Quotulatiousness

August 7, 2025

“The Beer Store seems to be going down faster than, well, a nice, cold beer”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Line Scott Stinson discusses the precipitous fall in the fortunes of Ontario’s former beer retail behemoth now that beer is available in — shock! horror! — grocery stores and even (gasp!) convenience stores:

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

A major Ontario retailer announced last month that it would permanently close 20 locations in August. This follows the closure of 10 of its stores just over a week before that, and precedes the planned shuttering of 10 more locations in September.

What business could possibly be swooning this much? A general retailer pummelled by Amazon? An exporter battered by Trump’s tariffs?

Nope: Beer. Seriously. The Beer Store seems to be going down faster than, well, a nice, cold beer.

Welcome to the uniquely weird world of alcohol sales in the province of Ontario, where somehow selling beer has become a struggling business.

Some background is probably required, for those who, understandably, must think by this point that I am full of shit.

For ages the vast majority of Ontario’s beer sales ran through The Beer Store, a chain of 450-ish outlets that was co-owned by Canada’s largest brewers. You could also get beer at the provincially owned LCBO, but the largest size available there was a six-pack. That was it. This system was exceedingly unfriendly to consumers, but owing to our puritan roots and the fact that the brewers had excellent lobbyists at Queen’s Park, it remained that way through decades — and governments of all three major parties.

About a decade ago, the Toronto Star got its hands on one of the agreements between The Beer Store and the province, which revealed what a sweetheart deal it was getting. Among other things, the deal greatly restricted the degree to which the LCBO could compete in beer retail, which caused much frothing over the fact that The Beer Store, long since owned by multinational conglomerates, was getting preferential treatment over the province’s own booze outlet.

The Liberal government of the day responded by loosening The Beer Store’s stranglehold on beer retail, but just a little: allowing it to be sold at a limited number of grocery stores, a hilariously small step but one that in Ontario was nevertheless a great leap forward.

Doug Ford’s Conservative government had long wanted to expand alcohol sales much further, but always stumbled over the fact that The Beer Store had a deal that prohibited such expansion until 2026. But then Ford wanted to hold an election last spring and he convinced The Beer Store to let him break that deal a year early for $225 million, which always seemed like an awfully steep price to move up that expansion by what amounted to a number of months.

It’s only in recently, though, that it has become clear how spectacularly dumb that giant payment was in the first place.

July 23, 2025

Javier Milei is delivering “a man-made miracle” for Argentina

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

Niall Ferguson‘s thread on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, thanks to the Thread Reader App:

While the world fixates on Donald Trump’s populist cocktail of reciprocal tariffs and big, beautiful deficits, @JMilei is delivering a man-made miracle that should gladden the heart of every classical economist and quicken the pulse of all political libertarians.

@JMilei has brought monthly inflation down from 13% to 2%. The economy is now growing at an annual rate of 7%. Investors no longer shun Argentine bonds and stocks — indeed, they were among the best investments you could have made over the past two years. After a brief upward jump, the poverty rate has fallen from 42%, when Milei was elected, to 31%

These are astonishing feats. And they have ramifications that go far beyond South America. Free-market economics and political libertarianism are sometimes dismissed as a fad of the “neoliberal” 1980s, long ago superseded by the new populisms of the left and the right. Not so. The world has never seen a government more radically libertarian than @JMilei. But the amazing thing is not that it is working economically. The true miracle is that Milei’s shock therapy is working politically.

With his leather jacket and late ’60s mop top, @JMilei is part–rock star, part–mad professor, dancing, singing, and screaming his catch phrase: ¡Viva la libertad, carajo! — “Long live liberty, damn it!” It’s as if Joe Cocker had gone onstage at Woodstock and sung “I’ll Get By with a Little Help from My Friedman”. Never in the history of democracy has a tribune of the people won power this way.

July 18, 2025

Argentina’s self-described anarcho-capitalist president

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

J.D. Tuccille says that Argentinian President Javier Milei may be the politician who has most successfully “defied the expectations of the chattering class” by not only winning the presidency but also by the completely unexpected turnaround of the national economy:

Drawing on official data, Reuters reports that Argentina’s “economic activity rose 7.7 per cent in April compared with the same month last year”. That was higher than expected and a welcome addition to news that the economy had grown by 5.8 per cent during the full first quarter relative to the same quarter the previous year. Early numbers put Argentina’s second-quarter growth at 7.6 per cent. By contrast, Canada’s economy grew at an annual 2.2 percent in the first quarter and the U.S. economy shrank a bit.

