Quotulatiousness

August 16, 2025

This is just crazy enough to work …

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

Disclaimer: I’m not an American and I don’t know the details of the US immigration system, but from what I’ve read elsewhere, Copernican‘s suggestion has a lot of merit:

I can’t be the only one sick of H1Bs destroying the western labor market, particularly in tech, but across the board. Out-of-work tech workers further compress the labor market in other areas. This problem is not unique to the United States, but I understand the laws of the US better, so I’ll be arguing from that perspective.

I know it. Walt Bismarck has a whole organization dedicated to trying to find reasonable employment by job-stacking. A few new and interesting resources have appeared, dedicated to screwing with these companies that open the floodgates to a horde of foreign software engineers. Seven-eleven clerks, and SAAR YOU MUST REDEEMs, that can crash our software, our ships, and our interstate semi-trucks for us.

Fortunately, there’s something we can do to fight back.

[…]

Well, while the government doesn’t seem intent on doing anything about it, the Millennials and Zoomers that have been fucked-over appear to finally have enough cultural weight to start pushing back. Here’s the thing about hiring H1B workers: doing so requires that the company demonstrate that no American Citizens can fulfill the role. That demonstration usually takes the form of a listing in a newspaper with 500 readers, the back-end of a website with black text on a black background, or something similar. They don’t want Americans to apply for these jobs; they want to successfully demonstrate that no Americans even applied.

So they make the application process nearly impossible.

Usually, the way this is done is that when an H1B is hired, they are permitted to remain in the country for up to 6 years (2 renewals of 2 years). Once that’s completed, either the H1B worker is forced to return to where they came from, or the job must be re-posted for 2 weeks for a potential American worker. If no American worker applies (because they didn’t see it because it was posted in a hidden corern of the website or a newspaper with no readers), then the H1B may be sponsored for perminent US residency.

What was clearly once a method for gaining the Best and Brightest as potential employees in the United States has become a system of exploitation. H1Bs are underpaid, undervalued, and often booted from the country, so there’s no impetus for them to assimilate. It’s a mess all the way around, and the only ones who benefit are stockholders for billion-dollar tech companies.

For the most part, we all know the story.

But … what if during that 2-week posting, a qualified American candidate does apply for the job? Well, then everything goes to shit. The company is legally not allowed to deny an American Candidate that job without opening themselves up to a massive lawsuit and fines, and penalties. If only one American candidate has applied, then the company has to hire that individual … and if they don’t hire the American candidate and then apply for another H1B to fill that slot, the company is in deep shit in a legal sense.

August 9, 2025

Carney hints at backing away from Trudeau’s digital policy catastrophes

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Michael Geist on the possibility that Prime Minister Mark Carney is starting to recognize just how damaging to Canadian interests the previous government’s various online bills have been:

Digital policies did not play a prominent role in the last election given the intense focus on the Canada-U.S. relationship. Prime Minister Mark Carney started as a bit of a blank slate on the issue, but over the past few months a trend has emerged as he distances himself from the Justin Trudeau approach with important shifts on telecom, taxation, and the regulation of artificial intelligence. Further, recent hints of an openness to re-considering the Online News Act and heightened pressure from the U.S. on the Online Streaming Act suggests that a full overhaul may be a possibility.

This week’s decision to let the CRTC’s decision on wholesale access to fibre broadband networks stand is a case in point. Last November, the Justin Trudeau-led government sent the CRTC’s initial ruling back to the Commission for reconsideration, noting that it “has concerns about future and ongoing investments in broadband infrastructure and services in Ontario and Quebec, including in rural, remote and Indigenous communities, and concerns that those investments could, if they are unprofitable, lead to a decline in quality and consumer choice in the retail Internet services market”. Nine months later, the CRTC came back with the roughly same ruling. That led to yet another request for a cabinet review but this time the government stood by the CRTC despite significant industry opposition. New leader, dramatically new approach.

The CRTC is example was preceded by the decision to eliminate the digital services tax. While the strategic approach seemed misguided – dropping the DST should have garnered more than just an agreement from the U.S. to return to the bargaining table – some noted at the time that perhaps Carney wasn’t a supporter of the DST and had few qualms with rescinding it. The tax had been a foundational part of the government’s campaign to “make web giants pay” but in a matter of 72 hours in late June it was gone.

The government has also shifted its approach on AI regulation. After months of supporting Bill C-27 and the EU-style AI regulatory approach, a new government brought a new minister and a new approach. Evan Solomon, the newly installed AI and Digital Innovation Minister, used his first public speech as minister to pledge that Canada would move away from “over-indexing on warnings and regulation” on AI. That too represents a significant shift in approach, particularly since Trudeau had embraced the EU style regulatory model.

Then there is the Online News Act and Online Streaming Act. When asked about the Online News Act this week, Carney seemed to suggest he was open to change, stating “this government is a big believer in the value of … local news and the importance of ensuring that that is disseminated as widely and as quickly as possible. So, we will look for all avenues to do that.” While that isn’t a clear commitment to change, it is far from an ironclad commitment to legislation is viewed by many to have done more harm than good. Further, reports indicate that the U.S. Congress is escalating pressure to rescind the Online Streaming Act, which may put that law on the chopping block, particularly if a court appeal strikes down elements of the bill or the CRTC’s implementation of the law puts the bill on the Trump radar screen.

August 4, 2025

The EU still dominates in one key area – over-regulation

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, Europe, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Cláudia Ascensão Nunes identifies the one area that the EU has carved out a unique niche for itself … and it’s global in scope:

EU regulations delenda est

In a world where global power is measured by military strength, technological innovation, or cultural influence, it is striking that the European Union, without housing major tech giants or centers of disruptive innovation, has turned bureaucracy into a tool of global power. It shapes the behavior of global companies, including American big tech firms, which adapt their products to comply with European norms. This phenomenon is known as the “Brussels Effect” and has positioned the EU as the world’s regulatory superpower, fueling growing tensions, particularly with the United States following the re-election of Donald Trump.

