

No one has the right to coerced association with anyone else. If someone comes to me and asks me to provide him with services, I have an absolute right to say yes or no. If I am uncharitable enough to dislike the colour of his face or what he does in bed, so much the worse. I may lose valuable business. But it is my time, and it is my choice. If anyone starts a whine about the horrors of discrimination, he should be ignored. We have an absolute right to discriminate against others for any reason whatever.

This being said, the position becomes less clear when state power of some kind is involved. Banks in this country require a licence from the State to operate. This protects them from open competition. It also gives them access to services and information from the State that are not given to other persons or businesses. If a bank finds itself in serious financial difficulties, it has at least a greater chance than other large businesses of being saved by the State – by a coordination of support by others or by direct financial help. The State has also made it illegal for many transactions to be made in cash. If I try to buy a car with £20,000 in cash, the car dealership is obliged to refuse my business, or to make so many enquiries that accepting my business is too much trouble. In effect, anyone who wants to spend more than a few thousand pounds in cash is obliged by various actual and shadow laws to use a bank account.

So we have privileged corporations and an effective legal obligation for people to do business with them. This entirely changes the libertarian indifference to commercial discrimination. The banks are a privileged oligopoly. The banks compete for custom among a public that is free to choose one bank rather than another, but that is compelled to choose some bank. For this reason, since the relevant laws will not be repealed, it is legitimate to demand another law to offset some of the effects of the others. Banks should be legally obliged to accept the business of any person or group of persons without question. Limitations on what services are provided must be justified on the grounds of previous financial misconduct as reasonably defined. For example, it should be permitted for a bank to refuse an overdraft to someone who is or has recently been bankrupt, or whose spending habits are obviously reckless. Perhaps it should be permitted for a bank to refuse to lend money for purposes it regards as scandalous as well as commercially unviable. Therefore, a representative of the White Persons’ Supremacy Foundation, or the Vladimir Putin Appreciation Society, should be able to walk into any bank and open an account – with no questions asked. If an account is refused, there should be a legal obligation on the bank to provide a full explanation of the refusal. If the refusal is not made on valid commercial grounds, there should be a right of appeal before a tribunal which does not award costs, and this tribunal should have the power to grant punitive damages against any bank found to be discriminating on any grounds but the validly commercial.

The refusal of banking services is only the beginning of a new and sophisticated totalitarianism. What the banks can do can also be done by supermarkets, by Internet service providers, by hotel chains, by airlines and railway companies, and by utility providers. There is indeed a good case for insisting on a law forbidding any organisation that has the privilege of limited liability from any but obviously commercial discrimination.

February 20, 2023

Thirteen reasons the Dutch did better financially than the English in the Seventeenth Century

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes investigates the huge differences between the rival English and Dutch financial markets in the 17th century:

The courtyard of the exchange in Amsterdam (De binnenplaats van de beurs te Amsterdam), 1653.
Oil painting by Emanuel de Witte (1617-1692) from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen collection via Wikimedia Commons.

One of the weird things about Britain, despite its being the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, is that its financial infrastructure was for a long time remarkably backward. Its “Financial Revolution”, by which both people and the state began to borrow at ever lower interest rates, only really took off in the early eighteenth century — long after London’s extraordinary growth in 1550-1650, when it had suddenly expanded eightfold to become one of Europe’s most important commercial hubs. Indeed, even for much of the late seventeenth century, England lacked many of the most basic financial institutions that had been used for decades and decades by their most important rival and trading partner, the Dutch Republic.

I was especially intrigued when I stumbled across a discussion of Dutch policies and customs, written up in around 1665 by the young merchant Josiah Child, and published a few years later: a kind of wishlist of many of the things that made the Dutch so wealthy, and which the English continually failed to emulate:

