Quotulatiousness

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

August 27, 2019

So much for nil nisi bonum

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

The old Latin phrase De mortuis nihil nisi bonum encourages us to only speak well of the dead. The recent death of libertarian billionaire David Koch has brought forth a torrent of vituperation from many people in media and politics, as James Piereson and Naomi Schafer Riley record:

David Koch speaking at the Defending the American Dream Summit in Columbus, Ohio, 21 August 2015.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

“Yesterday David Koch of the zillionaire Koch brothers died … of prostate cancer. I guess I’m going to have to reevaluate my low opinion of prostate cancer.” That was Bill Maher last Friday night, joking before his approving audience. Maher went on to say, “The Amazon is burning up. I’m glad he’s dead.” Maher is not known for his kindness toward those with whom he disagrees. In that sense, he reflects the thinking of a growing number of progressives and leftists who openly despise conservatives and libertarians. David Koch, along with his brother Charles, have for decades been targets of harsh rhetoric from the far Left.

What is it about David Koch that inspired such hatred? “We live in the world that he helped build, and it is on fire,” wrote Sarah Jones in New York, denouncing Koch’s “monstrous legacy.” In Esquire, Charles Pierce writes: “Except for his surviving brother, Charles, no man had a worse effect on American politics since the death of John C. Calhoun. Every malignancy currently afflicting us can be traced in one way or another into their wallets, and that’s not even to mention the lasting damage they’ve done to the planet as a whole.”

This is the kind of language that religious cults reserve for heretics and apostates — and in many ways, David and Charles Koch were blasphemers to the liberal orthodoxy. They believed in smaller government and thus criticized the welfare state, excessive taxation, and a great deal of government regulation. At the same time, they criticized America’s wars abroad, along with high levels of defense spending, and were sympathetic to the causes of gay rights and gay marriage. They were consistent in their views across a range of issues, antagonizing liberals but also vexing conservatives. The claim that David Koch was a reflexive right-winger is a caricature of his beliefs.

The Kochs believed in smaller government. Whether it was gay marriage or land wars in Asia, they consistently argued that less government intervention would produce freer and happier people. Their support for drug legalization and abortion rights irked plenty of conservatives, but it drove few over the edge as their support for lower taxes and greater school choice did for liberals. Perhaps nothing irked liberals more, though, than the Kochs’ fight for less environmental regulation. Blaming Charles and David Koch for singlehandedly destroying the rainforests or raising the temperature of the earth seems to be a common theme among critics — an attribution of immense power beyond the capacity of any man or family or company.

April 13, 2019

QotD: School vouchers

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

I am still a supporter of school vouchers. I don’t think they’ve lived up to the hopes that I (and a bunch of other folks) had for them. But that said, the best opponents can say is that they don’t do all that much better than the public schools on academic measures. Parents like them, kids like them, and they cost less. I just don’t see a good argument against them.

I think it’s telling that of the folks I know who oppose vouchers, not one of them has voluntarily kept their kids in a failing urban school. When they move, they choose a house in a good school district. I don’t see how you can morally do that and then tell some other, poorer parent that they need to lean into the strike zone and take one for the team.

That said, maybe there’s an argument for restricting them to kids in failing schools, or below a certain income. I don’t see any need for the government to subsidize Exeter. But for the kids who are trapped, I think they should get the same chance middle class kids do, even if it’s not the panacea we once hoped.

Megan McArdle, “Ask Me Anything”, Reddit, 2017-04-10.

December 13, 2018

When Democrats Loved Deregulation

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

ReasonTV
Published on 12 Dec 2018

Left-leaning politicians of the 1970s understood that red tape punishes consumers and protects big business. The leading deregulator of that era was none other than Jimmy Carter.

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When President Donald Trump bragged in his first State of the Union address about cutting red tape, the Democratic response was no surprise. “Deregulation,” warned Center for American Progress Senior Advisor Sam Berger in Fortune, “is simply a code word for letting big businesses cut corners at everyone else’s expense.”

But many leading Democrats had the opposite view in the 1970s. Then, at the dawn of the deregulation era, left-leaning politicians and economists understood that excessive government management of industry let the big-business incumbents get away with lousy performance at the expense of competitors, taxpayers, and consumers. The leading figure in that fight to cut red tape and shut down entire federal agencies was none other than Jimmy Carter.

It was Sen. Ted Kennedy who held extensive Senate hearings in the early ’70s, with testimony from the likes of Ralph Nader and liberal economist Alfred Kahn, about the benefits of lifting state controls on the airline industry. The resulting Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, signed by Carter, killed the Civil Aeronautics Board — a federal agency that decided which airlines could fly where, and even what they could charge. The new competition to the old airline cartel reduced fares, expanded destinations, increased safety, and made air travel an option for those of us who aren’t rich.