The European market comprises 450 million consumers with significant purchasing power, making it an essential destination for global companies. However, access to this attractive market comes with detailed regulations based on the precautionary principle, ostensibly prioritizing consumer and environmental protection, and enforced by an efficient bureaucracy capable of implementing and enforcing rules with precision. This combination encourages companies to align their global operations with European standards, as maintaining different product versions for each region is costly and complex. In practice, this exports European standards worldwide.

American big tech companies such as Apple, Google, and Meta exemplify the impact of the “Brussels Effect,” as they face the requirements of legislations like the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the Digital Services Act (DSA). These laws have forced companies to overhaul their business models, often at high cost and with significant implications. The DMA, for instance, forced Apple to allow alternative app stores and third-party payment systems on iOS, leading the company to announce, in 2024, global changes to its app policy affecting users even outside Europe, with cost estimates in the billions of dollars to restructure its infrastructure and address revenue losses from the App Store.

Google, under the same regulation, was required to offer alternatives to its search engine on Android and to unbundle services such as YouTube, impacting its global strategy and requiring significant investments in new operating systems and interfaces. The company faced potential fines of up to 10% of its global revenue for non-compliance.

Meanwhile, Meta, under the DSA, was required to invest billions in content moderation systems, a serious imposition that openly seeks to control freedom of expression on a global scale. Operational costs increased by around 20%, according to market analysts. These costly adjustments are ultimately coercive due to the weight of the European market, demonstrating how Brussels shapes corporate behavior on a global scale.

These successive impositions and forced adaptations illustrate precisely Friedrich Hayek’s warning about the dangers of central planning. By replacing spontaneous order with top-down, uniform rules imposed by a technocratic authority, the capacity for local adaptation and respect for market complexity is lost. In this scenario, the European Union increasingly takes on the features of a regulatory Leviathan, a body concentrating disproportionate power in the hands of bureaucrats far removed from citizens, reducing freedom of choice and stifling innovation.

July 28, 2025

The AI threat to the laptop classes

Filed under: Business, Economics, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Warren at Coyote Blog responds to a recent Gato Malo post on the way artificial intelligence (however described) will continue to disrupt the workplace especially as it begins to threaten the “laptop class” workers:

I agree with Gato that AI has a huge potential to disrupt current work patterns, in the same way that the industrial revolution did. The 19th century disruptions were severe, and many people suffered as their experience and skill set no longer matched the new economy. But eventually everyone, from the poorest to the rich, were better off for letting the industrial revolution run its course.

But in the 19th century, the disrupted were essentially powerless. What happens this time around, though, when the disrupted are the ruling elite themselves? These potentially disrupted professions include lawyers and doctors who already have shown themselves very willing to organize to block innovation, squash competition, and protect their high pay. Just look at the history of the attempts by Congress to reduce Medicare reimbursements to doctors. And that was minor compared to the potential AI disruption. Let me give you another example of the powerful resisting a technological change that should have disrupted their businesses.

When TV first was being rolled out, the industry coalesced around a network of local broadcast stations, many of whom became affiliates of a network like NBC or CBS. Why this model? Mainly it was driven by technology — the farthest a TV signal could reasonably be broadcast was about 50-75 miles. Thus everyone by necessity got their TV through three or four TV stations in their metropolitan area, each its own small business.

Now fast forward to today. There are multiple ways to broadcast a TV signal nationwide — there are several satellite options and many streaming internet approaches. So now when we watch DirecTV or Youtube TV, we just watch the national NBC or ABC feed, right? Nope. Federal law requires that whatever service you use MUST serve up NBC, for example, via the local affiliate. That is why your streaming TV service harasses you when you travel, because it is worried about violating the law by showing you the Phoenix CBS affiliate when you are staying overnight in Atlanta (gasp).

This is hugely costly. In order to be able to provide NBC among its stations, Youtube TV must gather the feeds from 235 different stations. In the Internet streaming era this is costly but in the satellite era it was insane. DirecTV, with its limited bandwidth, had to simultaneously broadcast 235 stations, most showing identical content, just to legally provide you with NBC. So why this crazy, expensive, insane effort? I am sure you have guessed — pound for pound local TV stations are among the most powerful lobbyists in the country. First, they have money and a massive incentive to defend their local geographic monopoly — Car dealers and alcohol distributors are much the same, which is why every potential innovation is resisted in those markets. But TV stations have one extra card to play — nearly every Congressman in the House likely depends on the three or four TV stations in one major metropolitan area for a huge part of their publicity and coverage. No politician is going to screw with that. At the end of the day, local stations did not get disrupted, they actually became more valuable with this government-enforced distribution of their product.

This is a small example of the fight that is coming in AI. Congressmen will couch their arguments in fear-charged terminology as if their real fear is some Terminator-like AI apocalypse. But the real concern will be from the influential elite who are being disrupted. What would have happened to the Industrial Revolution if the hand-loom weavers were the children of the nobility? Would the government have allowed the revolution to proceed? We are about to find out.

On a cheerier note (if you’re an AI), here’s Ted Gioia‘s most recent concerns about AI getting more evil as it gets more capable:

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but AI doesn’t make ethical decisions like a human being. And none of the reasons why people avoid evil apply to AI.

Okay, I’m no software guru. But I did spend years studying moral philosophy at Oxford. That gave me useful tools in understanding how people choose good over evil.

