Just as Hoover is preparing to rest on his laurels, he receives a cry for help. Germany has occupied and blockaded Belgium. The blockade prevents this tiny, heavily urban country from importing food, and the Belgians are starving. Germany needs its own food for its own armies, and is refusing to help. The Belgians order a thousand tons of grain from Britain, but when their representative comes to pick it up, Britain refuses to let them transport it, nervous at sending food into enemy-occupied territory. During tense negotiations, someone suggests using neutral power America as a go-between. But America is 5,000 miles away and busy with its own problems. So the US Ambassador to Britain asks his new best friend Herbert Hoover if he has any ideas.
Hoover invites Emile Francqui, a Belgian mining engineer he knows, to Britain. Together, they plan a Committee For The Relief of Belgium, intended not just to help transport the thousand tons of grain at issue, but to develop a long-term solution to the impending Belgian famine. Nothing like this has ever been tried before. Belgium has seven million people and almost no food. No government is offering to help, and they don’t have enough money to feed seven million people even for one day, let alone indefinitely. Hoover springs into action …
… by crushing all competing attempts to provide food for Belgium. He attacks the Rockefeller Foundation, which is trying to help, with a blitz of press coverage accusing it of various forms of insensitivity and interference, until it finally backs off. Then he gets to work on the government:
The letter bore several Hoover watermarks, beginning with its heavy load of facts and figures organized in point form. It noted that myriad relief committees were springing up both inside and outside of Belgium, and urged consolidation. “It is impossible to handle the situation except with the strongest centralization and effective monopoly, and therefore the two organizations [Hoover outside Belgium and Francqui inside it] will refuse to recognize any element except themselves alone.” The letter also contained Hoover’s usual autocratic and slightly paranoid demands for “absolute command” of his part of the enterprise.
Control attained, Hoover springs into action actually feeding Belgium. He launches one of the largest public relations campaigns the world has ever seen, sending letters to newspapers around the world asking for donations. He “urged reporters to investigate the famine conditions in Belgium and play up the ‘detailed personal horror stuff’. He personally arranged for a motion picture crew to capture footage of food lines in Brussels, and he hired famous authors, including Thomas Hardy and George Bernard Shaw, to plead for public support of the rescue effort.” He constantly telegrams his exasperated wife and children, now safely back in Palo Alto, demanding they raise more and more money from the West Coast elite.
He browbeats shipping conglomerates until they agree to ship his food for free, then browbeats railroads until they agree to carry it. By telegraph and letter he coordinates banks, railroads, docks, ships, and relief workers on both sides of the Atlantic. But that’s just the prelude. His real problem is the governments. Britain doesn’t want food shipped to Belgium, because right now the starving Belgians are Germany’s problem, and they don’t want to solve an enemy’s problem for them. But Germany also doesn’t want food shipped to Belgium, because the Belgians are resisting the occupation, and they figure starvation will make them more compliant. Shuttling back and forth across the North Sea, Hoover tries to get them to switch theories: Germany needs to think starving Belgians are their problem which it would be helpful to solve, and Britain needs to think starvation would make Belgians more compliant with the German occupation. In the end, both countries allow the shipments.
He goes on a fact-finding mission to Belgium, and managed to somehow offend everyone in the country that he is, at that very moment, saving from mass starvation […] By 1915, Hoover is, indeed, feeding millions of Belgians, indefinitely, using only private funding. He is also almost broke. Millions of Brits and Americans have given him contributions, from tycoons donating fortunes to ordinary people donating their wages, but it’s not enough. His expenses pass $5 million a month, which would be about $100 million today; all these bills are starting to catch up to him. In an act of supreme sacrifice, Hoover pledges his entire personal fortune as collateral for the Committee’s loans, then takes out more money. The grain shipments continue to flow, but his credit is at its end.
He continues beating on the doors of every government official he can find – British, German, American – demanding help. They all say their budgets are already occupied with the war effort. He begs them, lectures them, tells them that millions of people are doing to die. He goes all the way to the top, finagling an opportunity to meet with British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Lloyd George later calls Hoover’s presentation “the clearest he had [ever] heard on any subject”, but he can offer only moral support.