Carter also lifted stifling government oversight of the rail and trucking industries under a Democrat-controlled House and Senate. The result? Competition intensified, prices dropped, and consumers saved more money on everyday products.

In 1978, President Carter signed a bill that lifted Prohibition-era criminal restrictions on home brewing. The legalization of do-it-yourself beer production unleashed a boom of experimentation, paving the way for the craft beer revolution that is ongoing to this day. The year that Carter loosened the rules, the U.S. was home to a mere 50 breweries. Today there are well over 5,000. In two generations of beermaking, America went from global laughingstock to world leader.

The governor of California during Carter’s presidency was none other than Jerry Brown, then known as “Governor Moonbeam” for his far-out musings, glittery social life, and lefty politics. Yet Brown, too, could be a fiery skeptic of government. In his terrific second inaugural address in 1979, Brown stated that “many regulations primarily protect the past, prop up privilege or prevent sensible economic choices.”

But even while some sectors were unleashed four decades ago by far-seeing Democrats and Republicans alike, too many governments at the local, state, and federal levels have forgotten those lessons, and instead imposed entirely new categories of regulations. Occupational licensing, which applied to about one in 10 jobs 40 years ago, now impacts one in three.

So how did the party of Jimmy Carter and sideburns-era Jerry Brown become the ideological home of Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? One explanation may be that Democratic support for deregulation back then was born out of a sense of nearly hopeless desperation in the face of stagflation. Cutting red tape to foster dynamism was about the last move politicians had left.

Our long economic expansion and stock-market boom will soon come to an end, imposing limits on government precisely at the moment when it’s asked to do more. When that day of reckoning comes, the best questions for lawmakers of both parties to ask may just be: What would Jimmy Carter do?

Photo credits: Jimmy Carter Library, Arthur Grace/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Dennis Brack/Newscom, Everett Collection/Newscom, Ron Sachs/CNP/MEGA/Newscom, Brian F. Alpert/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Paul Harris/Pacific Coast Nes/Newscom, Bee Staff Photo/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Dennis Brack/bb51/Newscom, Jonathan Bachman/REUTERS/Newscom, Rick Friedman/Polaris/Newscom

April 22, 2018

How to begin solving the common problems of big cities

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

Vladimir “Zeev” Vinokurov is writing about Australian cities in particular, but the same general analysis applies to many Canadian, American, and British urban areas as well:

… our economy and population are growing, and the resulting congestion is costing us thousands of dollars per year individually, and billions to the economy. It isolates us from family, friends and work. But cities can still grow without getting us stuck in traffic, missing increasingly overcrowded and delayed trains, or left unable to afford property. All this is happening because workplaces are too far from residents living in the suburbs, which effectively funnels residents into the inner city for work. It must change.

First, we must unwind planning laws that prevent offices, homes and apartments from being constructed alongside each other and throughout the city. These laws also raise housing prices by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Second, instead of banning cars, charge commuters for using congested roads and trains. Third, stop supporting taxpayer funded ‘road to nowhere’ infrastructure projects. These reforms will cut congestion, grow the economy, cut living costs and reconnect us to family, friends and local communities.

Planning laws cause congestion and social isolation by preventing people from building apartments and commercial offices throughout our city. As a result, rents and property prices become dearer because not enough housing is built to accommodate demand from population growth. Indeed, Reserve Bank economists estimate that planning laws increase average property prices by hundreds of thousands of dollars. This drives residents into the outer suburbs to look for cheaper housing, even as they commute into the inner city for work. If more people lived close-by to their workplaces, commutes would be shorter.

We need multiple CBDs, not just one. Unwinding planning laws that prevent commercial growth outside the CBD will cut housing costs and rents, cut congestion and promote tightly knit, thriving urban communities.

Congestion also occurs because we pay for using roads and public transport with thousands of dollars of time every year, rather than money. Congested public roads or trains cost us no more money to use in peak times, and busier routes cost no more to use than empty ones. As a result, the Grattan Institute think tank estimates that the average Melbournian’s commute to the city is twice as long in peak time. By contrast, Sydney’s trains are less congested, but are used more widely compared to Melbourne’s because its tickets are dearer in rush hour. Congestion charges that reflect market demand for infrastructure will also encourage businesses to open in commercial districts outside the CBD. Reconnecting local commuters with local workplaces will save us time and money overall.