And this is relevant expertise in the current moment.

So let’s look at the eight main reasons why people resist evil impulses. These cover a wide range — from fear of going to jail to religious faith to Darwinian natural selection.

You will see that none of them apply to AI.

Do you see what this means? You and I have plenty of reasons to choose good over evil. But an AI bot is like the honey badger in a famous meme — and just don’t care.

So sci-fi writers have good reason to fear AI. And so do we. The moral compass that drives human behavior has no influence over a bot. As it gets smarter, it will increasingly resemble a Bond villain. That’s what we should expect.

Anyone who tries to forecast the future of AI must take this into account. I certainly do.

And even though I’d like to think that I’m a fearless predictor, I must admit that what I see playing out over the next few years is very, very very troubling.

Here’s my hypothesis: Let’s call it Ted’s Unruly Rules of Robotics:

  1. Smart machines will have an inherent tendency to evil—because human moral or legal or religious or evolutionary tendencies to goodness don’t apply to them.
  2. The only way to stop this is through human intervention.
  3. But as the machines get smarter, this intervention will increasingly fail.

July 23, 2025

Britain’s housing crisis has roots as far back as 1947

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

Tim Worstall on the deep reasons Britain can’t seem to build any new housing:

Homes Fit for Heroes – Dagenham
“These are typical examples of the housing on the Becontree Estate. Initially 25000 homes were built by the London County Council between 1921 and 1934. These homes fit for the heroes of WW1 had all mod cons gas, water and electricity with inside toilets and bathrooms. A further 2000 homes were built before WW2. The Becontree estate was the biggest council estate in the world.”
Image and description from geograph.uk. Photo by Glyn Baker – CC BY SA 2.0

The real problem Britain faces is that it’s no longer legal to build the housing we thought was the bare minimum acceptable a century ago.

    The more apposite point is that a couple of hundred yards up the road are those post-WWI homes for heroes. Here. Semi detached, not huge to be fair. But kitchen, living room, parlour, 3 beds and indoor bathroom. They’re still highly desirable houses in fact. Note, they’ve front gardens. They’ve also back ones too.

    Now, we’ve heard this, even heard it from someone on Bath City Council (who had heard it, we’re not quite old enough to know anyone who was on BCC in the 1920s), and never, quite tracked it down officially. But the statement was made that the Homes for Heroes needed to be on 1/4 acre gardens. The working man needed the space to grow vegetables for his family and to keep a pig. These houses, the 1920s ones, do have substantial gardens as the 1960s ones don’t.

As I pointed out:

    But Homes for Heroes? We’ve done this before. And those Homes for Heroes? Right now, today, it’s illegal to build them. No, really. What was considered the basic minimum that the local council should provide to the working man is illegal to build now. Those decent sized houses were on those decent gardens d’ye see? You can get perhaps 9 dwellings with 1/4 acre gardens on a hectare of land. Last we saw the current insistence is that we must have no less than 30 dwellings per hectare in order to gain planning permission. Even though Englishcombe – as with so much other land – is there and ripe for the taking.

    It’s actually illegal to build houses that were regarded as the proper minimum a century ago.

The reason we cannot is that Green Belt, itself stemming from the Town and Country Planning Act 1947. The point of which — no, really, the stated purpose — was to make sure that no one would ever be allowed to build housing for proles — sorry, stout Britons — anywhere anyone ever wanted to live.

Which is a bit of a problem. For, outside my own head, there’s no constituency for repealing the TCPA and abolishing the Green Belt.

However, there is a large constituency for plastering farmland with solar cells.

    Waller-Barrett’s farm has been targeted for a massive solar plant, which will be called Glebe Farm, and now his landlord plans to take his land away, replacing potato crops with thousands of giant glass panels.

    The decision, backed by edicts from Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, favouring solar farms over food production on UK farmland, means his flourishing food business will shrink – and staff will be out of work.

    Meanwhile the distant landlord will be quids in, potentially quadrupling their rent with virtually no effort.

Oh.

And now one of those little wrinkles of the law. Those solar farms will last 20 years maximum. No, really, that’s tops. The wrinkle being that the land underneath them will be, in that 20 years’ time, defined as brownfield land. Been previously developed, see? And brownfield land to housing is usually pretty easy as a development path. Certainly wholly unlike greenfield (or even Green Belt) to housing.

The land area Ed wants to cover with these things is 2 to 3% of the land area of the country. Which, as it happens, is about the land area currently covered by housing — including their gardens.

So, therefore we can see that Ed is, in fact, playing the long game. He’s going to solve the housing problem by not having to take on the Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England and every LibDem middle-ager with too few grandchildren to occupy her time. He’s going to do an end run around that problem by building solar first.

July 7, 2025

The federal government’s EV mandate cannot stand

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

Following its established pattern, the Canadian government will seek any possible path other than economic reality, especially when it comes to things like mandating that all vehicles sold in Canada must be EVs by 2035:

Nissan Leaf electric vehicle charging.
Photo by Nissan UK

It’s not always the unexpected that gets governments in trouble — often enough it’s their own bad judgement, poor timing or general clumsiness that gets in the way. But the unanticipated does happen a lot.

Parties and politicians put time and effort into concocting a set of policies aimed at winning votes by proposing remedies to problems identified as occupying top rungs of current voter concern. If they’re lucky they get elected, presumably intending to put those policies into effect at the earliest opportunity. Then the world shifts and pulls the rug from under them.

Former prime minister Justin Trudeau was a big fan of the attention-getting promise. Especially if it was a pledge timed well into the future when he was unlikely to still be around to be held responsible. Carbon reductions too ambitious to be realistic. Budget targets too unlikely to be believed. Statist planning projects that tended increasingly to the surreal.