What finally works is going to Germany and meeting with their top military brass. The brass are unimpressed; they still think that Belgium starving is as likely to help them as hinder. But the contact spooks top British officials, who agree to meet with Hoover again. Hoover feeds them carefully crafted lies, saying that the German brass have told him that British aid to Belgium would be a disaster to the Central Powers and so they, the Germans, are going to fund everything Hoover wants and more. “Oh no they don’t!” say the British, who promise to give Hoover even more funding than his imaginary German partners. The Committee for the Relief Of Belgium is finally back in the black. And what a black it is:
The scope and powers of the Committee For Relief of Belgium were mindboggling. Its shipping fleet flew its own flag. Its members carried special documents that served as CRB passports. Hoover himself was granted a form of diplomatic immunity by all belligerents, with the British permitting him to cross the Channel at will and the Germans providing him a document saying “this man is not to be stopped anywhere under any circumstances”. Hoover had privileged access to generals, diplomats, and ministers. He enjoyed personal contacts with the heads of warring governments. He negotiated treaties with the belligerents, advised them on policy, and delivered private messages among them. Great Britain, France, and Belgium would soon be turning over to him $150 million a year, enough to run a small country, and taking nothing for it beyond his receipt. As one British official observed, Hoover was running “a piratical state organized for benevolence.”
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Hoover”, Slate Star Codex, 2020-03-17.
October 6, 2020
QotD: Herbert Hoover and the Belgian relief program
September 13, 2020
Are the Kielburgers fleeing before the real story breaks?
Ted Campbell listened to an Evan Solomon radio report recently and spells out the key points:
The Kielburgers, he notes are neither newcomers nor naifs. Mark Kielburger is a Rhodes Scholar and Craig Kielburger has, he say, “been rubbing shoulders with politicians since he was 12 years old.” They have, Mr Solomon says, been selling the “halo effect” to politicians and other celebrities, a list which he tells us includes Justin Trudeau, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Erin O’Toole and the “halo effect” says, in effect, if you come out and make us look good then we, being a famous, big-league charity will make you look good, too. It’s all part of an astute marketing plan.
But then Evan Solomon gets to the real question: if Tylenol, he says, can survive a scandal in which people died then why are the Kielburgers reacting so dramatically to what is, really, on the surface, a minor league scandal? So the Kielburgers paid Margaret Trudeau a few hundred thousand dollars to make a few charity appearances, is that such a big deal? I mean the Trudeaus are wealthy, aren’t they? They can’t be bought, can they? Well, most if us don’t have million dollar plus trust funds and most of us didn’t earn $450,000 in speaking fees in a year, but the Trudeau family is unlikely to have just forgotten about $250,000 in speaking fees paid to Margaret Trudeau. Bill Morneau may have forgotten about owning a villa in France, but unlike the Trudeaus, Mr Morneau is rich … really rich. So are the Kielburgers. The commercial property part of their WE empire, alone, is worth $50 Million. Could a few thousands dollars per appearance (she made 28 over four years, about one every couple of months) paid to Margaret Trudeau really threaten the entire WE empire?
[…]
My guess, and that’s all it is, is that there is real fear in the WE boardrooms and in WE’s legal department that Prime Minister Trudeau might be guilty of something more than just conflict of interest. Someone like Pierre Poilievre or the Lobbying Commissioner, for example, might think that further, deeper investigations are needed and those questions might lead investigators to look more deeply into why and how Justin Trudeau and the Kielburger brothers, themselves, cooked up the idea of WE Charity running a multi-hundred-million-dollar government programme and then trying to cover-up the whole thing.
Might those questions be enough to bring Justin Trudeau down?
Might those questions be enough to threaten the Kielburgers’ fortunes, even their freedom?