Congestion charges are also a fairer and cheaper way of funding infrastructure projects compared to taxes like fuel tax or stamp duty. Scrapping these two taxes could save property purchasers tens of thousands of dollars or more, and reduce petrol bills by at least a third. If we pay for congested roads and trains with money rather than time and taxes, we may end up paying less.

March 13, 2018

Trump Is ‘Destroying’ Regulations

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 06:00

ReasonTV
Published on 12 Mar 2018

The president’s first year of slowing down regulations shattered previous records. But will politics and legislative inaction stall things from here?
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With his tariffs on aluminum and steel, family-separating crackdowns on nonviolent illegal immigrants, and authoritarian musings about executing drug dealers, President Donald Trump can be a libertarian’s nightmare.

Except when it comes to regulatory reform.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a Washington, D.C.-based free market think tank that focuses on the administrative state, tallied up the number of regulations in Trump’s first year in office and found, “This is the lowest count since records began being kept in the mid-1970s.” CEI Vice President for Policy Clyde Wayne Crews told Reason that, “I haven’t seen personally anything like the regulatory reductions that have taken place.”

What’s producing these results? In part, the president’s early executive orders mandating that with every new regulation two old ones get killed, and that the net imposed regulatory cost of each agency and department be zero. Trump has also appointed some real reformers to change the way the executive branch does business: Scott Gottlieb at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Ajit Pai at the Federal Communications Commission, Betsy DeVos at the Department of Education, and Rick Perry at the Department of Energy.

Chief among the anti-bureaucratic bureaucrats is Neomi Rao, administrator of the obscure-sounding but important Office for Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which applies cost-benefit analyses to proposed regulation while making sure it still aligns with legislative intent. Rao, who came to the administration after founding the Center for the Study of the Administrative State at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, tells Reason that, “We have done more in our first year than any president since we’ve been keeping records, which is back to Reagan.”

President Trump appears genuinely enthusiastic about this push, talking up FDA reforms in both of his State of the Union addresses, and crowing at a December red-tape-cutting ceremony that, “The never-ending growth of red tape in America has come to a sudden screeching and beautiful halt.”

But Crews warns that a midterm will be much harder for Trump to navigate than the comparative honeymoon of 2017. “I think in 2018, he’s going to have a much tougher time meeting the goal,” Crews said. “When you’re acting alone as president and you can’t make law on your own, the barrier that you run into is you run out of low-hanging fruit.”

Produced by Matt Welch and Alexis Garcia. Camera by Todd Krainin, Ian Keyser, Mark McDaniel, and Jim Epstein.

December 29, 2017

2017 wasn’t all doom and gloom and Trump tweet wars

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

Veronique de Rugy manages to find three things that 2017 produced that somehow didn’t kill millions of Americans (so far, as far as we know):

First, President Donald Trump just signed a historic reduction in the corporate income tax rate, from 35 percent — the highest of all industrialized nations — to 21 percent. And except for a one-time repatriation tax, the U.S. will no longer tax most profits made by businesses overseas.

Both changes should boost economic growth and American workers’ wages. Moreover, the reform removes many of the distortions that discourage companies from investing foreign-earned income in the United States and prompt them to use tax avoidance techniques.

Second, this was a very good year for deregulation. Cutting taxes isn’t the only way to boost growth and raise wages; innovation may matter even more. Getting rid of duplicative and outdated regulatory hurdles to innovation promises to have a real impact on our lives. That’s what the Trump administration, with the help of Congress, seems committed to doing.

When the president first got to the White House, for example, he froze many not-yet-implemented Obama-era regulations. These include the punishing overtime pay regulation, which would have increased the cost of employing workers and ultimately reduced their base compensation to offset the increase in overtime pay.

[…]

Last but not least are the sustained efforts by Sens. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., and Richard Shelby, R-Ala., to slow down the process that would restore the Export-Import Bank, a bastion of cronyism, to its full and former glory.

Appointing enough board members to give Ex-Im a full quorum would instantly restore the agency’s ability to sign off on deals above $10 million for the benefit of a handful of very large foreign and domestic corporations. By resisting, the two senators are fighting a lonely fight on behalf of the unseen victims of corporate welfare.

December 14, 2017

Cognitive dissonance in action – Net Neutrality partisans want TRUMP to control the internet

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

Jon Gabriel on the weird position Net Neutrality fans find themselves in … demanding that Il Donalduce himself, the most hated politician in Liberal America since Richard Nixon be the one to dictate how the internet is run:

If President Trump is some kind of digital facist, he sure has a funny way of going about it.

His FCC chairman is trying to remove government from the Internet, returning it to those dark, authoritarian days of 30 months ago — you know, when pretty much every website, app and online service we use was created.

