Quotulatiousness

August 12, 2024

“Premier Doug Ford’s plans for the demon liquor will lead us all to untold poverty and perdition”

In the National Post, Chris Selley points and laughs at the classist viewing-with-alarm and frenzied pearl-clutching over the impending rule change that will allow wine and beer to be sold (and even served) in convenience stores like the 7-Eleven chain:

The plight of poverty-stricken Ontarians, forced to get drunk at their local 7-Eleven dive bar.
Gin Lane, from Beer Street and Gin Lane via Wikimedia Commons.

Ontario politics in recent weeks has played out as something like a real-time satire of itself, with the Latent Methodist Brigade still insisting Premier Doug Ford’s plans for the demon liquor will lead us all to untold poverty and perdition. The news this week has only made them more upset: Japanese convenience store empire 7-Eleven will open licensed areas in 58 of its 59 stores in Ontario, in which you can enjoy an alcoholic drink with your hot dog, nachos or chicken nuggets. The company says it’ll add 60 jobs.

Fifty-eight is not a large number, you will agree, in a province with many thousands of licensed premises, any of which might get you drunk and send you back out to your car or boat (though of course they shouldn’t). Some of those thousands of licensed premises are even attached to gas stations, I can report. And many gas-station convenience stores in Ontario sell beer, wine and liquor as independently run “LCBO agency stores”.

For the record, 7-Eleven announced they were doing this way back in December 2022. Pro-forma neo-puritan controversy ensued, and quickly died down. Two 7-Elevens already operate as licensed restaurants in Ontario, apparently without incident, along with 19 in Alberta. (Unfortunately, bien-pensant Ontarians are trained from birth to believe Alberta’s liquor-retail reforms in the 1990s were a grotesque misadventure that everyone there regrets.)

Nevertheless, the same pro-forma neo-puritan freakout is playing out again.

“Let me get this straight. 7-Eleven locations where people fuel up their cars will now allow folks to drink on the premises? What could possibly go wrong?” sneered JP Hornick, president of the Ontario Public Service Employees’ Union (OPSEU), who was last seen dragging LCBO employees into a disastrous tantrum-cum-strike over expanding retail access.

“We need a government that will focus on real things including bringing down hospital wait times, fixing schools and tackling the housing crisis as their signature achievements, amongst many more,” Toronto Coun. Josh Matlow correctly averred on Twitter … and then, as is the fashion here, went full non-sequitur: “Doug Ford made sure we could drink coolers inside a 7-Eleven.” As if the government decided it could only pick one.

(And can I just say here, any Toronto city councillor complaining about another politician’s lack of “signature achievements” is on bloody thin ice.)

Every fully paid-up member of the Laurentian Elite [Spit!] believes with all their flinty hearts that Alberta is a barren wasteland of ruined lives thanks to the demon liquor being sold in corner stores. Initial issues from a generation ago are firmly ensconced as “the way it is” with liberalized booze access out there in the wild west.

June 24, 2024

Raise a glass of your favourite microbrew to … Jimmy Carter?

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

Glenn “The Instapundit” Reynolds visits a local brewing festival in Knoxville and remembers what it was like before — of all people — Jimmy Carter began the process of deregulating the beer industry by legalizing homebrewed beer in 1978:

The Instapundit models his Hamm’s Beer Hawaiian shirt at a recent Knoxville beer festival.

This weekend I want to the Knox Brewfest at the Knoxville World’s Fair Grounds. As the name suggests, it was a collection of most of the local micro-breweries, each with a booth offering samples. (There were also a few bigger operations, like Sierra Nevada, Abita, and Paulaner). I wore my Hamm’s Beer Hawaiian shirt, which was a surprisingly big hit.

And there were some lessons, about which more later.

Hamm’s doesn’t really exist anymore except as a sometimes-produced minor product of Coors, which bought the trademark after it passed through the hands of numerous other companies. But it’s not forgotten!

The beer was good and the crowd was cheerful.

Mostly me, and my friend Jim (who I’ve known since junior high) were reflecting on the vast improvement in the world of beer in America, and particularly in Knoxville. As late as, oh, 1990 or so, you could go into almost any bar in Knoxville and if you asked what kind of beer they had you’d get an answer like this: “We’ve got everything! Bud, Bud Light, Miller, Miller Light, Coors, Coors Light – anything you want!”

It’s easy to take the craft-brewing revolution for granted, but it brought about huge changes and for the better. Nowadays, the beer scene in America tends to be better than that in Europe. No, really. In fact, one of my former research assistants, who practices law in Belgium now, brought over a couple of Belgian friends who wanted to see Tennessee. I met them for lunch at Barley’s in the Old City, to hear a bluegrass show and eat pizza and drink beer. They were very impressed with the fifty or so taps that Barley’s offers.

Back home they said, the bars are usually owned by the breweries and only sell their own brews, so you might have only three or four varieties, all from the same label. Nothing like this.