August 23, 2020
QotD: Herbert Hoover and the American tourists
The US Consulate in London didn’t know how to solve these problems either. But Herbert Hoover, still high on his decision to pivot to philanthropy and public service, calls them up and asks if he can help. They say yes, definitely. Hoover gets in touch with his rich friends, passes around the collection plate, and organizes a Committee For The Assistance Of American Travelers. Then he gets to work, the way only he can:
Within 24 hours, Hoover’s committee had its own stationery, and within forty-eight it was operating a booth in the ballroom of the Savoy Hotel as well as three other London locations. Through his business connections, Hoover managed to bypass restrictions on telegraph service and open a transatlantic line to allow Americans to wire money to stranded friends and relatives. In a city suddenly flooded with refugees, he reserved for American travelers some two thousand rooms in hotels or boardinghouses. He issued a press release proclaiming that his Residents’ Committee was assuming charge of all American relief work in the city, and that in doing so it had the blessings of its honorary chairman, Walter Hines Page, the US ambassador to London.
… which is totally false. Hoover is starting to display a pattern that will stick with him his whole life – that of crushing competing charities. He begins a lobbying effort to get the US Embassy to ban all non-Hoover relief work, focusing on the inefficiency of having multiple groups working on the same problem. When the US Assistant Secretary Of War arrives in London to coordinate a response, he is met on the dock by Hoover employees, who demand he consult with Hoover before interfering in the US tourist issue. Eventually the Embassy, equally exasperated by Hoover’s pestering and impressed with his results, agrees to give him official control of the relief effort.
After two months of work, Hoover and his Committee have repatriated all 120,000 US tourists, supporting them in style until it could find them boat tickets. All of its loans and operating costs have been repaid by grateful tourists, and its budget is in the black. The rescued travelers are universal in their praise for Hoover, partly because Hoover has threatened to ruin any of them who get too critical:
Other complainants were received with less patience, including a hotheaded professor of history from the University of Michigan, who wrote to accuse the Residents’ Committee of mistreatment. Hoover refuted his charges indignantly and comprehensively, copying his response to the president of the university and its board of regents. After a meeting with his employer, the professor returned Hoover an abject retraction and apology.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Hoover”, Slate Star Codex, 2020-03-17.
August 1, 2020
“All style and no substance made it the perfect match for Trudeau”
Andrew Lawton on the Prime Minstrel’s performance in “explaining” his role in the WE scandal:
“Don’t look at me – I’m just the prime minister.”
That about sums up Justin Trudeau’s defense in a Canadian scandal starring grifters, shell corporations, virtue signallers and a federal ethics probe.
The WE-Scam, as it’s come to be known in Canadian circles, is, on its surface, a simple one.
Trudeau’s government created a $912 million government program to pay students to volunteer – formerly known as “working” if memory serves – and outsourced the administration of it to WE Charity, one of those purported international development charities more known for holding glitzy, celebrity-filled parties than digging any wells in Africa.
All style and no substance made it the perfect match for Trudeau.
WE would have netted about $44 million from the program had the government not pulled the plug amid the backlash. The charity would also have had a budget to pay teachers up to $12,000 each to funnel their students into the paid volunteer channels.
The program itself was a boondoggle, but bad policy became a scandal because Trudeau and virtually everyone in his immediate family have personal and financial connections to WE, as do at least two of his cabinet ministers, not to mention his chief of staff – all of whom say their relationships had nothing to do with WE getting the sole-sourced contract.
After weeks of ducking scrutiny from his political opponents, Trudeau made a rare appearance before the parliamentary finance committee Thursday, though his testimony was heavy on the sanctimony and light on the details.
July 17, 2020
Justin Trudeau IS the Liberal Party and he’s not planning to go away
The government is doing what it can to ride out the storm of yet another ethics investigation into the Trudeau family entanglements with WE, and no rational person expects Justin Trudeau to be even a bit chastened by the experience — he genuinely has no idea what the fuss is all about, and he has no inclination to step aside from his patrimony. Even if he did … the Liberals have nobody who could credibly step up:
Some, however, are wondering whether it’s time for the Liberals to start thinking about life after Justin Trudeau. It would be understandable if his leadership were in jeopardy. The ethics commissioner is commencing his office’s third official investigation into events that could have been avoided had the prime minister simply not done unnecessary things: vacationed on the Aga Khan’s island; inserted himself in the prosecutorial chain of command to “save” 9,000 jobs at SNC-Lavalin that were not in jeopardy; sole-sourced a giant jobs program to his buddies Craig and Marc. This theory holds that Chrystia Freeland is ready and willing and able to take over. And then everything would be, somehow, better.