  1. The Dutch councils of state and war always included merchants who had experience of trading and living abroad — Child was perhaps just angling for some influence here, but for all that merchants were getting more influential, in England they were not actually in charge.
  2. Gavel-kind succession laws, whereby all children got an equal share of their parents’ estates, rather than it all going to the eldest. English primogeniture, by contrast, apparently left a lot of gentlemen’s younger sons having to become apprenticed to merchants.
  3. High regulatory standards for goods. A barrel of Dutch-packed herring or cod would apparently be accepted by buyers just by viewing the marks, without having to open them up to check. English-packed goods, by contrast, were rarely trusted because the fish would turn out to be rotten or even missing — the English regulators’ stamps of approval were reputedly given to anyone who would pay.
  4. Encouragement for inventors of new products, techniques, and import trades, who received rewards from the state, and not just temporary monopoly patents.
  5. Ships, called fluyt, which were cheaper to build, required fewer sailors, and were easier to handle. Despite being only very lightly armed, they sailed in fleets for protection, when necessary being convoyed by ships of war. English trading ships, by contrast, were each heavily armed, but with those cannon taking up room and weight that could have been used for carrying merchandise.
  6. Education of all children, even girls, in arithmetic and keeping accounts. As Child put it, this infused in the Dutch “a strong aptitude, love, and delight” for commerce. It also meant that husbands and wives were real partners in many businesses — something that impressed almost all foreign visitors to the Netherlands.
  7. Low customs duties, but high consumption taxes. Very low customs duties, on both imports and exports, meant that it was often very profitable to trade with the Netherlands. The Dutch were famed for their many ships, and for their granaries bursting with grain, despite growing hardly any trees or crops themselves. To fund their state, they instead overwhelmingly relied on the gemene middelen — taxes on the sale of wine, beer, meat, fuel, candles, salt, soap, flour, cloth, and a host of other goods, with many of the higher rates reserved for expensive luxuries. Much like modern value-added taxes, these taxes on consumption raised revenue while preserving the all-important incentive to save and invest.
  8. Thrifty living — which, come to think of it, was probably related to the high consumption taxes, although Childs doesn’t seem to have noticed the connection. Dutch thrift was thought by the English to be especially useful because it allowed wage costs to be kept low — essential for maintaining competitiveness in international markets — while preventing the country having a trade deficit. The English always worried they were sending too much of their silver abroad to pay for French wines and other luxuries, but the Dutch appeared to have prevented this without resorting to import tariffs that might annoy trading partners and prompt retaliation.
  9. Religious toleration, which attracted all sorts of industrious immigrants to bring their families and wealth. (Incidentally, as I’ve mentioned before, this was also one of the key attractions of Livorno, set up by the Medici Dukes of Tuscany to be a major trading hub.)
  10. The use of the Law-Merchant, which meant that all controversies between merchants and tradesmen were decided in just 3 or 4 days’ time. England, rather strangely for such an increasingly commercial nation, did not develop merchant courts with a specific jurisdiction or a distinct body of merchant law — disputes instead had to be resolved in the royal common-law or equity courts, in the Admiralty court, or else abroad. The English courts, however, were often slow. Child complained that cases often took half a year, and often much longer. (Incidentally, slow and rotten justice in the Court of Chancery, the key equity court used by merchants in England, was one of the reasons Francis Bacon was impeached by Parliament and sacked as Lord Chancellor.)
  11. Transferrable bills of exchange — in other words, the circulation of credit notes as a currency. These were not properly supported by English laws, but allowed Dutch merchants to trade a lot more frequently. English merchants often had to wait some six months to a year before receiving all the coin from selling their foreign goods in London, so as to purchase goods again to make fresh trades. They spent much of their time chasing shopkeepers for payment. But the Dutch, by being able to easily buy and sell their credit notes, could “turn their stocks twice or thrice in trade”, immediately settling their accounts and making fresh purchases. (I intend to look into this in a lot more detail soon, as finding a way to bills of exchange transferrable in England appears to have been a major project for many of the mid-seventeenth-century inventors and improvers — after just a cursory glance, transferability was only secured in law as late as 1704.)
  12. Banks. Or rather, as Child actually put it, “BANKS”. In England many of the functions of banks gradually evolved from the practices of individual goldsmiths and the scriveners — legal clerks who specialised in property transfers and mortgages. There was certainly nothing so secure as the municipal Wisselbank of Amsterdam, established in 1609, which had various monopoly powers as a clearing-house for bills of exchange and was backed by a vault full of bullion. Nor the municipal Bank van Lening, established in 1614, which was a pawnbroker modelled on the Italian Monte di Pietà, or mounts of piety, designed to make small and low-cost loans to the poor.
  13. “PUBLIC REGISTERS” — again capitalised by Child — of all lands and houses sold or mortgaged. This item on the policy wishlist would not be ticked off for England until two centuries later, but the key advantage was to prevent lawsuits over land titles — still cited as a major problem even in the 1690s — and so make land more genuinely secure for mortgages.

Finally, the result of many of these policies was the Dutch had significantly lower interest rates — often just 3-4% when the English were still lending and borrowing at 6-8%. Indeed, this list was made because of a long-standing English policy debate I’ve been researching, on whether to lower the legal maximum rate of interest.