[…]

This deregulatory story started (like airlines and trucking deregulation) with Jimmy Carter of all people. Despite his (often true) reputation as a bossy micro-manager, he was an engineer and a rationalist. That worked out poorly in foreign policy, but led him to undo a number of irrational regulatory structures, one of which was the limit on home beer production. Carter signed a bill legalizing homebrewing in 1978, and those homebrewers were the nucleus of the craft beer movement a decade or so later.

June 8, 2024

El Loco, Argentina’s “skunk at the garden party”

In The Free Press, Bari Weiss talks to Argentinian President Javier Milei (through a translator) about his first six months in office:

At the start of the twentieth century, Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries in the world. The capital, Buenos Aires, was known as “the Paris of South America”.

A lot can happen in a hundred years.

Argentina today is in grave crisis. It has defaulted on its sovereign debt three times since 2001, and a few months ago, it faced an annualized inflation rate of over 200 percent — one of the highest in the world.

Why? What happened?

Argentina’s new president says it’s simple: socialism.

When Javier Milei took office in December 2023, he became the world’s first libertarian head of state. During his campaign, he made his views clear: “Let it all blow up, let the economy blow up, and take this entire garbage political caste down with it”. In case the chainsaw he wielded on the campaign trail left any question about his intentions, during his victory speech last year, he reiterated his vision: “Argentina’s situation is critical. The changes our country needs are drastic. There is no room for gradualism, no room for lukewarm measures.”

There is nothing gradual about what Milei is now doing.

He’s eliminating government ministries and services, cutting regulations, privatizing state-run companies, and purposely creating a recession to curb the out-of-control inflation.

This is why people voted for him: change. They saw someone who could shake things up in a way that could turn out to be lifesaving for the country — even if it meant short-term economic pain.

But will it work? Not all Argentines think so. And not everyone is willing or able to wait for things to improve. In April, with food prices rising and poverty up 10 percent, tens of thousands of Argentines took to the streets to protest Milei’s aggressive austerity measures.

Milei is a strange and idiosyncratic creature. There are the obvious things: He says he doesn’t comb his hair (and he doesn’t appear to). He has four cloned mastiffs that he refers to as his “four-legged children“, and which he’s named for his favorite free-market economists. He was raised Catholic, but studies the Torah. (He even quoted a Midrash during our conversation.) He used to play in a Rolling Stones cover band. And he has been known since grade school in the ’80s as El Loco, on account of his animated outbursts, which would later bring him stardom as a TV, radio, and social media celebrity.

But that’s all the superficial stuff. What really makes Milei unusual is that he is the ultimate skunk at the garden party. In a world of liberals and conservatives, he doesn’t represent either side. He is ultra-liberal on economics, but right-wing and populist on rhetoric. He is anti-abortion, but favors the legalization of prostitution. He wants to deregulate the gun market and legalize the organ trade.

He calls himself an anarcho-capitalist, which basically means he believes the state, as he told me, is “a violent organization that lives from a coercive source which is taxes”. Essentially, he’s a head of state who really doesn’t believe in states. Or at least, not theoretically.

In January, Milei showed up at Davos, the Alpine mountain resort that hosts the annual World Economic Forum. This is traditionally a place where people who all think the same way go to drink champagne and tell each other how smart they are. Milei arrived, flying commercial, and blew up that comfortable consensus: “Today, I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger. And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have defended the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty.”

All of this is why I was eager to talk to Milei and put some of these questions to him: How long will it take for things to improve in Argentina? Why does he believe the Western world is in danger? What’s the difference between social justice and socialism? Can the free market really solve all of our civic problems? And how does he feel about being the skunk at the garden party? (Spoiler: He loves it.)

And despite having called journalists “extortionists”, “liars”, “imbeciles”, “freeloaders”, and “donkeys”, for some reason, he agreed to sit down with me.

June 5, 2024

“Stop viewing every inconvenience discovered in the economy as a market failure needing government intervention”

Filed under: Americas, Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Argentine President Javier Milei visited the Hoover Institution at Stanford and spoke about his approach to addressing Argentina’s many economic issues during his first six-months in office:

Milei recalled his years as an economist with HSBC Argentina and work advising a large pension fund. He explained how he had to remain adaptable to changing market conditions and new ideas and not make assumptions based on static economic models.

“Reality is complex, but when the model doesn’t match reality, you get rid of it,” he said. “You don’t get angry with reality.”

Milei argued that many twenty-first-century leaders see every failure of an economic model as proof of a market failure warranting government intervention.

He added that the state interventions are slowly strangling our ability to generate economic growth.

“Let us not allow the fatally conceited to destroy our lives with regulations.”

Throughout his speech of more than one hour, Milei brought up luminaries who’ve shaped his worldview, including Adam Smith, Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, Henry Hazlitt, and Murray N. Rothbard. He described how they influenced his view that everything should flow from the promotion of private enterprise and maximum possible growth, and that state intervention often only exacerbates the problem it was intended to solve.