There doesn’t seem to be much to hang it on. Exactly one MP, Toronto backbencher Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, appears willing to put his name to complaints about the Trudeau Gang’s latest easily-avoided snafu, and he’s not being impolite about it. Polling shows little sign that the scandal is leaving a mark on Liberal voting intentions: Canadians seem very grateful for the federal government’s terrible-to-middling performance during the pandemic. “Snap election, Trudeau super-majority” remains a competing Ottawa narrative.
But it’s an intriguing thought: The Justin Trudeau Liberals, without Justin Trudeau — intriguing because it’s basically a black hole. Way back in the Michael Ignatieff era there was this idea that the Liberals would assemble the best minds of various generations and turn themselves into a party that believed in things and behaved as such in government. There was to be a conference in Montreal, modelled on Lester Pearson’s 1960 think-fest in Kingston, Ont., which spawned various useful ideas including the Canada Pension Plan.
No one remembers much about the 2010 think-fest, which was, coincidentally enough, titled “Canada 150,” because all this “ideas” mumbo jumbo soon became a moot point. Justin finally agreed to run for leader, and he might as well have been unopposed, and it turned out he was really good at doing what Liberals have always believed in: winning.
Get rid of the Trudeau brand, warts and all, and what do you have? Freeland is an impressive person, though she’s also deputy prime minister and was presumably in the cabinet room as this WE disaster was conceived and implemented. You have a couple of very useful and competent veteran ministers in Carolyn Bennett and Marc Garneau. You have some greener ministers who might shine in a less top-down power structure. But mostly you have a flaky centre-left operation that doesn’t know how to do anything better than spend money and broadcast its own self-styled virtue.
Trudeau is damn good at that. Everything suggests he would walk away with an election held next week. Surely it’s unlikely he’s going anywhere he doesn’t want to.
July 15, 2020
QotD: State and private charity
Similarly with US aid to poorer countries. The United States is regularly berated for being very low on the list of aid givers, but this only applies to government-to-government aid. Once the private contributions made by Americans to people in poorer countries are counted in, the US rises to the top. In fact US private help is better spent, usually going to people to spend in towns and villages in the local economy, rather than on gold palaces and white elephant steel mills in the desert.
Part of this mismatch arises from the fact that these analysts seem to wear spectacles that admit only light of a political wavelength and ignore private generosity. The latest victim of this myopia is the “bank of mom and dad.” It is assumed to be a bad thing that young people should turn to mom and dad to help out with deposits and mortgages.
“Richard”, “Is Private Help a Bad Thing? – Political Spectacles of the Left”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-04-02.
July 13, 2020
Sarah Hoyt on noblesse oblige
In the latest edition of the Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt explains how noblesse oblige can and is used as a tool to benefit the powerful:
Of all the traps a culture can fall into, the fact that Americans tend to fall into Noblesse Oblige traps says very good things about us. It also doesn’t make the trap any less dangerous.
Noblesse Oblige, aka “nobility obligates” was a way that the excesses of a hierarchical society was kept in check. While the peasants were obligated to obey the nobleman, the nobleman was obligated to look after them/not put extreme demands on them/behave in certain paternalistic ways. (One of these days I need to do a post on paternalistic versus patriarchal. remind me.)
It is what is notably lacking from ideologically driven totalitarianisms and hierarchies, probably because their basis being atheistic they don’t seem the humans they have power over as being worth anything or commanding any duty from them. This is why in places like Cuba, Venezuela or China, the officials of the “democratic” government give themselves airs as long-suffering public servants while treating the people under their power worse than any of us would treat a stray animal (let alone a pet.)
In the US — where the citizen is king! — we have evolved a form of noblesse oblige best described as “Them who can, do what they can for those who can’t.”
[…]
But the noblesse oblige that affects the common individual in America is the foundation of worse traps.
Most of the idiotic compliance with ridiculous Winnie the Flu rules and restrictions hooked directly into Noblesse Oblige. For instance, the brilliant idea that you should wear masks to show you care even though we pretty much know they are completely ineffective and quite deleterious for a vast swath of people.