Mark Carney is left with the detritus and the problem of what to do about it. As prime minister he’s already acted on a few of the problematic leftovers, ditching the carbon tax even though he’d previously supported it as a good idea; scrapping an increased tax on capital gains although the Treasury could certainly use the money; “caving,” as the Trump administration so tastefully put it, on a digital services tax that was a bad idea to begin with but pushed through by the Trudeau government anyway.

There’s an argument to be made, and not a bad one, that each retreat was the right move for the moment. And if there are mistakes that need abandoning, the early days of a new government is proverbially the best time to do it.

But righting wrongs has confronted Carney with a new predicament, in that there are so many Trudeau-era wrongs that need righting. Washington was still in the midst of its victory dance over its digital tax triumph when Canada’s auto industry came along to plead for similar treatment from Ottawa, insisting automakers couldn’t possibly meet previously-set electric vehicle targets and urging the new Liberal government to backtrack post haste.

Carney hosted the session with Canada’s chief executives for Ford, Stellantis and General Motors. Brian Kingston, chief executive of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers Association, was blunt in identifying the targets set for electric vehicle (EV) production as the main topic.

“The EV mandate itself is not sustainable. The targets that have been established cannot be met,” he said on arriving for the meeting. Afterwards he told Politico‘s online news site, “At a time when the industry is under immense pressure, the damaging and redundant ZEV mandate must be urgently removed”.

QotD: The mythological “perfect market” and “perfect competition”

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

In modern neoclassical economics, the benchmark of analysis from which real-world markets are judged is the model of perfect competition, in which a homogenous good is bought and sold by a large group of buyers and sellers, respectively, none of whom have an influence on the price. Moreover, under such conditions, there exists free entry and exit of sellers in the marketplace, defined by perfect information.

The narrative that is constructed and logically follows from this model is that observed deviations from perfect competition in the marketplace are indicative of imperfections, also known as “market failures”, associated with the existence of monopoly power, pervasive externalities, the provision of public goods, and macroeconomic instability. According to this narrative, government intervention is the deus ex machina that saves the market from its own “imperfections” through regulations, taxes, subsides, and other public policy measures. Why? To use a quote from Frank Knight often used by James Buchanan, “to call a situation hopeless is to call it ideal”. The narrative that is constructed is one in which, outside the conditions of the ideal of perfect competition, there is no hope but for government intervention to save the market from itself. Anyone who has taken an economics course is well aware of what I’ve stated thus far, and therefore this should not be surprising.

But what is the implicit meaning of the word “imperfect” that is baked into the narrative, which is constructed into the model of perfect competition? What is implied when we postulate that markets are “imperfect” in comparison to the benchmark of perfect competition is that markets are flawed, non-ideal, or otherwise sub-optimal, and therefore in need of correction through government intervention. Who could dispute the logic of this narrative?

However, if we simply reinterpret our understanding of the word “imperfect”, not only will it reframe the narrative being told about the marketplace, but also the public policy implications that flow from this narrative. If we analyze the etymology of the word imperfect, breaking it down from its Latin origins, you will learn that “im” expresses the negation, “per” comes from the Latin word meaning “thoroughly” and “fect” comes from the Latin verb “facere“, meaning “to do”. Thus, rather than saying that something, or some state of affairs, is flawed, suboptimal, or non-ideal, another way to interpret the meaning of “imperfect” is an act or process that is not thoroughly done, or incomplete. In fact, from a quick perusal of the Merriam Webster’s Dictionary, you will find a similar definition of the word imperfect: “constituting a verb tense used to designate a continuing state or an incomplete action” (emphasis added).

Rather than regarding the market as a flawed or sub-optimal state of affairs, a better understanding of an “imperfect market” reveals that the market is a process of continuous tendency towards perfection, or completion, where are all the gains from trade are exhausted and all plans between buyers and sellers are perfectly coordinated. As Ludwig von Mises states in his magnum opus, Human Action, the “market process is the adjustment of the individual actions of the various members of the market society to the requirements of mutual cooperation” (1949 [2007]: 258).

Thus, markets will always be imperfect, but that is precisely why markets exist in the first place! Markets never conform to the “ideal” of perfect competition, but this is completely irrelevant, since under such state of affairs, markets are unnecessary and redundant, since all resources are already perfectly allocated to their most valued uses. Market processes exist precisely because to generate the information necessary to better coordinate the plans and purposes of individuals in a peaceful and productive manner. The entrepreneurial lure for profit and the discipline of loss is what guides such imperfect processes in a tendency towards the creation of more complete information between buyers and sellers.

Rosolino Candela, “Are Markets Imperfect? Of Course, But That’s The Point!”, Econlib.org, 2020-05-18.

June 9, 2025

The federal Minister of Public Safety admits he knows literally nothing about Canadian gun laws

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s cabinet may actually be worse than any line-up of ministers under Justin Trudeau, with the Minister of Public Safety as a poster child for ignorance and apathy:

[…] Then we have the Minister of Public Safety, Gary Anandasangaree — a Trudeau–Carney loyalist freshly installed under the new Liberal minority regime — who made headlines not for bold leadership, but for a shocking display of ignorance on the very file he’s been assigned to oversee: firearms policy.

During a session of debate on the current spending bill, Conservative MP Andrew Lawton posed a basic question:

    “Do you know what an RPAL is?”

An RPAL, or Restricted Possession and Acquisition Licence, is a standard certification required by law for any Canadian who wants to own restricted firearms, such as handguns or certain rifles. It’s a core element of Canada’s legal firearms framework.

The Minister’s response?

    “I do not.”

Lawton followed up with another foundational question:

    “Do you know what the CFSC is?”