Milei described himself as a libertarian and a minarchist who believes the role of the state is only to protect individuals and their property from aggression.

While talking about the challenges of governing and the Austrian school of economists who influenced his worldview, he suggested that it may have been his love of conflict that brought him away from work as an economist and television commentator and into the position he finds himself today.

“That’s probably why I got into politics. I love conflict.”

Milei said that his government is working to tame inflation and get public spending under control, and he applauded his economy minister, Luis Caputo, sitting in the audience.

“He’s in charge of the chainsaw operation,” Milei said, alluding to the chainsaw he brought with him to campaign rallies to symbolize his anti-spending agenda. “We are getting rid of a whole lot of things.”

“I am very happy when my economy minister gets applause. He’s making the greatest adjustment not only in the history of Argentina but in the whole history of humanity. We have already adjusted by 13 percent of GDP.”

He then turned to confront those he called “statists” and “regulators” who oppose his efforts in Argentina.

“They’re sitting in an office, and they create regulation just to justify their own existence,” he said. “This has a direct impact on innovation … They regulate just out of ignorance or just to justify the chair [they sit on], and they’re ruining our lives.”

He argued that most people in economics can’t even articulate where the state ends and the market begins.

“The market is ourselves,” he said. “When there’s talk of the market, we are the market.”

He described the market as a “social cooperation process” where “property rights are voluntarily exchanged”. He contrasted this with interaction with the state, where participants are compelled to act in a certain way.

“State intervention is always bad, because it’s based on coercion, on force, and nothing based on coercion can be good.”

May 29, 2024

Ontario’s long and winding (and subsidy-strewn) road to beer in convenience stores

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

Apparently I’ll have a little bit more to celebrate on my birthday this year as the Ontario government’s glacially slow-to-change alcohol sales rules are being liberalized as of September 5th to allow all the province’s convenience stores to begin selling beer and wine:

“The Beer Store” by Like_the_Grand_Canyon is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Premier Doug Ford promised Ontarians beer in corner stores, supermarkets and big-box stores, and by God he has delivered. As of Sept. 5, all Ontario convenience stores meeting eligibility criteria will be allowed to sell beer, wine, cider and pre-mixed drinks. As of Oct. 31, the privilege will be extended to all grocery and big-box stores. The province says it expects as many as 8,500 new booze-procurement sites to come online under the new regime. By Ontario standards, it’s absolutely revolutionary.

The new regime is also, of course, hilariously complicated. And absurdly, offensively expensive.

It is fair to describe the new regime as somewhat more competitive, and certainly more convenient. In addition to offering potentially thousands of new locations, supermarkets (including the roughly 450 already licensed) will be able to offer volume discounts on beer — i.e., a 24-pack will cost less per bottle than a six-pack. This was a privilege hitherto reserved for The Beer Store, the American-, Belgian- and Japanese-owned conglomerate that dominated beer sales in Ontario from the end of Prohibition until fairly recently.

Private retailers will even be able to set their own prices, which until now has been considered blasphemy.

It is not fair to describe the new regime, as the government does, as an “open” market.

Near as I can tell, Ontario will by 2026 have the following retail environments in place:

  • The Beer Store. Smelly, surly, and the best-available value. Only beer — no cider or mixed drinks. It’s in the name.
  • LCBO locations. Government-run liquor stores retain their near-absolute monopoly on hard liquor sales, in addition to selling beer (especially craft beer, in which The Beer Store’s owners aren’t so interested), wine and everything else.
  • LCBO- and/or The Beer Store-branded “agency stores” in rural areas, which sell everything the LCBO does, but operate inside of convenience stores, small supermarkets and other local businesses, and are staffed by non-government employees.
  • The existing supermarkets licensed to sell beer, cider and wine (and in rare cases all three!), plus scores of new outlets — the new 8,500 new locations.

The Beer Store maintains a monopoly (in urban areas) on wholesale for bars and restaurants and on refunding cans and bottles, although its new “master framework agreement” (MFA) doesn’t even oblige it to maintain its current number of locations — which in urban areas have been dwindling rapidly. I’m a 17-minute walk from my nearest Beer Store. The house I grew up in, in the heart of midtown Toronto, is a 45-minute walk. I’m not schlepping a leaky garbage bag full of empty cans either distance.

January 15, 2024

The radical anti-state agenda of Argentina’s Javier Milei

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Jon Miltimore compares the Venezuelan experience after electing Hugo Chavez in 2007 to Argentina’s radically opposed choice to elect Javier Milei as President late in 2023:

Javier Milei, 8 October 2022.
Photo attributed to Vox España via Wikimedia Commons.

In November, the country elected libertarian Javier Milei as its new president. And whereas Hugo Chavez said, “All that was privatized, let it be nationalized”, Milei is essentially saying the opposite: All that was nationalized, let it be privatized.