The idea that our kids should be forced to perform “volunteer” labor to graduate school, to “teach them to care for others.” The idea that you can always do a little more/sacrifice a little more for “those worse off” (Who often aren’t.)
When Noblesse Oblige turns into toxic altruism, it can take society apart.
Much of the “Green” mania is part of the noblesse oblige trap. They’re trying to convince us that if we just do these little things — most of them counterproductive, like, say recycling, which uses more resources and causes more issues than just using stuff — we’ll make it better for everyone.
In a bigger sense, they’re trying to make it so that we commit polite suicide so that “others live better.”
It can result in truly horrible racism, too. A great part of the left’s being convinced, say, that meritocracy is white supremacy comes from the fact that, being white, (and racist) they assume that they’re more competent than any other race, and therefore following “merit” causes white people to rise to the top.
June 23, 2020
QotD: Scientific discoveries despite “research” and “planning”
For from the “planning” point of view, the little nerd has endangered billions of dollars in funding, and thus the livelihoods of innumerable bureaucratic drudges. That is, after all, why they retain the China Wall of lawyers: to prevent unplanned events from happening. But glory glory, sometimes they happen anyway.
David Warren, “That’s funny”, Essays in Idleness, 2018-03-08.
December 8, 2019
The “Church of Atheism” doesn’t get charitable status … this time
Colby Cosh on the recent court decision on the Church of Atheism’s attempt to qualify as a church — and receive the tax benefits — under Revenue Canada’s rules:
“The Descent of the Modernists”, by E.J. Pace, first appearing in his book Christian Cartoons, published in 1922.
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Last week the Federal Court of Appeal upheld Revenue Canada’s rejection of an application for charitable status made by a “Church of Atheism” tucked away in Ontario’s Lanark Highlands. The idea of making a gesture like this has probably occurred to every atheist who looks around at a world of tax-exempt churches and wonders why his kind is excluded from the gravy train. (Clergymen pay tax on their income, but they have access to a generous residential deduction, and any professional expenses covered by the church go untaxed.)
The fact is that the “Church’s” efforts were a bit amateurish and confused. But they may, like a doomed military reconnaissance, have revealed weaknesses in the anomalous exclusion of atheists from religious tax exemptions.
These weaknesses cannot be any big secret. You probably remember the Supreme Court’s Mouvement laïque québécois v. Saguenay decision of 2015 — that’s the case in which the Quebec Court of Appeal had ruled that a statue of Christ with an electrically illuminated Sacred Heart was “devoid of religious connotation.” The Supreme Court, perhaps suppressing a chuckle or two, proceeded to unanimously overturn the Quebec ruling and expound the concept that the Canadian state has a Charter-based “duty of religious neutrality” (except, of course, where the constitution explicitly specifies otherwise, as with Catholic schools). Government, the SCC insisted, “must neither favour nor hinder any particular belief, and the same holds true for non-belief.”
Given that this is our law, what can be the problem with a “Church of Atheism”? Good question! Justice Marianne Rivoalen, writing on behalf of a three-judge Federal Court panel, confirmed the general point that there is a state duty of religious neutrality; in fact, even Revenue Canada, acting as the respondent, conceded this.
But the court simply ruled, without any logical elucidation, that “the Minister (of Revenue)’s refusal to register the appellant as a charitable organization does not interfere in a manner that is more than trivial or insubstantial with the appellant’s members’ ability to practise their atheistic beliefs. The appellant can continue to carry out its purpose and its activities without charitable registration.”
October 23, 2019
QotD: Climbing Maslow’s Pyramid again
If people want little orchards of native (well, you know) apples then people should have little orchards of native apples. As long as, of course, they’re creating and maintaining those little orchards of native apples at their own expense. This is, after all, what liberalism means, that the peeps get to do what the peeps want. And if we’re to add some Burkean conservatism so that it’s the little platoons sorting it out for themselves then all the better.
As long as no one is being forced to pay for this through taxation then what could possibly be the problem?