The CFSC, or Canadian Firearms Safety Course, is a mandatory course required for all individuals seeking to obtain a firearms license in Canada — including the RPAL. It’s the very first step every legal gun owner in the country must complete. This is basic civics for anyone involved in firearms policy.

Anandasangaree replied again:

    “I do not know.”

This wasn’t a “gotcha” moment. It was a revealing moment. The Minister of Public Safety, the individual charged with implementing gun bans, overseeing buyback programs, and crafting firearms legislation, has no familiarity with the fundamental licensing and safety processes every Canadian gun owner must follow.

In any other profession, this level of unpreparedness would be disqualifying. If a surgeon couldn’t name a scalpel, he’d be pulled from the operating room. But in Ottawa? It qualifies you to oversee a multi-hundred-million-dollar national gun seizure operation.

And that brings us to the next moment of absurdity.

Lawton asked the minister how much money had already been spent on the federal firearms buyback program, the centerpiece of the Liberal government’s Bill C-21, which targets legally acquired firearms now deemed prohibited.

Anandasangaree’s answer?

    “About $20 million.”

But that doesn’t match the government’s own published data. In a report tabled by Public Safety Canada in September 2023, it was disclosed that $67.2 million had already been spent on the buyback as of that date. The majority of that spending was attributed to “program design and administration” — before a single firearm had even been collected.

So what happened? Did the government refund tens of millions of dollars? Were contracts cancelled? Of course not.

They just reframed the accounting — separating so-called “preparatory costs” and implying they don’t count as part of the buyback, even though they exist entirely to implement it.

It’s not transparency. It’s political bookkeeping — a deliberate attempt to make a costly, unpopular program appear manageable.

And it didn’t end there. When Lawton asked for the number of firearms that had actually been collected under the buyback, the response was yet another dodge. The Minister and his department couldn’t provide a number.

That’s right: after spending over $67 million, the federal government can’t even say how many guns have been retrieved. Yet they’re moving full steam ahead, with the support of a minister who doesn’t understand the system he’s responsible for.

This isn’t policymaking. It’s blind ideology strapped to a blank cheque. And the people paying the price are law-abiding citizens — not criminals, not gangs, and not smugglers.

At this rate, I can’t imagine how he’ll still be in cabinet by the end of summer.

May 20, 2025

Gen Z is blaming Capitalism for the sins of Cronyism

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Lika Kobeshavidze at the Foundation for Economic Education explains why angry Gen Z’ers are blaming capitalism but should instead be blaming crony capitalism for the economic plight they find themselves in:

Image Credit: Custom image by FEE

Across college campuses, on TikTok feeds, and in everyday conversations, a familiar narrative is gaining steam: capitalism is broken.

Rising rents and stagnant wages fuel the claim among some young people that free markets have failed an entire generation. According to a 2024 poll by the Institute of Economic Affairs, more than 60% of young Britons now view socialism favorably. In the United States, the trend is similar, with Generation Z increasingly skeptical of capitalism’s promises.

But much of this idealism is rooted in distance — many of the young people romanticizing socialism have never lived through the economic dysfunction or political repression it often brings. For those who experienced Soviet shortages, Venezuelan collapse, or East Germany’s surveillance, the word socialism doesn’t suggest fairness or opportunity — it suggests fear, failure, and control. There’s a reason so many fled those systems to come to freer countries. What sounds utopian in theory has too often turned dystopian in practice.

But blaming capitalism misses the mark. The real culprit is cronyism, the unholy alliance between big government and big business that twists markets, blocks competition, and rewards political connections over genuine innovation.

[…]

Cronyism is not limited to one country or one political party. Across the United States and Europe, the symptoms are the same.

In the US, Canada, and the UK, the dream of homeownership slips further away for young people. Sky-high housing prices are blamed on “market failure”, but the real cause lies in layers of government-imposed barriers: restrictive zoning laws, burdensome permitting requirements, and endless bureaucratic delays. Big developers who can afford to navigate or influence the system survive. Everyone else gets locked out.

In Europe, the pattern repeats. France’s labor laws, designed to protect workers, instead stifle opportunity. Hiring becomes risky and expensive, especially for young people. Large corporations, with the resources to manage compliance costs, consolidate their dominance. Small firms and startups never get off the ground.

There’s also a persistent myth that big business fears government intervention. In reality, the largest corporations often embrace it, because it keeps them on top. Tech giants like Facebook and Google now lobby for more regulation, knowing that complex new rules will strangle smaller competitors who can’t afford fleets of compliance officers. Green energy subsidies, meant to combat climate change, often end up showering billions on well-connected firms while locking out emerging innovators.

Cronyism doesn’t reward the best ideas. It rewards the best lobbyists.

May 10, 2025

QotD: Undocumented America

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

In the Panopticon State, the Shadowlands are thriving: a state that presumes to tax and license Joe Schmoe for using the table in the corner of his basement as a home office apparently doesn’t spot the half-dozen additional dwellings that sprout in José Schmoe’s yard out on the edge of town. Do-it-yourself wiring stretches from bungalow to lean-to trailer to RV to rusting pick-up on bricks, as five, six, eight, twelve different housing units pitch up on one lot. The more Undocumented America secedes from the hyper-regulatory state, the more frenziedly Big Nanny documents you and yours.