Milei started by cutting in half the number of federal ministries in Argentina, reducing them from 18 to nine. This was followed by a massive currency devaluation.

Milei did not stop there. In a recent televised announcement, he said he would “repeal rules that impede the privatization of state companies”.

Those words were backed up by a 300-measure order designed to deregulate internet services, eliminate various government price controls, repeal laws that discourage foreign capital investment, abolish the Economy Ministry’s price observatory, and “prepare all state-owned companies to be privatized”.

Milei capped it off on Wednesday with a 351-page omnibus bill that takes aim at Argentina’s regulatory state and would grant Milei emergency powers “until December 31, 2025”.

Giving any president emergency powers is no small thing, even during a genuine crisis. Though Milei’s bill is designed to curb state power, not to expand it — a notable contrast to the typical crisis response paradigm — history and recent events in El Salvador show how emergency powers can be abused and used to violate human rights and liberty.

Whether Milei can get his full agenda through is unclear, but there’s reason for optimism.

His stunning election is itself evidence that Argentines are hungry for change. He’s already shown an impressive pragmatism to wed to his undeniable political flair, surrounding himself with a slew of talented policy experts. This includes Federico Sturzenegger, a former chief economist of Argentina’s central bank who two decades ago managed to turn around the failing Bank of the City of Buenos Aires. Sturzenegger’s reforms were so effective they became a Harvard case study.

Success is by no means certain, of course.

Recovering from decades of Peronism — a blend of socialism, nationalism, and fascism, which dominated Argentina’s political system for years — will not happen overnight. And Argentina’s political class has spent the last few years making a bad situation worse.

Still, the great economist Adam Smith once observed that the key to economic prosperity is surprisingly simple.

“Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice,” the Wealth of Nations author said.

Milei knows this. He has not just read Smith (in addition to Austrian school economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises). In a 2017 profile, he dubbed himself “Adam Smith’s heir.”

A heavy dose of Adam Smith is precisely what Argentina needs, and Milei has correctly diagnosed the affliction of Argentina’s once-prosperous economy.

“The state doesn’t create wealth; it only destroys it,” Milei said in a widely viewed 2023 interview.

November 26, 2023

It’s apparently political earthquake season

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.

February 9, 2023

“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future” … but sometimes it’s almost prophetic

Filed under: Books, Business, Education, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Once again, Ted Gioia’s Honest Broker Substack has something interesting I’d like to share with you (I wouldn’t blame you at all for cutting out the middleman and just subscribing for yourself):

Today I want to focus on a single paragraph published in 1960.

You’re asking yourself: How much can a single paragraph matter — especially if it was written 63 years ago? But read it first and judge for yourself.

It’s a chilling paragraph.

[…]

By any measure, [Paul Goodman] was one of the most eccentric thinkers of the era. Yet he anticipated our current situation with more insight than any of his peers.

Let’s look at this one paragraph from the Preface to Growing Up Absurd. It’s a long paragraph — it takes up most of two pages. So we will break it down into pieces.

Goodman begins with a puzzle he needs to solve — society is stagnating everywhere, and we all can see it. But there’s no action plan to fix it. There’s a lot of huffing and puffing and finger-pointing everywhere, but nobody has even started on developing a practical agenda.

According to Goodman, this is because people “have ceased to be able to imagine alternatives”. Everybody accepts that the current system “is the only possibility of society, for nothing else is thinkable”.

Now comes his analysis, and — to my surprise — Goodman begins by talking about music. This was the last thing I expected in a social critique, but for Goodman the manufacturing of hit songs is a metaphor for everything else that’s wrong in a stagnant society.

He writes:

    Let me give a couple of examples of how this [inability to imagine healthy alternatives] works. Suppose (as is the case) that a group of radio and TV broadcasters, competing in the Pickwickian fashion of semi-monopolies, control all the stations and channels in an area, amassing the capital and variously bribing Communications Commissioners in order to get them; and the broadcasters tailor their programs to meet the requirements of their advertisers of the censorship, of their own slick and clique tastes, and of a broad common denominator of the audience, none of whom may be offended: they will then claim not only that the public wants the drivel that they give them, but indeed that nothing else is being created. Of course it is not! Not for these media; why should a serious artist bother?

When I first read this, I was dumbstruck. Goodman wrote this during the winter of 1959 and 1960, when radio stations were independent and freewheeling. Back in my teen years, a single business was only allowed to control one AM station and one FM station. In 1985 this was increased to 12 stations on each band. And in 1994 this was raised again, this time to 20 AM stations and 20 FM stations.

But then all hell broke lose when the Telecommunications Act of 1996 passed in the Senate by a 91 to 5 margin and was signed into law. Now the sky was the limit — and all the airwaves it contained.