In equally encouraging news, Argentina’s “monthly inflation rate has fallen below two per cent for the first time in five years,” according to the Financial Times. That’s still high in North American terms, but Argentina’s governments have a history of wildly expanding the money supply to pay off debt and finance expenditures, resulting in inflation rates in the hundreds and even thousands per cent per year. Inflation slowed somewhat in recent years, but it was over 200 per cent in 2023 and Milei was elected on a promise to stabilize prices — even if it meant adopting the U.S. dollar as the country’s official currency.

Importantly, the poverty rate in Argentina has also fallen to 38.1 per cent of the population at the end of 2024 from 41.7 per cent when Milei took office. Again, that remains very high, but it’s an improvement in a country where politicians have long seemed committed to keeping people poor and dependent on the state.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. In a November 2023 open letter, over 100 economists warned that Milei’s economic “proposals, rooted in the economy of laissez-faire and which include controversial ideas such as dollarization and significant reductions in public spending, are fraught with risks that make them potentially very harmful to the Argentine economy and people”.

The economists — including such academic luminaries as Thomas Piketty and Jayati Ghosh — warned of havoc if Milei implemented his free-market plans. Voters weren’t impressed by the forecast of doom; they chose the self-described “anarcho-capitalist” economist and his upstart political coalition over the standard-bearer of the dominant Justicialist Party.

The Justicialists have been the strongest force in Argentine politics since their launch in the 1940s by Juan Peron. Peron served as a military observer in Europe and apparently combined the worst ideas he encountered into a peculiarly Argentine ideology he called “justicialism”, better known as Peronism. At its heart, the ideology drops the pretense of any practical difference between socialism and fascism and promotes a brutal mélange of statist economic schemes. This means that, while most property and business activity is in private hands, it’s subject to government dictates, distortions, and control.

July 12, 2025

Noah Smith on how surprisingly well free market policies are working in Argentina

Filed under: Americas, Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the headline, you should read the unstated “surprising to far too many mainstream economists and political commentators”, but full credit to Noah Smith for admitting that Milei’s radical agenda has started to make life much better for ordinary Argentinians:

Javier Milei at CPAC in National Harbor, Maryland 20 February, 2025.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

So to be clear, when I say that criticism of free markets has been overdone, I’m partly talking to myself. A couple of months ago, horrified by Trump’s tariff policies, I wrote an apology to libertarians, admitting that I had failed to see the political usefulness of their project in terms of maintaining economic sanity on the Right.

But it’s not just the political benefits of free markets that have been undersold; I think the purely economic advantages are also too often ignored.

Exhibit A is Javier Milei’s track record in Argentina. A year and a half ago, when Milei was elected President of Argentina, a bunch of left-wing economists warned darkly that his radical free-market program would lead to economic devastation:

    The election of the radical rightwing economist Javier Milei as president of Argentina would probably inflict further economic “devastation” and social chaos on the South American country, a group of more than 100 leading economists has warned … [S]ignatories include influential economists such as France’s Thomas Piketty, India’s Jayati Ghosh, the Serbian-American Branko Milanović and Colombia’s former finance minister José Antonio Ocampo …

    The letter said Milei’s proposals – while presented as “a radical departure from traditional economic thinking” – were actually “rooted in laissez-faire economics” and “fraught with risks that make them potentially very harmful for the Argentine economy and the Argentine people” … [T]he economists warned that “a major reduction in government spending would increase already high levels of poverty and inequality, and could result in significantly increased social tensions and conflict.”

    “Javier Milei’s dollarization and fiscal austerity proposals overlook the complexities of modern economies, ignore lessons from historical crises, and open the door for accentuating already severe inequalities,” they wrote.