This multicultural squeamishness is most instructive. Illegal immigrants are providing a model for survival in an impoverished statist America, and on the whole the state is happy to let them do so. In Undocumented America, the buildings have no building codes, the sales have no sales tax, your identity card gives no clue as to your real identity. In the years ahead, for many poor Overdocumented-Americans, living in the Shadowlands will offer if not the prospect of escape then at least temporary relief. As America loses its technological edge and the present Chinese cyber-probing gets disseminated to the Wikileaks types, the blips on the computer screen representing your checking and savings accounts will become more vulnerable. After yet another brutal attack, your local branch never reconnects to head office; it brings up from the vault the old First National Bank of Deadsville shingle and starts issuing fewer cards and more checkbooks. And then fewer checkbooks and more cash. In small bills.

The planet is dividing into two extremes: an advanced world — Europe, North America, Australia — in which privacy is vanishing and the state will soon be able to monitor you every second of the day; and a reprimitivizing world — Somalia, the Pakistani tribal lands — where no one has a clue what’s going on. Undocumented America is giving us a lesson in how Waziristan and CCTV London can inhabit the same real estate, like overlapping area codes. There will be many takers for that in the years ahead. As Documented America fails, poor whites, poor blacks, and many others will find it easier to assimilate with Undocumented America, and retreat into the shadows.

Mark Steyn, After America, 2011.

April 28, 2025

Unintended consequences of vehicle mileage regulation

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

On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, Sheel Mohnot explains the amazing unintended consequences of another “great idea with the best possible intentions”:

Ever wonder why sedans disappeared and every car is huge now?

“Thanks, Obama!”

His administration changed fuel economy standards in a way that had the perverse impact of making cars even bigger.

Here are all the vehicles for sale by the 3 largest US automakers. 62 vehicles, 4 sedans (6%). 20 years ago this chart would have been ~50% sedans!

What happened?

Obama administration changed auto fuel efficiency rules to tie fuel economy targets to vehicle size.

Under the new system:
-The bigger the car’s footprint, the easier the MPG target was.
-Light trucks (including SUVs and crossovers) had far lower requirements than passenger cars.
-Crossovers were quietly reclassified as “trucks,” giving them a huge regulatory advantage.

Instead of building lighter, more efficient cars, automakers simply made everything bigger, and made more trucks and SUVs.

Notice that cars that used to be sedans are now crossovers? They do this so it counts as a light truck – they raise ground clearance, square off the rear for cargo capacity, and meet off-road approach minimums so they get qualified as a light truck. Think Subaru Legacy > Subaru Outback.

As you can see in the chart, it’s a LOT easier to meet MPG requirements if your vehicle is classified that way.

So cars got LARGER to meet fuel efficiency goals. The new Honda Civic is 20 inches longer and 4 inches wider than it used to be, about the same size as an old Accord. By making the Civic larger, Honda slightly shifted it into a more favorable regulatory category.

… and smaller cars disappeared. The Honda Fit was a great little car, but would have had to hit 67 MPG in 2026, which would be nearly impossible … so instead, Honda stopped selling them.

So, the only way to make small vehicles now is to make them EV’s (Chevy Bolt).

The Slate truck that is all the rage now is only possible because it’s an EV … otherwise its footprint would have demanded an overly onerous MPG target.

So in short – Obama era CAFE standards had the opposite of the desired impact: sedans died, vehicles ballooned in size, and America’s streets turned into an SUV parking lot.

All thanks to a policy that accidentally incentivized bloat instead of efficiency.

Don’t get me started on “cash for clunkers!”

April 23, 2025

Germany’s extremely extreme extreme right AfD now the most popular party

Filed under: Germany, Liberty, Media, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Friedrich Merz, the leader of the “main” right-wing party in the Bundesrat seems to have a problem with math, as he keeps promising to cut the AfD support in half, yet ends up doubling it:

Many years ago – in 2018, to be precise – a man named Friedrich Merz was in the running to succeed Merkel as chairman of the CDU.

Merz said many interesting things back then. On 14 November 2018, for example, he gave an interview to BILD, in which he denounced Alternative für Deutschland as a party “that does not distance itself from the right” and said that “this makes them unsuitable for any coalition”. Merz pledged to win back all the CDU voters who had defected to the AfD over the years. “In the short term,” he said, “it will probably be impossible to get rid of the AfD,” but if he were chosen to succeed Merkel, he pledged that he could “cut their support in half“.

The very next day he tweeted the exact same thing – promising to lead the CDU back to 40% in the polls and to “halve the AfD“.

At a regional CDU conference around this time, Merz yet again promised to “cut the AfD in half,” adding that “this really is possible”. If I looked harder, I could probably find even more examples of Merz repeating this exact same promise. He made it such a core component of his campaign for the party chairmanship that the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung observed in retrospect: “The whole idea of Merz as party chairman was based on the notion that he would win back votes that Angela Merkel had lost“.

[…]

The latest Forsa poll (conducted for RTL and ntv) has Alternative für Deutschland at a cool 26%. That is their best result in history, and it makes them the strongest party in the Federal Republic. This is the second such poll that places AfD in first place, following an Ipsos survey from 9 April that pegged them at 25%.

Merz has indeed done something to AfD support involving the operand of 2. It’s just not exactly what he imagined.

Now all of that rhetoric we one once heard from the cartel parties – about the importance of dealing with the AfD on the issues and of making convincing appeals to the “democratically inclined” among AfD voters – have become yesteryear’s pablum. They are going to try to ban the AfD now. Because they can’t beat them in any other way, and because they believe Germans shouldn’t be allowed to cast their votes beyond the narrow confines of the political cartel that runs the Federal Republic, they’re going to try to remove the AfD from the board via legal trickery.

Of course, if the AfD is now the most popular party in Germany, it must be suppressed ASAP, and the individual members of the party must be punished “to save democracy”:

In Germany, owning guns is a privilege that can be taken away — not for breaking the law, but for holding the wrong political opinion.