Soon Clear Channel Communications owned more than 1,200 radio stations in some 300 cities. The company began the process of standardizing and homogenizing our musical culture. We still suffer from that today.

Even after radio started losing influence in the Internet Age, huge streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) ensured that access to the ears of America would be controlled by a tiny number of huge corporations. A musical culture that was once local, indie, and flexible has become centralized, corporatized, and stagnant.

How could Paul Goodman even dream of such a scenario back in 1960? That future was decades away at the time.

But we are only at the start of this visionary paragraph. Goodman now explains that the same thing will happen in universities.

Colleges and schools were small and non-bureaucratic back in 1960. Yet Goodman sees a crisis looming. On the next page Goodman warns against “the topsy-turvy situation that a teacher must devote himself to satisfying the administrator and financier rather than to doing his job, and a universally admired teacher is fired for disobeying an administrative order that would hinder teaching”.

Administration at US colleges has grown exponentially in the last two decades and has turned almost every academic institution into a plodding bureaucracy — but how in the world did Goodman anticipate this in 1960?

Now let’s return to our chilling paragraph. Immediately after discussing radio stations, Goodman adds a gargantuan sentence. It jumps all over the place but hits the target at every twist and turn:

    Or suppose again (as is not quite the case) that in a group of universities only faculties are chosen that are “safe” to the businessmen trustees or the politically appointed regents, and these faculties give out all the degrees and licenses and union cards to the new generation of students, and only such universities can get Foundation or government money for research, and research is incestuously staffed by the same sponsors and according to the same policy, and they allow no one but those they choose, to have access to either the classroom or expensive apparatus: it will then be claimed that there is no other learning or professional competence; that an inspired teacher is not “solid”; that the official projects are the direction of science; that progressive education is a failure; and finally, indeed — as in Dr. James Conant’s report on the high schools — that only 15 per cent of the youth are “academically talented” enough to be taught hard subjects.

Here in a nutshell is the credentialing crisis of our times. Learning is replaced by exclusionary certification programs that limit career opportunities — unless you take out loans and “purchase” the necessary credential from these academic gatekeepers.

This has become so destructive in our own time that many are crushed by student loans, and others seek ingenious ways of bypassing college entirely. There’s no way that Goodman could have grasped this in 1960 — when only 7.7 percent of Americans had college degrees.

Nor could he have known about the replicability crisis in science or the destructive games now played in awarding of scientific grants. Those are the problems of our times — not his.

But somehow Paul Goodman saw it coming.

December 23, 2022

Remember when ending “Net Neutrality” was going to be the death of the internet?

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Peter Jacobsen answers a reader question about the now almost forgotten doomsday scenario for the internet that was the ending of “Net Neutrality” in 2017:

To answer this question, we have to wind back the clock to 2017. Then-chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Ajit Pai successfully led an effort to repeal a set of 2015 regulations on Internet Service Provider (ISP) companies originally put into place by the Obama Administration.

The simplest summary of net neutrality regulations is that they required ISPs to enable access to content on the internet at equal speeds and for equal costs. For example, your ISP charging you to get faster speeds on YouTube or blocking High Definition access on Netflix would be examples of violations of net neutrality.

The idea of paying your ISP extra to have access to certain websites is a scary one, but it appears the worst fears associated with the end of net neutrality were overstated. To some extent proponents of net neutrality are the victim of their own apocalyptic marketing.

The Rumors of the Internet’s Death Were Greatly Exaggerated

If you spent any time on the internet during the death of net neutrality, it was hard to miss it. On July 12, 2017 websites across the internet coordinated their messages for the “battle for the net.”

Websites including Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, and Reddit called their users to fight for “a free and open internet”.

On Twitter, #SaveTheInternet thrived, seemingly implying the internet itself was facing an existential threat.

    The repeal of #NetNeutrality officially goes into effect today, but the fight is far from over.

    The people saying we can’t pass the resolution to #SaveTheInternet in the House are the same people who were saying we couldn’t do it in the Senate.

    Ignore them. Just keep fighting.

    — Ed Markey (@SenMarkey) June 11, 2018

After the decision by the FCC, CNN briefly declared it was “the end of the internet as we know it”.

Unfortunately for all kinds of doomsday prophets, extreme rhetoric always looks silly in hindsight when it fails to pan out.

Obviously we aren’t seeing ISPs charge users different amounts to use different websites in any systematic way. There’s no “pay your ISP to access Hulu” package yet. So already it’s clear some of the doom and gloom was over-hyped.

Fears of ISPs offering “fast lanes” to make users pay more for better service don’t seem to have materialized either. The only example of this sort of thing I could find was a Cox Communications trial of an “Elite Gamer” service. But this service was unlike the “fast lanes” hyped up by net neutrality proponents in that it never offered a less throttled experience and would have been permissible under the old net neutrality rules.