At another level this is climbing Maslow’s Pyramid again. At one level of income we’ll take fruit in the only way we can, seasonally and in a limited manner. We get richer, technology advances, we can have apples year round – but that does mean trade, commercially sized operations and the inevitable limited selection. We get richer again and now we’ve more than sufficiency, let’s have that variety back again.
After all, it’s not as if we’re not seeing this right across the food chain, is it?
That roast beef of Olde Englande was most certainly better than the bully beef from Argentina or the Fray Bentos pie. As is the best grass fed British beef of today. But we moved through the cycle to get from most not being able to eat any beef, to all being able to have bad beef, to now again thinking more about the quality – we have a more than sufficiency of beef and can be picky about it.
Tim Worstall, “I fully approve of this”, Tim Worstall, 2017-10-22.
February 24, 2018
“Oxfam, like many large British charities, has long been a villainous organisation”
Theodore Dalrymple puts the boots to Oxfam:
It is very wrong, morally, to take pleasure in the misfortunes of others, but I cannot disguise from myself the intense pleasure, amounting almost to joy, with which I learned of the public exposure of the wrongdoings of Oxfam in Haiti, Chad, and elsewhere. Its workers, sent to bring relief to the acute and chronic sufferings of those countries, used the charity’s money, partly derived from voluntary contributions and partly from government subventions (the British government and the European Union are by far the largest contributors to British Oxfam), to patronise local prostitutes, some of them underage, and also to conduct orgies, no doubt at a fraction of what they would have cost to conduct at home.
Oxfam, at least in Britain, has long been one of the most Pecksniffian of organisations, much give to auto-beatification. Mr. Pecksniff, in Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit, introduces his daughters, called Charity and Mercy, to Mrs. Todgers, adding ‘Not unholy names, I hope.’ It is therefore of the hypocritical Mr. Pecksniff that I think whenever I pass the Oxfam shop in my small town, with its unctuous slogan, Thank you for being humankind, posted in the window. It is only with difficulty that I resist the urge to throw a brick through it.
Of course, Oxfam, like many large British charities, has long been a villainous organisation — and the sexual exploits (or should I say exploitations?) of its workers in Haiti and elsewhere are the least of it. In the moral sense, though not the legal, it has for many years been guilty of fraud, of misleading the public.
I first realised this some years ago when I found a used book dealer of my long acquaintance poring in his shop over Oxfam’s annual accounts.
‘Look at this,’ he said, but I saw nothing until he pointed it out to me.
Oxfam, in common with many other charities in Britain, runs thrift stores in practically every British town and city. Such thrift stores are now more numerous even than Indian restaurants: they allow people to give away their unwanted belongings in the belief that, by so doing, they are furthering a good cause.
My acquaintance pointed out that, despite receiving their goods free of charge, paying practically nothing for their labour (which was voluntary), and paying much reduced local taxes, Oxfam shops made a profit on turnover of a mere 17 per cent, much less than his own, despite his incomparably greater expenses. How was such a thing possible, by what miracle of disorganisation (or malversation of funds)?
Until then, I had carelessly assumed that the great majority of any money that I gave to a large charity went to serve its ostensible end, say the relief of avoidable suffering. I was not alone in this, of course. When I asked the volunteer ladies in a local shop run on behalf of the British Red Cross what percentage of the money I paid for a book there went to the Red Cross, they looked at me as if I were mad.
‘Why, all of it of course,’ piped up one of the ladies.
The real average figure at the time for Red Cross thrift stores was 8 per cent; but the volunteer ladies supposed, because the goods they sold were free to the Red Cross and they themselves were not paid, that (apart from a small amount for unavoidable expenses) all the money raised went directly to victims of earthquakes and the like.
July 26, 2017
QotD: From local private charity to national government social program
In a small town, the impulse to assist the poor and disorganized was direct, and the people being helped were known to everyone. Big cities with their concentrated slums of poor immigrants led to social service agencies, funded at first by churches and cities, and then by state and federal governments. As the source of the assistance became impersonal, so did the aid — and the direct contact between those assisting and those assisted declined. Instead of the local church matrons with their bourgeois ideas of proper behavior and work, harassed social workers with enormous caseloads processed cases quickly, and the ideology of government assistance changed so that any behavioral expectation of the client population was viewed as an affront to their dignity.