December 14, 2022

PayPal channels its inner Justin Trudeau

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Canada’s current Prime Minister found a neat work-around to punish peaceful protestors and their small-scale financial backers by getting Canada’s chartered banks to freeze their bank accounts and credit cards. He didn’t bother getting a law or even an Order-in-Council to do this. He merely had the Finance Minister have a friendly chat with the banks’ CEOs and it was a done deal at least for a few hundreds or thousands of Canadians. PayPal clearly admires Justin Trudeau’s forthright moves to crush dissent and — being a financial institution itself — has been doing similar things to wrongthinking individuals and organizations who (used to) use PayPal’s services:

If you’re one of the lucky ones and your account has just been suspended, you can go to customer service, explain your situation and hope that someone gets back to you. If you’ve been banned, you’ll need an attorney to file a subpoena for the internal PayPal documents — simply to learn why you’ve been banned. (Good luck getting unbanned.)

These are entrepreneurs, writers, academics, activists — the very same people PayPal, whose mission is “democratizing financial services”, was meant to empower. 

PayPal won’t say how many of them it has suspended or banned. In June 2021, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil-liberties groups wrote a letter to PayPal and Venmo, calling on them to open up. So far, they have not, said Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

The people who founded PayPal — the so-called PayPal Mafia — include Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks and Max Levchin. All are champions of free speech. All have expressed shock and dismay at what is happening to the company they created. Several founders agreed to talk with The Free Press for this article.

“If the online forms of your money are frozen, that’s like destroying people economically, limiting their ability to exercise their political voice”, Thiel told me. “There’s something about destroying people economically that seems like a far more totalitarian thing.” [Justin Trudeau smiles]

When they launched PayPal, in December 1998, the founders imagined themselves connecting people to the global economy by sidestepping the hefty fees charged by credit-card companies and the inflationary policies of poorly run governments. Early PayPal users had Palm Pilots, and they would beam money from their devices to anyone with an email address. It was especially popular among eBay users. 

“PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before”, Thiel said at a company meeting, in late 1999. “It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means, because if they try the people will switch to dollars or pounds or yen, in effect, dumping the worthless local currency for something more secure.”

Since those early heady days, PayPal has amassed 429 million active accounts. Fifty-eight percent of Americans use PayPal, and in 2021, there were 19.3 billion PayPal transactions. It now has a market valuation of $84 billion. 

But the company that was meant to liberate countless individuals is becoming something else.

Increasingly, it is becoming a police officer. It is deciding what is right and wrong, who gets to be heard, who is silenced. It is locking out of the financial system those people or brands that have slipped outside the parameters of acceptable discourse, those who threaten the consensus of the gatekeepers. The consensus is hard to articulate; it is an ideology lacking clearly defined ideological contours. But the tenets of that consensus are unmistakable: the new progressive politics around race and gender are a force for good, the Covid lockdown was just, the war in Ukraine is noble, and an unfettered exchange of ideas and opinions is an unacceptable threat to all of the above. 

A cynic might say that the original idea, “democratizing financial services”, has been implemented with a capital “D” which makes it all make sense in an American political context.

November 13, 2022

Corruption in US politics? Where’s the fainting couch?

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

Elizabeth Nickson looks at several recent books covering political corruption in US politics:

Whitney Webb’s One Nation under Blackmail published late last month, explains in exhaustive detail how the American government was taken over by well-dressed thieves. Webb writes from the left, but she is dispassionate. In 1,000 pages, she explains the history of the turning of democracy, starting post WW2 with the heinous Dulles brothers, moving through Reagan with country club thugs calling themselves The Enterprise, to Jeffrey Epstein’s seduction of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Promising riches beyond their imaginings, the seduction led the couple, by increments, to sell out the country to China and Wall Street.

Webb explains how Epstein set up the Clinton and Gates Foundations promising a new iteration in “charity”, one that made profits, and pushed forward the founders as Saviours. Clinton in her years as Sec State, flew around the world eating brownies and demanding tithes for herself, in return for every beneficence she gave courtesy of the American taxpayer. The ’08 crisis was brought to us by the same crooks, and the same methods, chipping away at regulation. The head Fannie and Freddie Mae bureaucrat, James A Johnson walked away with $100 million leaving the world in crisis. Tens of millions lost everything.

Add this to [Profiles in Corruption] Peter Schweizer’s extraordinary detailing of how Pelosi etc. made their hundreds of millions using taxpayer money, pinpointed deregulation and insider trading.