Milei won anyway. His first big policy, and the one the lefty economists fretted about the most, was deep fiscal austerity. Argentina’s long-standing economic model, created by dictator Juan Peron in the 1950s, involved a large and complex array of public works projects and subsidies for various consumer goods like energy and transportation. Milei slashed many of these, as well as cutting pensions, civil service employment, and transfers to provinces. Overall, he cut public spending by about 31%, resulting in a near-total elimination of Argentina’s chronic budget deficit:

The point of all this cutting wasn’t just to remove state intervention in the economy — it was to stop inflation. Basically, macroeconomic theory says that if deficits are high and persistent enough, then they convince everyone that the government will eventually inflate its debt away by printing money (which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy). And most or all countries that experience hyperinflation end up escaping it only when they get their fiscal house in order. Perpetual deficits were part of Argentina’s “Peronist” system, and it’s probably a good bet that this has been responsible for the periodic bouts of hyperinflation that it experiences.

[…]

But still, Milei’s success so far should make us somewhat more confident about free-market policies — especially when we evaluate them against the new socialist ideas that have been gaining currency in the U.S. In the past, socialists and other left-leaning economic thinkers advocated central planning and nationalization of industry; in recent years, they have taken to calling for expansion of the state through fiscal policy, mixing macroeconomic justifications with micro. At all times, they call for deficit-financed expansion of social programs; when fiscal hawks want to tame the deficits, the lefties warn of the short-term macroeconomic harms of austerity.

If you’re always more terrified of austerity than you are of deficits, expansion of the state — and of the deficit — becomes a one-way ratchet. This approach is very different than Keynesianism, which advocates stimulus to overcome recessions, followed by austerity during boom times. You’ll recognize it as bearing a distinct similarity to MMT; that pseudo-theory has largely fallen out of favor, but there are plenty of more respectable progressive types whose ideas nonetheless have a lot of this “macroleftist” flavor.

February 1, 2025

DOGE’s first week

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

J.D. Tuccille on the odd position DOGE finds itself in, as many Americans seem conflicted about cutting back the federal government:

The new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is off to a quick start, if we consider the advisory board’s claimed savings in federal spending and the voluntary buyout of workers that could reduce the ranks of federal employees with a minimum of drama. But while the public agrees that corruption, inefficiency, and red tape are serious problems for the government, DOGE itself enjoys mixed popularity and majorities believe the government spends too little on big-ticket items, leaving little room for savings. The American people themselves are a big obstacle to paring the federal government to size.

DOGE Off to a Good Start

“DOGE is saving the Federal Government approx. $1 billion/day, mostly from stopping the hiring of people into unnecessary positions, deletion of DEI and stopping improper payments to foreign organizations, all consistent with the President’s Executive Orders,” the DOGE X feed boasted this week. “A good start, though this number needs to increase to > $3 billion/day.”

The Trump administration also sent a letter to the majority of the federal government’s roughly three million workers, offering a “deferred resignation” plan. Those who accept the deal could stop working for the government as of February 6 and still be paid through September of this year. The administration expects up to 10 percent of workers to take the offer. The voluntary nature of the plan blunts inevitable complaints from unions about “purging the federal government of dedicated career civil servants”.

We will have to see what the results will be in the coming months and years. But if that works out, it’s a pretty good launch for an administration and its advisory board that are less than two weeks old. Unfortunately, Americans aren’t sure where they stand on all this.

The Public Frets About Corruption, Inefficiency, and Red Tape …

According to AP-NORC polling, majorities believe that corruption (70 percent), inefficiency (65 percent), and red tape such as regulations and bureaucracy (59 percent) are “major problems within the federal government.” These findings square with the results of other surveys revealing that “nearly 2/3 of Americans fear that our government is run by corrupt officials” (Babbie Centre at Chapman University, Spring 2024), that 56 percent of Americans say government is “almost always wasteful and inefficient” (Pew Research, June 2024), and that “55% of Americans say the government is doing too much” (Gallup, November 2024). That’s exactly what the Trump administration created DOGE to combat, so it should be a good sign for the project.

But Americans are torn over DOGE. Asked by AP-NORC to share their opinions of “an advisory body on government efficiency led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy” (before Ramaswamy left to run for office), only 29 percent support the venture while 39 percent oppose it. That seems to reflect its leadership. Fifty-two percent of those polled have an unfavorable opinion of tech titan Musk, while 36 percent view him favorably.

Why the hate? Musk’s problem may be that he’s a high-profile rich guy with things to say at a time when that type of person isn’t especially popular. Sixty percent of respondents believe it would be a bad thing “if the president relies on billionaires for advice about government policy”. That disapproval crosses over into opinions about DOGE, even if people say they support its goals.