Members and supporters of the right-leaning Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party are now facing mass gun license revocations. The reason? The German government has labeled the AfD a “right-wing extremist” group — a political designation that suddenly makes its members “unreliable” under the country’s gun laws. And just like that, firearms must be surrendered or destroyed.

If that sounds outrageous, it should. But it’s not surprising.

[…]

In 2021, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), designated the entire AfD as a “suspected threat to democracy”. That move allowed the government to surveil, wiretap, and investigate the party and its members.

It didn’t stop there.

Courts have now upheld revoking gun licenses from AfD members, based solely on their political affiliation. In one case, a couple in North Rhine-Westphalia lost legal ownership of over 200 firearms. They weren’t criminals. They weren’t accused of wrongdoing. They were just AfD members.

Another court in Thuringia blocked a blanket gun ban for all AfD members — but left the door wide open for revocations on a case-by-case basis.

In Saxony-Anhalt, officials are reviewing the gun licenses of 109 AfD members. As of last fall, 72 had already been targeted for revocation, with the rest under active review. The justification? Supporting a party the state now claims is “working against the constitutional order”.

And the courts are backing it up. According to a March 2024 ruling, former or current AfD supporters “lack the reliability” required to legally own firearms.

April 17, 2025

Canadian labelling regulations save us from “too many vitamins”

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Bureaucracy, Cancon, Food, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Jesse Kline points out that Canadian food label regulations have become so nit-picky that they prevent safe and accurately labelled foods from Australia, Britain, and other countries from being sold here:

Marmite from the UK and Vegemite from Australia, two of the products at risk of Canadian over-regulatory twitches.

Shortly after winning the Liberal leadership, Mark Carney travelled to Paris and London to shore up our trading relationship with our European allies.

Yet it is noteworthy that Canada is one of only two countries that has not yet ratified the United Kingdom’s accession into the CPTPP, meaning that we don’t enjoy the benefits of free trade with the country with whom we share a system of government and a King. Meanwhile, France is one of a handful of countries that has yet to ratify the free-trade agreement between Canada and the EU.

If we can’t even agree to implement trade deals that have already been negotiated and agreed upon with countries that have such deep historical ties to Canada, what hope do we have of improving trade with our other partners around the world?

Part of the problem is that Canada refuses to follow the example of countries like Australia and New Zealand, which successfully phased out their own systems of supply management years ago with great success.

As a result, supply management has proven to be a sticking point in virtually every trade negotiation we’ve entered into, and is a constant source of tension even among countries we have free-trade deals with.

But we have also fallen into the trap, along with our European friends, of over-regulation. Modern bureaucratic states impose so many restrictions on commercial enterprises, it often becomes uneconomic to market their products in other countries.

Canada, for example, imposes stringent labelling requirements to ensure product information is available in both English and French, and that nutritional information conforms to our very specific requirements.

None of this is necessary, especially in an age in which we can hold a phone up to a box of French crackers to see what it says. But the problem extends far beyond language or disagreements over the recommended daily intake of fibre.

As the CBC reported on Monday, Leighton Walters, an expat from Down Under who owns several Australian-themed coffee shops in the Greater Toronto Area, was told earlier this year by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) that he was no longer allowed to sell the roughly $8,000 worth of Vegemite he had imported because it contains … too many vitamins.

Under current regulations, only a select list of products are allowed to contain added vitamins. Vitamin B-rich spreads like Vegemite and its British equivalent Marmite are not among them because … well, just because.

A similar situation arose a decade ago when reports that the government had ordered Marmite and the Scottish drink Irn-Bru to be taken off the shelves of a British supermarket in Saskatoon caused outrage on both sides of the pond.

The CFIA later clarified that only versions of those products formulated specifically to meet Canadian requirements — i.e., those that don’t contain added vitamins or a specific type of food colouring — are allowed to be sold in this country. Because heaven forbid we trust that other advanced Commonwealth nations would have reasonable enough food safety standards.

We have quite literally regulated ourselves into a corner. We can’t even import spreads like Marmite and Vegemite — which have been staples of British and Australian diets for decades — not because they’re unhealthy or unsafe, but because they don’t conform to our nit-picky regulations.

April 12, 2025

Carney’s Liberals promise to do something that’s been part of the legal code for decades

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Media, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Among the Conservative and Liberal mis-steps of the election campaign this week, the promise by Liberal leader Mark Carney to pass legislation to boldly and courageously do something that has been part of the firearms laws for over 40 years deserves calling out:

Your Line editors knew that guns were going to come into the campaign eventually. It’s one of the eternal issues for the Red Team, and while they seemed to have shied away from it a bit after some pretty brutal fumbling in Justin Trudeau’s later years, we figured it would be back eventually. And so it was on Thursday, when Liberal leader Mark Carney announced, as part of a package of crime policy proposals, that a re-elected Liberal government would make sure that guns were automatically taken from anyone convicted of a violent crime, including intimate partner violence.

*pulls hard on chain, activating bullshit klaxon*

See, here’s the thing, friends. First of all, to take Carney at his word here would require us accepting, even just for a moment, that this didn’t already happen. That up until Thursday of this week, the Liberals were hunky dory with people convicted of violent crimes, including intimate partner violence, keeping whatever guns they may own or wish to acquire.

That is, we suspect readers know, utter bullshit. Removing guns is already required in those circumstances, and it doesn’t even require a conviction. Police officers can seize any weapon of any type if it isn’t in the safety interest of any person, even without a warrant, and revoke any license they hold immediately.

Nobody is eligible to hold a license if it isn’t in the safety interest of a person — that’s literally the first eligibility criterion in the Firearms Act. Issuing a license requires the issuer to consider all past convictions, mental illnesses, history of violent behaviour, previous prohibitions, any potential intimate partner violence, and any potential harm to any person before they issue it. That is checked through a process called Continuous Eligibility Screening, where license holders are checked for “hits” against police systems every single day to determine whether they are still able to hold a license.