One of the biggest concerns about the repeal of these regulations was that it would lead ISPs to favor their own services. For example, AT&T owns Time Warner and HBO Max. In theory, AT&T could silently throttle speed to competing streaming platforms like YouTube and Netflix, thereby destroying competition.

March 14, 2022

“Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover Warren Harding again …”

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

Kind words for the oft-maligned 29th president of the United States? Daniel J. Mitchell is all over it:

Warren G. Harding, 14 June 1920.
Library of Congress control number 2016828156

Today, we’re going to celebrate the fiscal achievements of Warren Harding.

Most notably, as illustrated by this chart based on OMB data, he presided over a period of remarkable spending discipline.

Harding also launched very big — and very effective — reductions in tax rates.

And his agenda of less government and lower tax rates helped bring about a quick end to a massive economic downturn (unlike the big-government policies of Hoover and Roosevelt, which deepened and lengthened the Great Depression).

In an article for National Review last year, Kyle Smith praised President Harding’s economic stewardship.

    In a moment of national crisis, Warren G. Harding restored the economic health of the United States … America in 1921 was in a state of crisis, reeling from the worst recession in half a century, the most severe deflationary spiral on record … Unemployment, it is now estimated, stood somewhere between 8.7 and 11.7 percent as returning soldiers inflated the size of the working-age population.

    Between 1919 and August of 1921 the Dow Jones average plummeted 47 percent. Harding’s response to this emergency was largely to let the cycle play out … The recession ended in mid-year, and boom times followed. Harding and Congress cut federal spending nearly in half, from 6.5 percent of GDP to 3.5 percent. The top tax rate came down from 73 percent to 25, and the tax base broadened. Unemployment came down to an estimated 2 to 4 percent … Harding was a smashing success in a historically important role as the anti-Wilson: He restored a classically liberal, rights-focused, limited government, and deserves immense credit for the economic boom that kicked off in his first year and continued throughout the rest of the 1920s.

Smith’s article also praises Harding for reversing some of Woodrow Wilson’s most odious policies, such as racial discrimination and imprisoning political opponents (Wilson also had a terrible record on economic issues).

Of course, Harding’s term is much more often remembered for the scandals, and as most modern historians are far more interested in Woodrow Wilson’s bold progressivism they almost always decry Harding and then Coolidge for dismantling a lot of Wilson’s more enthusiastic progressive projects. Even H.L. Mencken — very much not a Wilson fan — found Harding to be not to his taste in turn:

On the question of the logical content of Dr. Harding’s harangue of last Friday, I do not presume to have views … But when it comes to the style of the great man’s discourse, I can speak with … somewhat more competence, for I have earned most of my livelihood for twenty years past by translating the bad English of a multitude of authors into measurably better English. Thus qualified professionally, I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and half a dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm … of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.

April 21, 2020

One of the few good things happening during the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic – deregulation

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

Patrick McLaughlin, Matthew D. Mitchell, and Adam Thierer on the benefits of suspending many existing regulations during the ongoing epidemic:

As the COVID-19 crisis intensified, policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels started suspending or rescinding laws and regulations that hindered sensible, speedy responses to the pandemic. These “rule departures” raised many questions. Were the paused rules undermining public health and welfare even before the crisis? Even if the rules were well intentioned or once possibly served a compelling interest, had they grown unnecessary or counterproductive? If so, why did they persist? How will the suspended rules be dealt with after the crisis? Are there other rules on the books that might transform from merely unnecessary to actively harmful in future crises?

In many cases, rule departures or partial deregulations undertaken during the crisis are tantamount to an admission by policymakers that some policies that were intended to serve the public interest fail to do so. “The explanation for many of these problems is that outdated 20th-century rules stymie 21st-century innovation,” noted former Florida Governor Jeb Bush in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial. “In an emergency, many of those rules can be waived by executive order. After the crisis, there will be momentum to challenge the stale rules that hindered our response. This is likely to go well beyond dealing with pandemics,” he argued. Similarly, lawyer and commentator Philip K. Howard has asserted that “the same kind of energy and resourcefulness will be needed to get America’s schools, businesses, government agencies and nonprofits up and running again” and has suggested the need for a “temporary Recovery Authority with a broad mandate to identify and waive unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles to recovery.” In addition, Wall Street Journal columnist and Brookings Institution Senior Fellow William A. Galston has called for a “Coronavirus 9/11 Commission” to study the governance failures witnessed during the crisis, arguing that “the immediate effects of Covid-19 are bad enough. Failing to learn from it would be criminal negligence for which future generations won’t forgive us.”

The crisis has been a stress test for American institutions. It has laid bare the outdated, overlapping, and often contradictory morass of rules that make it difficult for public and private organizations to respond to changing circumstances. In many cases, these rules persist not because they protect the public from danger but because they protect organized interest groups from new competition. Rules also persist because agencies rarely prioritize retrospective reviews aimed at eliminating unnecessary or potentially harmful rules. On the contrary, agencies typically have a vested interest in maintaining regulations that often took years to generate. Agency employees who have developed expertise in those rules, just like their counterparts in the private sector, have a financial interest in preserving these rules. In this way, “Agencies are stakeholders with respect to their own regulations.”