Schweizer describes how the mega-criminal dealing of the Bidens with China and the Ukraine has walked us into a potential nuclear conflict with both Russia and China. The Lords of Easy Money shows how Wall Street and all the pension funds, all the index funds, have been rolling over corporate debt and taking profits, then borrowing more, selling, borrowing more, selling, and repeat. Which means that every American enterprise that is traded and somehow functional, is laden with corporate debt it cannot possibly pay the interest on, as interest rates rise. Jay Powell made his $50 million that way.

Webb shows how Epstein coached Gates through invading and then purchasing public health both at home and through the UN. Add in the Covid mess, and another bunch of corporate and government thieves walked away with $3 Trillion, in the US alone.

Do you really think they’d allow the endless prosecutions they deserve? Do you really think they want to give back the money they stole?

September 20, 2022

Pierre Poilievre and the role of the Governor of the Bank of Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Jen Gerson looks at new Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s threat to fire the head of the Bank of Canada if and when he becomes Prime Minister:

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre at a Manning Centre event, 1 March 2014.
Manning Centre photo via Wikimedia Commons.

In May, Poilievre claimed that Macklem was “surrendering his independence” to the government of the day by using quantitative easing — printing money — to ease the COVID economic crisis. During the party’s English-language debate in Edmonton, Poilievre also said he would fire the governor if he ascended to prime minister.

This, very rightly, ticked off a lot of people. The governor of the Bank of Canada ought to be independent of daily partisan machinations for very good reason; we don’t want the person setting inflation targets to be subject to political pressure, otherwise we would risk a lot more money printing to pay for social programs in the short term, and devaluation of our currency in the long term. So threatening to fire the governor because he or she failed to hew to an incoming government’s wishes is a bad idea. We want that person to stay above the partisan fray.

A Conservative ought to understand this better than most.

Further, much of our inflationary woes is the result of international supply chain issues, which is something beyond the governor’s control. The bank’s defenders have been quick to make this point. Looking at overall increase in the monetary supply, including the significant amounts of money that was pumped into the economy for pandemic relief measures, in addition to the thwack of cash sitting on the banks’ books in the form of potential debt, I suspect that this argument is still highly debatable.

Regardless, the response to Poilievre’s comments from the bank itself was interesting. Although he didn’t call for the firing of his boss, Paul Beaudry, the deputy governor of the Bank conceded that Poilievre had at least a smidgen of a point.

“The aspect that we should be held accountable is exactly right,” Beaudry told a news conference in June. “Right now we completely understand that lots of Canadians can be frustrated at the situation,” he said. “It’s difficult for a lot of people. And we haven’t managed to keep inflation at our target, so it’s appropriate [that] people are asking us questions.”

Macklem himself acknowledged that he had misjudged the possibility for a serious inflationary period back in April. He deserves praise for admitting this! It’s difficult for people in senior roles to admit they were wrong and seek to course correct. One might even argue that his humility on this point demonstrates a personality that is particularly well-suited for his role.

So I want to reiterate that I think threatening to fire Tiff Macklem is a bad idea. It directly undermines the independence of his office, and it places blame on the bank for inflation, when the causes of that inflation are, at best, not his fault, and at worst, still not perfectly understood.

That said — again, messing with the independence of the bank is bad, m’kay — there is a historical precedent for this kind of institution-meddling chicanery. The last politician to threaten an unpopular Bank of Canada governor for political gain was that notable far-right populist … Jean Chrétien. That was back in 1993, in a situation that almost perfectly mirrors the economic and political dynamics of today.

In the ’90s, the incumbent Conservatives had appointed Bank of Canada governor John Crow, who had set interest rates to about seven per cent in order to keep inflation in check. If that figure, which is closer to historical norms than we like to remember, makes you eye your mortgage renewals a little warily, so it should. The Liberals, who were gunning to take over the government from the Conservatives, had argued that Crow’s obsession on maintaining low inflation had worsened a recession; they wanted Crow to prioritize reducing Canada’s unemployment rate instead.

Of course, if that sounds like a potential prime minister taking swipes at an ostensibly independent agent of the Bank of Canada, well, that’s because that’s exactly what it was. And media at the time recognized this at the time.

I think this is another case of a politician indulging in a bit of “bad policy but good politics” rhetoric. Unless he actually means it…

September 10, 2022

Magical Monetary Theory (MMT) – You’re soaking in it

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Kellen McGovern Jones outlines the rapid rise of MMT as “the answer to everyone’s problems” in the last few years and all the predictable problems it has sown in its wake:

“Inflation & Gold” by Paolo Camera is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) was the “Mumble Rap” of politics and economics in the late 2010s. The theory was incoherent, unsubstantial, and — before the pandemic, you could not avoid it if you wanted to.