December 30, 2024

RIP Jimmy Carter, “The Great Deregulator”, 1924-2024

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Liberty, Politics, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published 29 Dec 2024

Nobel-Winning Economist Vernon Smith says the 39th president radically improved air travel, freight rail, and trucking in ways that still benefit us immensely.
______

Jimmy Carter was perhaps the most successful ex-president in American history, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his work promoting human rights and economic and social development.

But his single term as president (1977–1981) is largely remembered as a series of failures and missteps, sometimes literally. Gas lines, a record-high combination of unemployment and inflation on the “misery index”, and Americans being held hostage by Iranian revolutionaries for over a year all fueled the perception that Carter was a weak and ineffective leader. When he collapsed during a six-mile run, it personified for many the exhaustion of the country under his leadership.

But there was at least one way in which Carter excelled as president. He was, in the words of 2002 Nobel–winning economist Vernon Smith, the great deregulator. Carter forced the airline industry, along with interstate trucking and freight rail, to compete for business, with powerful and positive effects that continue to this day.

I talked to Smith about Carter, whom he met at a White House event for American Nobel Prize winners, and what it was like to fly in the days when the government controlled air travel.

November 30, 2024

The mission of DOGE

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

One of Donald Trump’s more interesting announcements shortly after winning the federal election early in November was that he was going to give Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy a formal position to do to the US government’s vast array of bureaucratic organizations what Javier Milei did to Argentina’s bloated national government. Here, scraped from the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, is Devon Eriksen‘s thoughts on how to go about pruning back the “fourth branch” of government:

Since the framers of the Constitution created a federal government with three branches, not four, there are no Constitutional checks on the emergent fourth branch.

Currently, the fourth branch is in many ways the most powerful, and certainly the most destructive, arm of the government.

– It has the privilege of targeting individual citizens on its own initiative, which is forbidden to the three other branches.

– It can interfere their lives in any way it wishes by making a “ruling”.

– The only recourse against a “ruling” is to take the bureaucracy in question to court.

– But the process is the punishment, because this takes months if not years and costs tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

– Until recently, courts have deferred to bureaucrats as a matter of legal precedent. Now they merely do so as a matter of practice.

– But should the bureaucracy lose anyway, the only punishment the court inflicts is that they are told they have to stop doing that specific thing.

– Any fines or legal costs imposed on them punish the taxpayer, not the agent or even the agency.

– And the next, closely related, thing the bureaucracy thinks of to do is once again fair game, until the courts are once again brought in, at further cost, to tell it to stop.

All of this creates a Red Queen Effect.

Citizens must establish their own organizations, and raise donations to engage in constant lawfare, just to retain the rights they haven’t lost yet. And they must win every time to maintain the status quo.

Bureaucrats, on the other hand, can fight endless legal battles using money taken from their victims by the IRS, at no cost to themselves. Any victory they claim, they may keep permanently, while any loss may be refought endlessly simply by a slight variance of the attack.

Obviously, if this system is not changed, all power will accrue to the bureaucracy over time. They will constitute a totalitarian authority over every aspect of the life of every citizen.

This is why the name “DOGE” (Department of Government Efficiency) is a serious mistake.

Look, Elon, I like a joke as much as the next guy, and I do think irreverence is a load-bearing component of checking the bureaucracy, because a false aura of gravitas is one of their defenses against public outrage.

But words mean things.

When you create a check on the bureaucracy and call it the department of government efficiency, you focus the attention, and the correction, on the fact that the bureaucracy is stomping on people’s lives and businesses inefficiently, not on the fact that they are doing so at all.

But the name isn’t my decision. The power of the vote isn’t that granular. I can only elect an administration, not protect it from tactical errors by weighing in on individual policy decisions.

Unless someone with direct power happens to read this.

So, regardless of the name, here’s how an organization might be set up to effectively check federal bureaucracies.

1. DOGE must be responsive, not merely proactive.

Being proactive sounds better in the abstract, but it is much easier for a federal agency to gin up some numbers to fight a periodic overall audit, than it is to fight an investigation of a specific case.

2. DOGE must have direct oversight.

If it must take agencies to court, it is merely a proxy for the citizens whose money is being wasted, and whose rights are being trampled.

Imagine the level of inefficiency, waste, and delay, if your process for addressing bureaucratic abuse simply results in one part of the federal government pursuing an expensive court case against another.