Once the COVID-19 crisis subsides, there is likely to be considerable momentum to review the rules that have slowed down the response. Some of those rules should probably be permanently repealed and others amended to allow for more flexible responses in the future.

April 1, 2020

Getting the federal government out of the media business

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

Far from subsidizing the faltering mainstream media, the Canadian government should follow Ted Campbell’s advice here:

Direct subsidies will make many Canadians suspicious that the media has been bought and paid for and is little better than a government PR agency. Government advertising will bring charges of taxpayers’ money being used to publish propaganda. I wonder if tax breaks might help … maybe, as long as they are available, equally, to The Star and Rebel Media, and the North Renfrew Times, too I suppose. But where does it stop? Is my blog a news source? No, quite clearly not, it is almost 100% opinion, but what about blogs like Vivian Krause’s Fair Questions? It looks a lot more like reporting than what I do. In fact, some of her reporting looks a lot better than what the CBC does, doesn’t it? So where would the bureaucrats who draft the laws and regulations and then implement them draw the lines? Let’s assume that the traditional, mainstream media ~ the Globe and Mail and Global TV and so on ~ get tax breaks, and let’s assume that I don’t qualify. Who else does? Who makes that decision? Is it a politician, someone like the current Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault? Is it another the so-called “arm’s-length” boards that act as surrogates for the ministers? Or is it a team of bureaucrats? Who do we trust? None of the above?

The better answer, it seems to me, is to do pretty much exactly the opposite of what Daniel Bernhard recommends:

  • First: defund most of the CBC. Make it a national (and international) radio network (actually, two networks: one English and one French). Sell off ALL of the CBC’s TV broadcast licences and ALL of its TV production facilities and many of its major radio production facilities, too. Keep a fair number of local studios, especially in rural and remote regions, and a handful (five or six?) larger regional news centres and two (one English, one French) national and international newsrooms that will provide both voice and text reports ~ over the air and on the internet, free for all Canadians and totally free of copyright so that any news agency can use them;
  • Second, provide no, zero, nada, zilch funding to any news organization. Watch and see how they shake out in this rapidly changing environment. Remove or reduce most foreign ownership restrictions. Encourage “bundling” ~ allow e.g. telecom companies like Bell and Rogers to own and to integrate newspapers and TV stations and radio stations and internet platforms and entertainment sources, too; and
  • Third, get the CRTC out of the business of the internet and cable. There is a legitimate role for an independent regulator to manage scarcity. Over-the-air radio and TV channels are always in limited (and often in short) supply and they need to be allocated (licensed) to individual broadcasters; that’s a useful job for the CRTC. There is no scarcity of capacity on the landlines, cables and even satellite links in Canada. The market does a first-rate job of regulating them; the CRTC does, at best, a third-rate job.

I am certain that there are useful, profitable business models for media out there. The fact that we don’t seem to have one in Canada is, in my opinion, because of the existence of the CBC, which distorts the market too much, and the constant efforts of governments (national, provincial and even local) to try to “support” commercial favourites. The right move is to stand back and remove the heavy hand of bureaucracy and let the media find its own, profitable business model. There is a very limited role for government but Canada does not need a Ministry of Truth.

March 29, 2020

Can we keep a few of these innovations after the Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak is over?

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Food, Government, Law, Wine — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley finds a few of the changes to business practice in Ontario to be definite improvements that we should retain once the panic subsides:

“The Beer Store” by Like_the_Grand_Canyon is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Prepping my urban coronavirus hermitage involved packing my freezer with comforting made-ahead delights: pulled pork, chili, various pasta sauces including a life-altering Bolognese ragout recipe from Marie in Quebec City, who runs foodnouveau.com. Mostly, however, I’ve found myself wanting to eat … a bit more downscale. Supplies of Pogos and Bagel Bites are shamefully depleted, well ahead of schedule. And I do love that chicken from Popeye’s.

My superb local fried chicken joint has come up with a very simple and reassuring way to fill walk-up orders. It’s explained on the locked door: You phone in your order from outside, then retreat eight feet; an employee comes to the door with the credit/debit machine, makes eye contact, demonstratively puts on a fresh pair of gloves, opens the door and places the machine on a stool outside, along with the box of gloves. The customer dons a pair of the gloves, completes the transaction, discards the gloves in the waste basket provided, and retreats eight feet again. The employee, wearing fresh gloves, returns with the order and places it, with a smile, on the stool.