In time, the government assistance ethos spread to every corner of the country and crowded out the local community services. Meanwhile, locally-controlled schools were gradually taken over by higher levels of government and distant union bureaucracies so that the influence of local parents was minimized. This was viewed as “progressive,” since distant elites thought local school boards and parents were too parochial and backward to be entrusted with decisions, and would get in the way of teaching the correct materials.
The incorrect application of emotions of sympathy and support to faceless categories of people like “the poor” and “the undocumented” removes any possibility of understanding the real situations of each of the category’s members. A hazy idealized poor family is envisioned, then a response that would be appropriate if that family lived next door (help them!) leads to voting for politicians that offer new programs to help “people like that.” By misapplying family and community feelings to higher levels of government, voters put into place a bureaucracy that misses most of the social signalling features of local groups and takes tax money to grow itself, crowding out local groups (and the valuable social signals that maintained bourgeois standards.)
Jeb Kinnison, “Real-life ‘Hunger Games'”, According to Hoyt, 2015-09-25.
July 8, 2017
Demonizing the Koch brothers
Julian Adorney on the amazing contrast between the way the Koch brothers actually spend their money and the demonic sins they are regularly accused of by progressives:
The Koch Brothers recently announced a $21 million anti-poverty program in Dallas, designed to reduce gang violence and encourage young entrepreneurs. But their efforts to end poverty are unlikely to earn credit from progressives, who frequently demonize the family. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid routinely blasts them for, “crooked works” and “nefarious actions”; and when Charles and David Koch donated $100 million to New York-Presbyterian Hospital, leftists demanded (unsuccessfully) that the hospital return the gift.
Why are the Kochs so often criticized by the left, while far less progressive individuals are given a free pass?
Unlikely Alliances
The Koch brothers have spent at least $1.5 billion working to advance traditionally progressive causes. They have funded public television, museums, and hospitals. They contributed $25 million to the United Negro College Fund, the nation’s largest minority education group. The donation offers scholarships and support for historically black universities.
Politically, the Kochs have pushed for criminal justice reform. The brothers worked with Van Jones on his Cut50 project, which aims to cut America’s incarcerated population in half over the next ten years. The Kochs have partnered with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for American Progress to reduce prison populations and enact more humane criminal sentencing. And in 2011, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers gave Charles Koch its annual Defender of Justice award.
But criminal justice reform is far from the only progressive cause the Kochs have embraced. They publicly oppose corporate tax breaks and subsidies — including the ethanol subsidies that boost their bottom line.
In spite of this, many progressives disdain the Kochs as far-right extremists. On his Senate website, Bernie Sanders claims that the goal of these, “right wing billionaires” is to, “repeal every major piece of legislation … that has protected the middle class, the elderly, the children, the sick, and the most vulnerable in this country.” The Koch’s high-profile efforts to help the most vulnerable population in the nation, those victimized by the criminal justice system, receives no mention.
[…]
Progressives vilify the Kochs for the same reason that many venerate FDR: politics encourages black and white formulations. Prominent Democrats lambast the Kochs as ill-intentioned billionaires, and the specter of the Kochs has played heavily in Democratic fundraising attempts. Fear motivates, and boogeymen inspire fiercer opposition than the complicated reality of the Koch brothers.
Similarly, Democrats may turn a blind eye to FDR’s anti-progressive actions because they don’t wish to tarnish one of their own. FDR’s economic policies owe much to fascism: Roosevelt admitted that he was, “deeply impressed by what [Mussolini] has accomplished.” Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration stated it more directly: “The Fascist Principles are very similar to those we have been evolving here in America.”
This similarity is easy to brush off if FDR is perceived as a leftists titan, because in the public eye progressives and fascists are diametrically opposed. It is harder to ignore when one accepts that FDR’s record on human rights was only a few degrees better than Mussolini’s.
December 6, 2016
Alex & Tyler’s Economist’s Christmas
Published on 5 Dec 2016
This week: Let’s get in the holiday spirit! What would an economist do about Christmas gifts?