Instead, DOGE must have the power to simply make a ruling, via its own investigation hearing process, which is binding on federal agencies.

Any appeals to the court system must be allowed to trigger their own DOGE investigation (for wasting taxpayer fighting a ruling).

3. DOGE must have the power to punish the agent, not just the agency.

“You have to stop that now” is not a deterrent. Neither is fining the agency, because such fines are paid by the American taxpayer.

DOGE must follow Saul Alinsky’s 11th rule: target individuals, not institutions.

Why?

Because agencies are agencies. They consist of agents.

An agent is someone who acts on behalf of a principal — someone whose interests the agent is supposed to represent.

When the agent is incentivized so that his interests diverge from those of the principal, he will be increasingly likely to act in his own interest, not the principal’s.

This is the Principal-Agent Problem.

An agency is a construct, a theoretical entity. What Vonnegut would call a “granfalloon”.

Agencies do not act, they do not make decisions, they do not have incentives they respond to. Any appearance to the contrary is an emergent property created by the aggregate action of agents.

Every decision, whether we admit it or not, has a name attached to it, not a department. It is that person who responds to incentives.

Agents will favor their own incentives over those of their principal (the American people) unless a counter incentive is present for that specific person.

For this reason, DOGE should, must, have the power to discipline individual employees of the federal agencies it oversees.

This doesn’t just mean insignificant letters of reprimand in a file. It means fines against personal assets, firing, or even filing criminal charges. No qualified immunity.

Yes, you read that right. DOGE must be able to fire other agencies’ staff. I recommend that anyone fired by DOGE be permanently illegible for any federal government job, excluding only elected positions.

4. DOGE investigations must be triggerable by citizen complaints.

This is self-explanatory. It gives DOGE the practical capability to redress individual injustices, and it crowdsources your discovery problem.

Establish a hotline.

5. DOGE must have sufficient power to protect and reward whistleblowers, and punish those who retaliate against them.

6. Bureaucrats must be held responsible for outcomes, not just for following procedure.

Often, procedure is the problem. The precedent must be established, and clearly enforced, that because agents have agency, agents are responsible for using their discretion to ensure efficient, just, and sane outcomes, not just for doing whatever departmental policy allows.

7. DOGE must have an adversarial relationship with the bureaucracies is oversees.

This eliminates the phenomenon of “we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing”.

Following the previous recommendation is almost sure to make this happen.

The point is not for DOGE to address every instance of waste or wrongdoing, it is to make bureaucrats act responsibly because they fear an investigation.

In essence, I am imagining DOGE (or some superior name that better reflects the mission) as an entity with a license to treat bureaucrats the way bureaucrats currently treat citizens.

November 28, 2024

How is Argentina doing after a year under Javier Milei?

Filed under: Americas, Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I don’t normally follow South American news all that closely, as despite being in the same hemisphere, little that happens there has much importance to us here in Canada or the United States. The election of Argentinian President Javier Milei, however, has made Argentina a much more interesting place to watch as Milei valiantly attempts to turn the economy around from its near-century-long decline. Here, Dan Mitchell provides his assessment of Milei’s efforts so far:

… let’s focus today on Milei’s goal of maximizing economic liberty.

The bad news is that if he wants Argentina to become the new Hong Kong, Milei has a long journey. According to Economic Freedom of the World, Argentina ranked a lowly #159 out of 165 nations in 2022.

As you can see from the EFW rankings, Milei’s country gets especially bad scores for Sound Money, Trade and Regulation (dead last for Sound Money and in the bottom-10 percent of the world for the other two categories!).

The good news is that you don’t have to be libertarian Nirvana (or even Liberland) to make a big jump in the rankings.

You don’t even need to be Hong Kong (which used to be very good with scores above 9 but has now declined to 8.58 thanks to Beijing’s intervention).

Heck, almost every country in the western world has experienced a significant decline in economic liberty this century.

Milei actually could put Argentina in first place today merely by achieving the same level of economic liberty (8.67) that the United States had in 2004.

For what it’s worth, I think it would take several years of good reforms to climb that high.

That being said, dramatic improvements are nonetheless possible in a very short period. Here’s my back-of-the-envelope estimate of where Argentina could be by the end of next year.

August 12, 2024

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

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

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”

Filed under: Americas, Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bloomberg reports on Milei victory

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

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

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

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

Trump is a symptom, not a cause

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

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