Bizarrely, these net neutrality alarmists are demanding that Trump maintain control of the Internet, planting his administration firmly between citizens and whatever content they want to view or create.

Even if Democrats were running the show in Washington, how could federal meddling improve the Internet? Do they want the Web run by the bureaucrats who spent $2 billion to build a health care website that didn’t work? Do they want our privacy assured by those behind the National Security Agency?

Nevertheless, progressives insist that Trump regulate the Internet in the name of free speech. Perhaps he can do this between his tweets bashing the press.

[…]

If the FCC approves this new proposal, the worst of federal meddling online will be retired. Instead, the commission will simply require Internet service providers to be transparent about their service offerings. That way, tech innovators will have the information they need and consumers will know which plan works best for them.

In other words, Web users and creators will be back in control of the Internet instead of lawyers and bureaucrats. Just as they were for all but the past couple of years.

To ensure transparency, Pai made all his proposals public before the FCC vote Thursday. A big departure from the Obama administration’s methods, which kept its net neutrality rules secret until after they were approved.

Before the FCC’s heavy-handed intervention, we saw the creation of Amazon, Google and Twitter. If Washington removes these unnecessary regulations as expected, we’ll see the Internet continue to blossom.

And my daughters will get to watch their favorite YouTube celebrities complain about net neutrality for years to come.

November 28, 2017

Evergreen headline – “FCC bureaucrats don’t know what they’re talking about”

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

Nick Gillespie on the heightening panic over the FCC’s reversal of the controversial Net Neutrality rules:

Current Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai memorably told Reason that “net neutrality” rules were “a solution that won’t work to a problem that doesn’t exist.”

Yet in 2015, despite a blessed lack of throttling of specific traffic streams, blocking of websites, and other feared behavior by internet service providers (ISPs) and mobile carriers, the FCC issued net neutrality rules that gave the federal government the right to punish business practices under Title II regulations designed for the old state-enabled Bell telephone monopoly.

Now that Pai, who became chairman earlier this year, has announced an FCC vote to repeal the Obama-era regulations, he is being pilloried by progressives, liberals, Democrats, and web giants ranging from Google to Netflix to Amazon to Facebook, often in the name of protecting an “open internet” that would let little companies and startups flourish like in the good old days before Google, Netflix, Amazon, and Facebook dominated everything. Even the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which back in 2009 called FCC attempts to claim jurisdiction over the internet a “Trojan Horse” for government control, is squarely against the repeal.

[…]

Yet the panic over the repeal of net neutrality is misguided for any number of reasons.

First and foremost, the repeal simply returns the internet back to pre-2015 rules where there were absolutely no systematic issues related to throttling and blocking of sites (and no, ISPs weren’t to blame for Netflix quality issues in 2013). As Pai stressed in an exclusive interview with Reason last week, one major impact of net neutrality regs was a historic decline in investment in internet infrastructure, which would ultimately make things worse for all users. Why bother building out more capacity if there’s a strong likelihood that the government will effectively nationalize your pipes? Despite fears, the fact is that in the run-up to government regulation, both the average speed and number of internet connections (especially mobile) continued to climb and the percentage of Americans without “advanced telecommunications capability” dropped from 20 percent to 10 percent between 2012 and 2014, according to the FCC (see table 7 in full report). Nobody likes paying for the internet or for cell service, but the fact is that services have been getting better and options have been growing for most people.

Second, as Reason contributor Thomas W. Hazlett, a former chief economist for the FCC, writes in The New York Daily News, even FCC bureaucrats don’t know what they’re talking about.

Hazlett notes that in a recent debate former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, who implemented the 2015 net neutrality rules after explicit lobbying by President Obama, said the rise of AOL to dominance during the late 1990s proved the need for the sort of government regulation he imposed. But “AOL’s foray only became possible when regulators in the 1980s peeled back ‘Title II’ mandates, the very regulations that Wheeler’s FCC imposed on broadband providers in 2015,” writes Hazlett. “AOL’s experiment started small and grew huge, discovering progressively better ways to serve consumers. Wheeler’s chosen example of innovation demonstrates how dangerous it is to impose one particular platform, freezing business models in place.”

September 24, 2017

Rolling back the regulation tide

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

Megan McArdle on the Trump administration’s attempt to rein-in the regulation machine of the US federal government and its many, many agencies:

One of the first things Trump did as president was to sign an executive order requiring that two regulations be rolled back for every new one that was promulgated. As a longtime advocate of rolling back regulatory complexity, I found a lot to like in this rule. Unless strenuous effort is made to regularly prune them back, regulations have a tendency to blindly grow until they have wrapped the economy so tight that nothing can breathe, much less thrive. Trump’s executive order forces us to do some very necessary maintenance.