This is something almost no one outside Canada’s firearms-owning community understands, and The Line wants to underline this point — anyone with a firearms licence is automatically checked for any new legal issues that might render them unable to own firearms every single day. If you happen to find yourself hanging out with someone with a firearms licence, they were checked out by law enforcement within the last 24 hours. This includes your friends at The Line. The day you’re reading this is a day they passed another screening.

A conviction for a violent crime, it hardly need be said — well, actually, check that, apparently it does need saying — would render one rather ineligible! Not only is this already the law, but there are so many overlapping laws to deal with that exact scenario that it takes real effort to be ignorant of them. Weapon prohibition orders on conviction for violent offences? Already a thing at the federal and provincial levels. Prohibitions while on bail? Already a thing. Firearm seizures during divorces? Not automatic, but common, sometimes even where there is no history of violence or reasonable belief that violence is likely.

The Liberals know all this, especially since it was the Liberals who last changed these laws — though not to add the removal provisions, which largely already existed, but to remove any discretion or ability for rehabilitation.

Every party is fine with keeping guns away from domestic violence perpetrators. Carney making this an issue is bullshit. He’s counting on the public to not know enough to call him out on it.

It’ll probably work.

Oh, and by the way. If you don’t want to take our word for any of the above, you can just read the Firearms Act yourself. Relevant section, below.

April 8, 2025

Mark Carney explained how he viewed the world in his book Values

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s worth considering what Mark Carney wrote about his beliefs before becoming prime minister and how he’s campaigning right now:

For those who haven’t had the misfortune of parsing through Mark Carney’s Values, it reads like a sermon from a high priest of globalism — polished, preachy, and packed with ideas that should send shivers down the spine of anyone who cares about Canada’s economy, especially Western energy producers.

Writing as the former Bank of Canada governor and a darling of the Liberal elite, Carney pitches a vision of “sustainable finance”, net-zero absolutism, and heavy-handed regulation. To the National Citizens Coalition, it’s clear: this isn’t a roadmap to prosperity, it’s a wrecking ball aimed at the heart of Canada’s resource sector and the West’s economic lifeline.

Start with Carney’s obsession with “revaluing value”. In Values, he argues markets should prioritize climate goals over profit, pushing financial institutions to choke funding for oil and gas.

For Alberta and Saskatchewan, where energy employs tens of thousands and pumps billions into the economy, this is a death knell dressed up as virtue.

Western producers aren’t just businesses; they’re the backbone of communities, powering schools, hospitals, and homes. Carney’s disdain for fossil fuels ignores their role in keeping Canada competitive while our allies and adversaries keep drilling. His plan? Starve the sector, stranding assets and jobs, all to appease international green lobbyists in European nations with nationalized economies on the road to being as disastrous as Canada’s.

Then there’s his love affair with regulation. Values champions policies just like Bill C-69 — the “No More Pipelines Bill” — which Carney has refused to repeal. He sees it as a tool to enforce his net-zero utopia, but for the West, it’s a padlock on progress. Pipelines that could carry Canadian oil to global markets sit stalled, leaving producers at the mercy of low prices, foreign competitors, and now, tariff threats.

Carney’s mental framework both then and now doesn’t just stop projects, it signals to investors that Canada’s energy sector is a no-go zone. The result? Capital flees, jobs vanish, and the West pays the price for the lofty ideals of a London and Manhattan banker, who spends only part of his time in Canada — specifically, Ontario and Quebec.

Dan Knight on Carney’s swing through some British Columbia ridings this week:

A mock campaign sign for the Liberals spotted on social media.

Mark Carney rolled into Victoria this week with the swagger of a man who’s never missed a wine-and-cheese reception in his life and delivered what the Liberal brain trust likely considers a “bold vision” for Canada. But peel back the banker buzzwords and Churchill cosplay, and what you really got was a cringeworthy display of delusion, detachment, and recycled globalist dogma.

He opened his mouth and immediately signaled his marching orders: “clean energy”. Not once. Not twice. It was practically every other sentence. Because when you’re out of ideas, just say “green transition” on repeat and hope nobody checks the receipts.

He’s not just pushing the same failed Liberal climate ideology — he’s doubling down on it.

Carney promised to turn Canada into a “clean energy superpower” — without explaining how, exactly, we get there when his party has spent years shutting down oil and gas, blocking pipelines, and handing our resource wealth to the Americans.

This wasn’t new policy. It was the same Liberal fantasy that has already gutted Alberta, choked investment, and driven electricity prices through the roof — just ask Europe how that’s going. And when it comes to reopening auto plants or restoring manufacturing jobs? Nothing. Not a plan, not a word, not a clue.

And don’t worry — when Trump’s tariffs hit our industries, Carney says we’ll respond with “retaliatory tariffs”. Sounds tough, until you remember who actually pays those. Working Canadians. Line workers. Parts manufacturers. People trying to keep the lights on while Ottawa plays global economic chicken.

Carney’s big idea for recovery? Just keep handing money to the Liberal-connected elite.

He promised to “give back” — and by that, he means pouring another $180 million into the CBC, the same taxpayer-funded mouthpiece that’s been running interference for the Liberals for nearly a decade. This comes after ArriveCAN, the $60 million QR code boondoggle funneled through Liberal contractors, and countless other slush funds masquerading as “public service”.

While the working class is bracing for a made-in-Ottawa recession, Carney’s pledging more green slogans, more centralized control, and more taxpayer money to keep the illusion alive.

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