This is neither particularly ingenious nor unique. The food-delivery industry has taken to calling it “contactless delivery,” which is an amusingly jargon-y term for “pay in advance and we’ll leave it wherever you tell us and run.” I found myself weirdly impressed, though. Popeye’s system might not scale to Ronald’s place across the street, and I’m certainly not questioning McDo’s decision to shut down everything in Canada except delivery and drive-through. But especially living in a city where most everyone seems to be treating COVID-19 with suitable respect, it’s nice to appreciate the ingenuity that will keep those of us lucky enough to be sentenced to house arrest as comfortable as possible.

And it has been striking to see governments getting out of the way. Ontario, where change is generally about as welcome as a dry cough and fever, is all of a sudden a jurisdiction where licensed foodservice establishments can sell alcoholic beverages with takeout or delivery meals. It’s a place where supermarkets licensed to sell booze can do so as of 7 a.m. British Columbia made the same call on booze delivery and takeout. Alberta has allowed restaurants to sell their booze, period.

It’s hard not to notice that these loosened restrictions come as government-run bottle shops in Ontario and Quebec shorten hours. In Ontario, the Beer Store, a foreign-owned quasi-monopoly, has reduced hours and refuses to refund empty bottles. (There is no other place to refund empty bottles in Ontario.) They say you find out in a crisis who your friends are.

blogTO shows how some Toronto restaurants are getting creative with wine and food delivery options.

December 26, 2019

“Make Gas Cans Great Again”

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

At Ace of Spades H.Q., Buck Throckmorton offers a simple, yet fiendishly clever policy for Donald Trump to secure millions of votes in the next election:

If Donald Trump wants to ensure he recaptures the 2020 electoral votes in the Great Lakes states he won in 2016 — and possibly add Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Maine — there is one simple thing he could do that would make him a hero to every snow-blowing American — issue an executive order to restore functioning gas cans.

To be clear, this would also make him a hero to tens of millions of other Americans throughout the country who use lawn mowers, power tools, etc around their homes or in their jobs. In 2009 the EPA banned the sale of gas cans that functionally pour gas. To be specific, the scientifically illiterate bureaucrats at the EPA outlawed gas cans with vents, mandating that all new gas cans must have crazy contraptions that require three hands to operate. Unlike the old gas cans, the new ones spill gas all over the user and onto the ground. The result of the EPA’s incompetence is a new gas can that is much worse for the environment than the one it replaced. The incompetent regulators at the EPA are so scientifically illiterate that they honestly believed that the vents on gas cans were there to allow gas fumes to escape, rather than the actual purpose of allowing air to flow in to the can so that gas can be poured out. Having received their “science” education in Oppression Studies classes at Grievance State University, these morons making rules for how we gas up our power tools have likely never handled a tool more powerful than their own personal groomers.

The government-mandated non-functioning gas can may be the most unpopular government-imposed regulatory rule since the 55 mile per hour speed limit. If you don’t know someone who mocks and despises these stupid red canisters, then you are living a very sheltered urban or upscale lifestyle. Most all working-class and middle-class Americans deal with these awful containers, and they mock the government for imposing them on us.

October 18, 2019

Hong Kong

Filed under: Britain, China, Government, History, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

David Warren on how Hong Kong got to be Hong Kong:

The motto of the resistance in Hong Kong is on my lips much lately, though often I am not applying it to Hong Kong. Nor am I not. I look at this “Oriental entrepôt” (as we used to say before political correctness), where once I lived for a couple of months, from a great and widening distance. The people there are quite another generation from that which I remember; of course they seem much younger. The idea of the inhabitants of Hong Kong nearly closing the city with demonstrations, week after week, was not formerly possible to imagine. But their enthusiasm for the personal freedom they once enjoyed (under the aegis of British imperialism and colonialism, descending from opium wars), hardly surprises me.

The British approach was finally, live and let live; but it had an administrative basis. From the 1950s, Hong Kong was an experiment. What would happen if they deregulated almost everything, and cut taxes to match? If they consciously de-politicized the colonial administration? If they shrank police functions to what was needed only to direct traffic, and defeat crime? The result was, as ever, unprecedented prosperity, but more: a people who forgot the habit even of kow-towing to men “dress’d in a little brief authority.”

People were transformed, from indifferent parts in a rusting machine, to free agents. (Unfortunately, in a broader view, prosperity also kills, as people use their freedom only for material gain, and a new jackboot state grows around the need to protect against the consequences.)

Hong Kong is a city now of seven million souls. It has, as it had, economic and social classes — plenty of them — yet the present “troubles” have nought to do with class. Opposition to the Communist government is as broad as it was in all ex-Soviet states, as we discovered when the Berlin Wall fell, and nearly discovered across China in the moment of Tiananmen. Rebellion, to start, is an urban phenomenon; it begins with a sudden collective sense that “we have the numbers.” The fear, upon which all tyrannical regimes depend, evaporates. What happens next is anyone’s guess, except, we can know the regime is doomed.

2019 Hong Kong anti-extradition law protest on 16 June, captured by Studio Incendo from Flickr.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons

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