Unfortunately, it’s a rather crude instrument for the job. It’s possible that nothing more nuanced would actually work; nuance and flexibility, alas, give regulators quite a bit of discretion to put off an annoying chore. Just the same, we should recognize the dangers of cutting with such a dull knife.

In agencies that are dealing with a genuinely new and disruptive force — one for which innovators need regulatory clarity before they can bring a product to market — such a strict regulatory requirement faces them with an unpalatable dilemma. Every new regulation that is vitally necessary means finding two regulations that aren’t. But each of those dusty old rules was created for a reason. Some of those reasons were bad; in some cases the rule never worked as intended; and in others the rule later became obsolete. But that does not describe all of our regulations. And imagine the brutal publicity that will ensue if someone dies or gets hurt in an accident that could plausibly have been prevented by a rescinded rule.

An even larger problem is that the “two for one” rule doesn’t really tell us about the relative quality of the regulations involved. An agency could satisfy that executive order by issuing a terrible, stupid, costly regulation that forced power companies to rip out their windmills, as long as it repealed two sensible and necessary regulations that (for now) prevent factories from dumping toxic waste into our watersheds.

Reducing regulatory complexity is an important goal, but it cannot be our only goal. We ought to strive for less regulation, yes, but also for good regulation, and for regulation that gives companies enough clarity to innovate and build their businesses. Unfortunately, while the Trump administration has proven enthusiastic about the first goal, we’ve seen much less talk about the others. And given how long it has taken for Trump to staff all the agencies he oversees, we haven’t really had the personnel to deliver on things like better regulation, even if doing so were the Trump administration’s main priority.

May 20, 2017

Net Neutrality Nixed: Why John Oliver is Wrong

Filed under: Humour, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Published on 19 May 2017

Progressives are freaking out now that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is beginning the repeal of Net Neutrality regulations, which give the government the right to regulate Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
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The main arguments in favor of Net Neutrality are really arguments guarding against hypotheticals: that ISPs could otherwise block and censor content (they never have) or that they’ll run their operations like shakedowns, requiring content providers to pay up or slow their traffic to molasses. The main documented instance of an ISP favoring one content provider over others wasn’t sinister collusion. Metro PCS offered unlimited YouTube in a budget data plan but not unlimited Hulu and Netflix, because YouTube had a compression system that could be adapted to the carrier’s low-bandwidth network. In a different context, critics might have applauded Metro PCS, since bought by T-Mobile, for bringing more options to lower-income customers.

Net Neutrality is a proxy battle over what type of internet we want to have — one characterized by technocratic regulations or one based on innovation and emergent order. Progessives are generally suspicious of complex systems existing without powerful regulators present and accounted for. Small-government folks are repulsed by bureaucrats in general, and think the internet will fair better in a state of benign neglect. The FCC has come down on the side of an organic internet, instead of treating the internet more like a public utility.

We don’t know how the internet is going to evolve over time, but neither do the government administrators trying to rein it in. But given the record of free-market innovation vs. government-regulated services, the odds are with market forces and entrepreneurs.

Written and performed by Andrew Heaton, with writing assistance from Sarah Rose Siskind and David Fried.

Edited by Austin Bragg and Siskind.

Produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg.

Theme Song: Frozen by Surfer Blood.

May 10, 2017

Raging Bitch, Good Shit, and Flying Dog Beer’s Fight for Free Speech

Filed under: Business, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:21

Published on 10 May 2017

“I’ve lived my life as a pro free enterprise person,” explains Flying Dog Brewery CEO Jim Caruso. “Not pro business. Pro free enterprise, pro consumer choice, artisanal manufacturing.”
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A central player in America’s craft beer revolution, Caruso is dedicated to creating something special both inside and outside the bottle. Famed artist Ralph Steadman, best known for his iconic illustrations for work by Hunter S. Thompson, creates all of Flying Dog’s labels. It was Steadman who spontaneously wrote on his first commissioned label “good beer, no shit.” And it was this label that kicked of Flying Dog’s first — but not last — fight with government censors.

Caruso sat down with Reason’s Nick Gillespie to talk about his run-ins with the state, why he is a libertarian, and the how his values keep him happy.

“I’m a happy person. And I attribute that to living as an individual, taking self responsibility, self reliance, but connected to society. It’s not a lone ranger sort of thing.”

Cameras by Meredith Bragg, Todd Krainin, and Mark McDaniel. Edited by Bragg.

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