What do you really want for the holidays? And how can you be sure you’re giving the perfect gift to someone else?
Of course, you want to get your loved ones something they will appreciate, but you face a knowledge problem: you don’t know everything about their wants and needs. You also have an incentive problem: oftentimes people aren’t quite as careful choosing a gift for others as they would be if buying something for themselves.
We’ve all received a present that we didn’t really want. When that happens, the value that we place on the gift can be less than its cost. According to research by economist Joel Waldfogel, gift givers spend an average of $50 on gifts that recipients only value at $40. Given that Americans spend around $100 billion on Christmas gifts, we’re wasting $18-20 billion every holiday season!
Is there a solution to this costly problem? Well, you can always give cold, hard cash! Many gift recipients would prefer it. But if you know the recipient’s tastes very well, you do have the opportunity to give them a non-cash present that they’ll love and that creates value by lowering their search costs.
There are, of course, occasions where the gift of money doesn’t make sense. Perhaps you want to signal that you care in a different way, or maybe there’s a custom you want to follow. You’ll just have to risk it in these situations.
Around the holidays, there’s also a spike in charitable giving. If you face knowledge and incentive problems in giving gifts to loved ones, you can imagine that these issues increase when you’re giving to someone you’ve never met. To combat this problem, some charities, such as GiveDirectly, give cash to people in need so that they spend charitable donations however meets their needs.
The efficiency of an economist’s Christmas may feel less warm and fuzzy, but the value creation is no less generous!
September 21, 2016
Pathological altruism
Amy Alkon on the mainspring of some (possibly many) altruistic actions:
I write about this sort of thing in Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck. It’s called “pathological altruism,” and describes deeds intended to help that actually hurt — sometimes both the helper and the person they’re trying to help:
[Dr. Barbara] Oakley notes that we are especially blind to the ill effects of over- giving when whatever we’re doing allows us to feel particularly good, virtuous, and benevolent. To keep from harming ourselves or others when we’re supposed to be helping, Oakley emphasizes the importance of checking our motives when we believe we’re doing good. “People don’t realize how narcissistic a lot of ‘helping’ can be,” she told me. “It’s all too easy for empathy and good deeds to really be about our self-image or making ourselves happy or comfortable.”
One example of this is The New York Times series on nail salons — intended to help the workers but actually keeping a number of them from being able to get work…work they were able to get before the crackdowns the NYT piece led to. From Reason‘s Jim Epstein:
Salon owners have also stopped hiring unlicensed workers, whether they’re undocumented or not. By law, every manicurist working in New York State must complete 250 hours of training at a beauty school, which costs about $1,000, and then obtain a government-issued license. This is a barrier to entry, and some aspiring manicurists can’t afford the time or tuition. There are some salon owners in the industry who, up until recently, were willing to hire them anyway because they were desperate for employees and the state rarely checked. Cuomo’s task force changed that.
Kim sponsored a state law, passed in July, that attempted to remedy the situation. The bill made it legal for nail salons to hire workers as apprentices receiving on-the-job training. After a year, they’re eligible for a state license without attending beauty school.
Few are utilizing the apprenticeship program. “It needs tweaking,” Kim admits. Despite assurances to the contrary from state officials, Kim says he’s hearing on the ground that when signing up for the program, applicants are being asked their citizenship status, which is scaring off many would-be apprentices.
Licensed workers legally working in the U.S. have also been hurt by the inspections. “Workers themselves prefer to be paid in cash, and it’s not just at nail salons,” says Kim. Salon owners have started recording every dollar that passes through their shops to avoid getting fined. The inspection task force has had “unintended consequences,” he says.
The biggest victims, however, are people like Jing Ren, the main character in the Times series. Ren, 20, is undocumented, penniless, and “recently arrived from China.” Instead of paying $1,000 for salon school, she signed on as a trainee at a shop in Long Island. By the end of the article, she’s making $65 per day in base wages.
When weaving its cartoonish tale of evil bosses and oppressed workers, the Times never considers what would happen if all of the nail salons willing to hire Jing Ren disappeared. Would future immigrants like her be better or worse off?
Oops.