People across the country celebrated MMT. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democrat Congresswoman from New York heralded MMT by proclaiming it “absolutely [must be] … a larger part of our conversation [on government spending].” The New York Times and other old-guard news sources authored countless articles raising the profile of MMT, while universities scrambled to hold guest lectures with prominent MMT economists like Dr. L. Randall Wray. Senator Bernie Sanders went as far as to hire MMT economists to his economic advisory team.

The most fundamental principle of MMT is that our government does not have to watch its wallet like everyday Joes. MMT contends that the government can spend as much as it wants on various projects because it can always print more money to pay for its agenda.

Soon after MMT became fashionable in the media, the once dissident economic theory leapt from being the obscure fascination of tweedy professors smoking pipes in universities to the seemingly deliberate policy of the United States government. When the Pandemic Hit, many argued that MMT was the solution to the pandemics problems. Books like The Deficit Myth by Dr. Stephanie Kelton became New York Times bestsellers, and the United States embarked on a massive spending spree without raising taxes or interest rates.

Attempting to stop the spread of Covid, state and federal governments coordinated to shut down nearly every business in the United States. Then, following the model of MMT, the federal government decided to spend, and spend, and spend, to combat the shutdown it had just imposed. Both Republican and Democrat-controlled administrations and congresses enacted trillions of dollars in Covid spending.

It is not hard to see that this spray and pray mentality of shooting bundles of cash into the economy and hoping it does not have any negative consequences was ripe for massive inflation from the beginning. Despite what MMT proponents may want you to believe, there is no way to abolish the laws of supply and demand. When there is a lot of something, it is less valuable. Massively increasing the supply of money in the economy will decrease the value of said money.

MMT economists seemed woefully unaware of this reality prior to the pandemic. Lecturing at Stoney Brook University, Kelton attempted to soothe worries about inflation by explaining that (in the modern economy) the government simply instructs banks to increase the number of dollars in someone’s bank account rather than physically printing the US Dollar and putting it into circulation. Somehow — through means that were never entirely clear — this fact was supposed to make people feel better.

In reality, there is no difference between changing the number in someone’s bank account or printing money. In both cases, the result is the same, the supply of money has increased. Evidence of MMTs inflationary effects are now everywhere.

July 23, 2022

Still living, still breathing, still walking around … but “legally dead”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, France, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I missed this from Alistair Dabbs last weekend, but it’s still just as concerning as it was then:

Zombies walk among us – until they need a nice sit-down, of course. It can be tiring to be undead. No wonder they drag their feet around and do all that moaning.

One such moaner is 58-year-old Michel from Montpellier. He has never stopped complaining since the postman delivered a letter one morning in June to offer him condolences on his recent death.

It was, as you might imagine, an administrative error: someone had probably clicked in the wrong checkbox or filed a request in the wrong folder. It was unlikely to be the result of a concerted Kafka-esque conspiracy to erase Michel from existence. Uncheck that box, drag the file out of the folder. It should be easy enough.

Evidently not. Once you’ve been declared dead, it sets in motion a sequence of automated digital-only procedures that sprint towards completion with alarming rapidity. You may have heard of France’s notoriety for officious paperwork and the snail-pace of its bureaucracy when you are living and breathing. But once you’re a stiff, it’s the fast lane electrons all the way.

Michel discovered that his bank accounts had already been frozen. His social security file had been closed immediately. His national health ID card was no longer valid and his top-up health insurance was cancelled.

He nipped over to his local social security office to see if they could put the brakes on the process but apparently it was too late: everything had already been done to kill him off, bar physically shoving him in a box and inviting friends and relatives around for beer and sandwiches.

Surely there’s a rollback option?

Ah now, it’s not that simple. The system architect that designed the automated process did not think of making [Alive] and [Dead] a pair of either-or radio buttons. They did not envisage a situation in which death, our ultimate existential destination, could be reversed by choosing Edit > Undo. There are no second- or third-life Power-Ups IRL. Instead, the system architect not unreasonably assumed that dying would be a one-way trip from which nobody is expected to return.

The system is not a complete disaster, though. The woman at the desk of the social security office was able to use it to find that a French national with exactly the same name and birthdate as Michel had died – albeit 4,500km (c 2,800 miles) away in Israel – and the two strangers’ records had probably been mixed up by a poorly trained official. So the error has been located. Good. Can it be corrected, please?

Yes, she said, before booking him in for a meeting to discuss it in two weeks’ time. No doubt he was also asked to bring documents that explicitly state when he didn’t die.

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress