In 1906, Upton Sinclair came out with his book The Jungle, and it shocked the nation by documenting the horror of the meat-packing industry. People were being boiled in vats and sent to larders. Rat waste was mixed with meat. And so on.
As a result, the Federal Meat Inspection Act passed Congress, and consumers were saved from ghastly diseases. The lesson is that government is essential to stop enterprise from poisoning us with its food.
To some extent, this mythology accounts for the wide support for government’s involvement in stopping disease spread today, including Covid and the catastrophic response.
Not only that, but the story is also the basis for the US Department of Agriculture’s food inspection efforts, the Food and Drug Administration’s regulation of medical drugs, the central plan that governs food production, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the legions of bureaucrats who inspect and badger us every step of the way. It is the founding template for why government is involved in our food and health at all.
It’s all premised on the implausible idea that people who make and sell us food have no concern as to whether it makes us sick. It only takes a quick second, though, to realize that this idea just isn’t true. So long as there is a functioning, consumer-driven marketplace, customer focus, which presumably includes not killing you, is the best regulator. Producer reputation has been a huge feature of profitability, too. And hygiene was a huge feature of reputation — long before Yelp.
Sinclair’s book was not intended as a factual account. It was a fantasy rendered as an ideological screed. It did drum up support for regulation, but the real reason for the act’s passage was that the large Chicago meat packers realized that regulation would hurt their smaller competitors more than themselves. Meat inspections imposed costs that cartelized the industry.
That’s why the largest players were the law’s biggest promoters. Such laws almost have more to do with benefiting elites than protecting the public. It was not really about safety, the best scholarship shows, but exclusionary regulation to raise competitors’ costs of doing business.
Jeffrey A. Tucker, “Poke and Sniff: A Lesson from 1906”, Brownstone Institute, 2022-06-29.
October 21, 2022
QotD: The real reason for Upton Sinclair writing The Jungle
October 20, 2022
Canadian firearms law – as deliberately opaque and confusing as the human mind can concoct
In The Line, Tim Thurley peels back the covers and provides a glimpse of the inanities, stupidities, and political opportunism that shape Canadian firearms legislation:
A typical arrangement of guns seized by Toronto Police back in 2012. Most of these weapons would be in the “restricted” or “prohibited” categories under the Firearms Act, and pretty much by definition not typically available to the majority of Canadians.
Canadians often assume our government is doing its best. Not the politicians, sure, but there is a broad assumption that at least the bureaucrats tirelessly working behind the scenes to implement political decisions must have a grasp on the facts and exhibit some consistency in decision-making. In few places is there a larger discrepancy between this perception and the grimmer reality than in how the government classifies firearms.
I’ve long had an interest in firearms policy. Those familiar with it will know how onerous the Access to Information process is and wonder why I partake on my own time and dime; I can answer only that a graduate M.Sc. thesis on legislative impacts on firearm homicide and time working in politics and government have made me a glutton for punishment. More seriously, it’s a fascinating field, and I have some insight into political and policy processes. And as any specialist in a hot-button policy area knows, there is nothing more frustrating than seeing bad policy enacted in your field again, and again, and again.
Firearms are classified into three categories under the Firearms Act: non-restricted, restricted, and prohibited. All three require a separate level of licence, obtained with escalating difficulty after multiple courses and checks. (Prohibited licences are no longer issued to the regular public, but some Canadians hold them as part of a grandfathering in of prior licence holders.) Each category is primarily determined by firearm design. A simple overview: restricted firearms are some rifles and most pistols, prohibited firearms are shorter-barrelled pistols or fully automatic (or converted to another mechanism therefrom), and non-restricted firearms are anything else meeting the legal definition of a firearm, typically meaning typical hunting rifles and shotguns.
That’s a simplified version, but that’s the system.
In theory.
In practice, as my requested documents confirmed, firearm classification in Canada is an opaque and byzantine nightmare. A messy plethora of firearms which meet the functional criteria for being non-restricted, subject to the least stringent oversight and controls, are prescribed by regulation as either restricted or prohibited, and therefore subject to more controls or outright banned. Since functional differences are accounted for by law and did not apply in these cases, the deviations must have another explanation.
In short, politics.
Take the 2020 Nova Scotia attacks. Despite the unlicensed murderer smuggling his firearms from the United States, the Liberals took the opportunity to issue an executive Order-in-Council that banned a bunch of legally owned Canadian guns mostly because it was an easy wedge for the next election. The facts of the case were irrelevant, as was the fact that the banned firearms were responsible for a minuscule fraction of Canadian homicides. The government did not even bother writing the ban by how the firearms functioned, which while unhelpful from a homicide-reduction perspective, would have at least been a coherent position. The order, among other things, simply identified a few well-known guns by name and banned those.
This is where the concept of “variants” matters. When a firearm is designated by regulation as restricted or prohibited, the designation includes all variants of the firearm, which then receive the same classification. This makes sense. Ridiculous as classifying firearms by name over function already is, it would be yet more ridiculous if a mere renaming by a manufacturer, for instance, was sufficient to evade a legal classification.
Most ridiculous of all is that the public does not and cannot know what constitutes a “variant”. The Firearms Act does not define it. The Canadian government does not define it. Nor do its agencies, even the one responsible for determining variants: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
The Mossberg Blaze 47 saga is illustrative of this problem. It is uncontroversial to assume that a precise mechanical copy of an original Russian AK-47 with a different name and slight design changes is still an AK-47. But when Mossberg, the manufacturer, slapped a plastic frame bearing some resemblance to Kalashnikov’s famous design on its Blaze rifle — a cheap, non-restricted, rimfire rifle suitable for, at worst, a particularly aggressive colony of rabbits — that new gun, dubbed the Blaze 47, somehow transformed from an unthreatening small-game rifle to a dangerous AK-47 variant prohibited under Former Prohibited Weapons Order No. 13.
The amazing transformation of a simple .22LR plinker into a facsimile of a dangerous “black fully semi-automatic murder machine”.
These head-scratching decisions have confused firearm owners and manufacturers, who wasted decades trying to understand how the government decides to classify their guns. It all seemed very random.
Surprise! It is!
October 10, 2022
How tall?
“An Englishman in New York” contemplates the ideal heights of city buildings:
I have often wondered what the maximum number of storeys for a good street is. No doubt an individual building can be indefinitely high, in the right setting. But this surely cannot be true of streets: a street with a thousand storeys would either be terrifyingly dark and claustrophobic, if the street were of normal width, or vast and bleak, if its width were scaled up to correspond with its height. So there must be some maximum beyond which pleasing street-based urbanism becomes impossible.
Some people think that the maximum is two or three. These people often believe that one is moving into inhumane scales when one goes above this point. Growing up in London, I knew the maximum must be at least four or five, since that is the norm for the Georgian terraces. I have a distinct memory of visiting Paris and realising it could not be less than eight, since that is the norm for the Belle Epoque.
Visiting Manhattan for the first time, I find it must be more still. The streets of Midtown Manhattan, each 60 feet wide, are often built up to ten or twelve storeys, with four or six more slightly set back above. The avenues, 100 feet wide, are often built up to fifteen or twenty storeys, with another five or ten set back. And to be clear: I refer to the height at which they are continuously built up, excluding the towers that rise above. The avenues of New York are perhaps not paradigmatic great streets, notably because they are almost invariably packed with four lanes of traffic. But their underlying form is good, as is borne out in the handful of cases in which they have been partly pedestrianised.
These streets evolved under New York’s famous 1916 building regulations. Before 1916, New York landowners could essentially build as high as they liked, and this did indeed generate streets that were sometimes rather menacing (pictured below left). The 1916 system was designed to allow as much height as possible while preserving the amenity of the street, indexing the height of the buildings to the width of the street and setting back the upper storeys in the time-honoured European fashion (pictured below right). This system lasted until 1961, when it was replaced with modernist regulations designed to generate slab blocks standing on open plazas; the results of this were so obviously inferior that the older system has been partly reinstated.
A pre-1916 street; a post-1916 avenue
My sense is that Manhattan’s tallest 1916-61 streets could not take many more storeys without losing amenity: the regulators basically succeeded in allowing as much height as possible without compromising the public spaces. In a city at a more southerly latitude, where the light is more intense, perhaps a few could be added; and perhaps the avenues could be widened further, with a corresponding growth in the buildings. It is hard to judge imaginary streets. But at any rate, New York shows we can go a lot higher than I had once supposed: there can be great streets with twenty storeys, five or ten more under a light plane, and more again in isolated towers.
And on grid-pattern streets:
Gridiron street plans have been used for planned cities in many times and places — in Harappa, in Dynastic China, in European Antiquity, even in the Middle Ages — so I assume there must be something very good about them. But I have never quite worked out what it is. One annoying thing about gridiron plans is the great frequency of road crossings. Walking the 3.2 miles from the Empire State Building to 1 Wall Street, one must wait, by my count, at 62 traffic lights. Walking the 3.3 miles from the Tower of London to Buckingham Palace, one encounters only 12, along with 8 crossings without lights that probably do not require waiting.
That is a slightly extreme example, but I think frequency of crossings is a general truth about gridirons. A gridiron distributes crossing points evenly and regularly, such that there is no way to reduce the number that one passes. If one wants to go three blocks east and twelve blocks south in Manhattan, there is no way one can avoid traversing fifteen roads. In an organic street plan with an equal overall density of roads, the crossings will be grouped in irregular ways. If one walked randomly, one would average the same number of crossings. But of course people do not walk randomly: one chooses one’s route, with a view in part to reducing the number of roads one has to cross. And so, rather picturesquely, the street plans long called “irrational” are in this respect preferable precisely because they are used by rational creatures.
October 9, 2022
The Nanny State’s manifold failings
Christopher Snowden scoffs at the pro-Big Nanny maunderings of Matthew Parris in the Spectator recently:
The London Sweep (from a Daguerreotype by BEARD).
Image from London labour and the London poor: a cyclopaedia of the condition and earnings of those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work, 1851, via the Wellcome Collection.
A few years ago I was on the panel at the Battle of Ideas in London. I can’t remember what the topic was exactly, but it was something like the sugar tax or e-cigarette regulation. Rather than deal with the merits of these policies directly, I noticed that my opponents talked in general terms about the good that government can do, referencing the abolition of slavery and the ban on children going up chimneys.
Given all the regulation of recent decades, I found it telling that they had to go back 200 years to find laws that everyone can agree were jolly good. If I had been presenting the case for anarchism, their arguments might have landed, but since I was making the more modest case that perhaps there might be one or two laws in existence that are unnecessary and illiberal, their approach looked more like a diversionary tactic.
Matthew Parris did the same thing in last week’s Spectator. Thanks to the Royal Mail strike, it only landed on my doormat today, but you can read it here. It is titled “Maybe Nanny does know best”. Confusingly, Parris does not use the term “nanny state” in the conventional sense meaning lifestyle paternalism, but as a catch-all term for any government regulation whatsoever.
His target is Liz Truss whom Parris dislikes even more than he disliked Brexit and Boris Johnson. Unless Rory Stewart or Nick Clegg somehow become Prime Minister, I suspect that Parris will be demanding the head of whoever is in charge of the government until his dying day. He is not impressed by Truss’s “dash for growth”.
Parris’s argument is that Big Government is the friend of economic growth, not its foe. He confesses that he, like Truss, once held the view that the “dead hand of the state” stifled growth and led to inefficiencies but that he has grown out of all that stuff now and, with two gin-scented tears trickling down the sides of his nose, he welcomes his bureaucratic overlords.
Why? Because, a hundred years ago, the government gave women the vote and allowed them to work.
There was a time not so long ago when a certain group – half our potential workforce – were all but disqualified from contributing to Britain’s GDP. This group were called “women”. Women were generally unable to own property, or to play much more than a menial role in business (let alone politics, where they could not vote). So who helped unleash women’s potential, gave them rights in the workplace, stopped employers throttling their potential by restricting them to mindless occupations? Was it free trade? Was it big business? Was it competition? Was it Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand”? No. Step forward Nanny. Nanny it was – legislation, the House of Commons, the first world war, the state – who commanded these things, driven in part by the forces of democracy.
The idea that women only started “contributing to Britain’s GDP” — i.e. working for pay — after the First World War is historically illiterate. It may have been true of the upper class and some of the middle classes, but for all other households it was a financial necessity for women to work, whether in agriculture, textiles, domestic service, pubs or whatever. It is true that more men were employed than women, but women were pregnant a lot of the time and had an enormous amount of unpaid work to do. They were certainly never “all but disqualified” from working, except in a few sectors such as the police force.
And who was it who banned women from owning property and voting in the first place? It wasn’t Adam Smith. It was the government, or, as Parris, would have it, the “nanny state”. So which nanny state are we supposed to be thankful for — the one that gave women the vote for a hundred years or the one that denied them the vote for hundreds of years?
Nanny had been busy since the 18th century, when in the Papists Act of 1778 she decreed that Catholics should not be excluded from key parts of the economy. She was still busy in the 20th century, starting with the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919, and later the 1944 Education Act outlawing the barring of married women from teaching.
Again, who excluded Catholics from key parts of the economy in the first place? Who barred married women from teaching? That’s right, it’s our old friend Big Government, the arsonist that Parris treats like a fireman.
October 5, 2022
“The centre ground on domestic policy and public services is Corbynism with a union flag on it and the word ‘British'”
Ed West on the decidedly conservative cast of many British voters’ core beliefs:
Jeremy Corbyn, then-Leader of the Labour Party speaking at a Rally in Hayfield, Peak District, UK on 25th July 2018 in support of Ruth George MP.
Photo by Sophie Brown via Wikimedia Commons.
It wasn’t until I was a fairly grown up that I learned just how conservative many Labour voters were. My parents’ Labour-supporting friends had mostly belonged to what Ken Livingstone called ‘the party of the metropolitan pervert’, London types who worked in creative industries or the public sector and held ultra-liberal views (at least for the 90s). But out there in the real world there were all these Labour supporters who were even more Right-wing than my dad, whether on crime, immigration, Europe, sexual relations or pretty much any social issue. They just wanted, in Blackadder’s words, a few less fat bastards eating all the pie.
That is pretty much where the public are now. As Aaron Bastani put it: “The centre ground on domestic policy and public services is Corbynism with a union flag on it and the word ‘British'”.
Although Jeremy Corbyn lost decisively in 2019, many have forgotten the political lesson of the Corbyn era — that it wasn’t his economic policies that put people off, but his lack of patriotism. He came from that long line of Quaker-Unitarian radicals who have always been seen as too sympathetic to Britain’s enemies, whether it was Robespierre, Napoleon, the USSR, Irish republicans or Islamic radicals.
Corbynomics is certainly more popular than what the current Tory Party is offering, especially that served up in the recent mini-budget, after which it could be said that things are developing not necessarily to the Government’s advantage.
I don’t have strong opinions on the aborted 45% tax cut; it didn’t seem very wise, or fair, but I’m not sure how drastic it was; Robert Colvile in The Sunday Times suggests that the proposal was not as bold as people make out. Yet it seems to be hugely unpopular, except with the Institute for Economic Affairs.
But I’m not convinced that makes it bad.
The IEA’s Kristian Niemietz has repeatedly pointed out that free-market economics is generally quite unpopular, and during the depths of the Brexit dispute he wrote a piece opposing what he called “Bregalitarianism”:
The Bregalitarian loves to wallow in faux-indignation every time an opponent – which can be a Remainer, but it can also just be a more cautious, less enthusiastic Brexiteer – mentions the possibility that not everyone who cast a vote on 23 June 2016 was fully aware of all the possible ramifications. “How DARE you suggest that 17.4 million voters are stupid!”, cries the Bregalitarian. “How DARE you be so patronising and insulting!”
I find this Bregalitarian rhetoric deeply disingenuous – and never more so than when free-marketeers engage in it … Here’s a little home truth: if you are a free-marketeer in Britain in 2018, you are part of a small and unpopular minority. The vast majority of the British public disagree with you on virtually everything. There is majority support for a (re-) nationalisation of energy companies, the railways, water and bus companies. There is majority support for rent controls and various price controls.
As a free-marketeer, you probably want, if not fully privatised, then at least mixed systems of healthcare and education, with much greater private sector involvement. If so, you are almost alone in Britain with that view. There is also majority support for a lot more government regulation, a lot more government interference with private business decisions, higher taxes and a larger state.
Indeed, public opinion on economic issues is quite eye-watering: a full 28 per cent of British adults want banks to be run by the state, and 30 per cent even want internet providers nationalised. A quarter want travel agents nationalised.
September 28, 2022
This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Infrastructure
Kite & Key Media
Published 31 May 2021America is a land of constant progress. Sometimes it seems like there’s nothing we can’t accomplish. And then we try to build something…
In recent years, infrastructure projects have taken way too long and cost way more than they should. Boston’s “Big Dig”, for example, took 15 years and cost more than 5x as much as projected. California’s High-Speed Rail was supposed to run between L.A. and San Francisco by 2020. Instead, some track nowhere near either city might be ready by 2027.
Why can’t America build quickly or cost effectively anymore? A well-intentioned regulatory law from the 1970s has a lot to do with it…
When the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) first took effect in the 1970s, the environmental impact analysis it required from builders before a project could begin would often run less than 10 pages. Today, the average is more than 600 pages.
Maybe delays and ballooning costs are worth it to protect the planet, right? Here’s the crazy part: NEPA doesn’t even guarantee that. In some cases, it’s actually making us less green.
(more…)
September 14, 2022
Whisky – Scotland’s Water of Life
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 13 Sep 2022
September 2, 2022
The winner in 1932 campaigned against high taxes, big government, and more debt. Then he turned all those up to 11
At the Foundation for Economic Education, Lawrence W. Reed notes that we often get the opposite of what we vote for, and perhaps the best example of that was the 1932 presidential campaign between high-taxing, big-spending, government-expanding Republican Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who ran against all of Hoover’s excesses … until inauguration day, anyway:
Top left: The Tennessee Valley Authority, part of the New Deal, being signed into law in 1933.
Top right: FDR (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt) was responsible for the New Deal.
Bottom: A public mural from one of the artists employed by the New Deal’s WPA program.
Wikimedia Commons.
If you were a socialist (or a modern “liberal” or “progressive”) in 1932, you faced an embarrassment of riches at the ballot box. You could go for Norman Thomas. Or perhaps Verne Reynolds of the Socialist Labor Party. Or William Foster of the Communist Party. Maybe Jacob Coxey of the Farmer-Labor Party or even William Upshaw of the Prohibition Party. You could have voted for Hoover who, after all, had delivered sky-high tax rates, big deficits, lots of debt, higher spending, and trade-choking tariffs in his four-year term. Roosevelt’s own running mate, John Nance Garner of Texas, declared that Republican Hoover was “taking the country down the path to socialism”.
Journalist H.L. Mencken famously noted that “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.” If you agreed with Mencken and preferred a non-socialist candidate who promised to get government off your back and out of your pocket in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt was your man — that is, until March 1933 when he assumed office and took a sharp turn in the other direction.
The platform on which Roosevelt ran that year denounced the incumbent administration for its reckless growth of government. The Democrats promised no less than a 25 percent reduction in federal spending if elected.
Roosevelt accused Hoover of governing as though, in FDR’s words, “we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible.” On September 29 in Iowa, the Democrat presidential nominee blasted Hooverism in these terms:
I accuse the present Administration of being the greatest spending Administration in peace times in all our history. It is an Administration that has piled bureau on bureau, commission on commission, and has failed to anticipate the dire needs and the reduced earning power of the people. Bureaus and bureaucrats, commissions and commissioners have been retained at the expense of the taxpayer.
Now, I read in the past few days in the newspapers that the President is at work on a plan to consolidate and simplify the Federal bureaucracy. My friends, four long years ago, in the campaign of 1928, he, as a candidate, proposed to do this same thing. And today, once more a candidate, he is still proposing, and I leave you to draw your own inferences. And on my part, I ask you very simply to assign to me the task of reducing the annual operating expenses of your national government.
Once in the White House, he did no such thing. He doubled federal spending in his first term. New “alphabet agencies” were added to the bureaucracy. Nothing of any consequence in the budget was either cut or made more efficient. He gave us our booze back by ending Prohibition, but then embarked upon a spending spree that any drunk with your wallet would envy. Taxes went up in FDR’s administration, not down as he had promised.
Don’t take my word for it. It’s all a matter of public record even if your teacher or professor never told you any of this. For details, I recommend these books: Burton Folsom’s New Deal or Raw Deal; Murray Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression; my own Great Myths of the Great Depression; and the two I want to tell you about now, John T. Flynn’s As We Go Marching and The Roosevelt Myth.
For every thousand books written, perhaps one may come to enjoy the appellation “classic”. That label is reserved for a volume that through the force of its originality and thoroughness, shifts paradigms and serves as a timeless, indispensable source of insight.
Such a book is The Roosevelt Myth. First published in 1948, Flynn’s definitive analysis of America’s 32nd president is arguably the best and most thoroughly documented chronicle of the person and politics of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Flynn’s 1944 book, As We Go Marching, focuses on the fascist-style economic planning during World War II and is very illuminating as well.
August 24, 2022
“A spectre is haunting Britain – the spectre of whingers”
A pub that was partially an inspiration for George Orwell’s description of the “perfect pub” is under threat from post-covid NIMBY complaints:
Google street view of the Compton Arms in Islington.
George Orwell’s favourite pub could be closed down because four neighbours have moaned about the noise.
A spectre is haunting Britain – the spectre of whingers. The dead hand of NIMBYism is felt on so many of our national crises, from the housing crisis to the “drought” to the energy crisis. The comfortably off classes have fought tooth and nail, all too successfully, in recent decades to block the building of anything – from houses to reservoirs – that might make life easier for everyone else. But their killjoy war on pubs might just be their most grating accomplishment.
The Compton Arms in Islington is the latest pub, still struggling in the wake of lockdown and now faced with soaring energy costs, to be threatened with closure over a handful of complaints. It’s been open since the 1800s. George Orwell drank there and it reportedly inspired his essay “The Moon Under Water”, published in the Evening Standard in 1946, which laid out his idea of the perfect pub. Now it has been slapped with a licence review by the local council after four neighbours complained that it was a “public nuisance” and posed a danger to health.
Given the Compton Arms was just voted the second-best pub in the UK by Time Out, with a review that hails its “seasonally led” “small-plates menu”, it seems unlikely to have become some den of criminal depravity. The furious explanation of Nick Stephens, the pub’s owner, seems more plausible – that some killjoys on this well-to-do Highbury side street got used to the pub being shut during lockdown and are now throwing their toys out of the pram.
“Our managers have gone to extreme lengths and worked their socks off to run the pub considerately (and exceptionally) – in spite of some more than challenging behaviour from some of the four complainants”, Stephens posted on Facebook. “A minority get used to the quiet then decide the pub that’s been there since the 1800s, that is an asset of community value, is now a nuisance.” He says that if this “minority of four” succeeds, the Compton won’t be financially viable “for us … or any other responsible operator”.
This is a story we have seen playing out time and again across the UK. An unholy alliance of whingers and council bureaucrats are shutting down and imposing punishing restrictions on much-loved pubs, stopping them from staying open later or blocking the opening of new venues over often ludicrous claims of noise and disruption. There seems to have been a particular flurry of this in recent months, following the end of lockdown and the entrenchment of working from home.
August 18, 2022
The acute lack of numbers in every climate debate
The Grumpy Economist notes that every discussion of laws and regulations “to tackle climate change” only ever seem to cover one side of the issue — how much your taxes will go up and how much more your life “needs” to be regulated to “save the planet”. The almost universally lacking numbers are the expected benefits of the law or regulation in climate terms:
Most legislation or regulation that spends hundreds of billions of dollars aimed at a purpose is extensively analyzed or scored to that purpose. OK, the numbers are often, er, a bit unreliable, but at least proponents go through the motions and lay out assumptions one can examine and calculate differently. Tax and spending laws come with extensive analysis of just how much the government will make or spend. This is especially true when environment is concerned. Building anything requires detailed environmental assessments. An environmental review typically takes 4.5 years before the lawsuits begin.
In this context, I’m amazed that climate policy typically comes with no numbers, or at least none that I can find readily available in major media. We’re going to spend an additional $250 billion or so on climate policies in the humorously titled “inflation reduction act”. OK, how much carbon will that remove, on net, all things included, how much will that lower the temperature and when, how much and when will it quiet the rise of the oceans?
Finally, I have seen one number, advertised in the Wall Street Journal,
Our contributor Bjorn Lomborg looked at the Rhodium Group estimate for CO2 emissions reductions from Schumer-Manchin policies. He then plugged them into the United Nations climate model to measure the impact on global temperature by 2100. He finds the bill will reduce the estimated global temperature rise at the end of this century by all of 0.028 degrees Fahrenheit in the optimistic case. In the pessimistic case, the temperature difference will be 0.0009 degrees Fahrenheit.
Bjorn’s twitter stream on the calculation.
Maybe you don’t like Bjorn’s numbers and the IPCC model. (Not exactly a right-wing operation). Maybe you don’t like the Rhodium group’s analysis. A quick reading left me the impression its thumb might be on the wildly over-optimistic side of what this rathole of pork can produce, and of experience with what the similar past ratholes have produced:
Our preliminary estimate is that the IRA can cut US net greenhouse gas emissions down to 31% to 44% below 2005 levels in 2030—with a central estimate of 40% below 2005 levels — compared to 24% to 35% under current policy. The range reflects uncertainty around future fossil fuel prices, economic growth, and technology costs. It will also meaningfully reduce consumer energy costs and bolster US energy security over the medium-term,
10% of 2005 levels is a lot. Subsidies reduce consumer costs, but not the cost to society overall. Clever. How one can claim that clamping down on fossil fuels and subsidizing windmills and solar panels helps energy security with the German example before us is a good question. Bjorn’s point is that even with this immense thumb on the scale, the actual climate benefit is tiny. If you disagree, fine, produce some alternates.
(BTW, politicians who tell you we need to do something about climate to turn off heat waves and stop forest fires are either lying or profoundly ignorant. Nothing even Greta Thunberg proposes will actually lower temperatures in our great grandchildren’s lifetimes. Read carefully, “reduce the temperature rise“. Not “reduce temperatures”.)
July 28, 2022
“… this time it will be worldwide”
Elizabeth Nickson recounts her journey from dedicated environmentalist to persecuted climate dissident and explains why so many of us feel as if we’re living on the slopes of a virtual Vesuvius in 79AD:
A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
I was experiencing a time-worn campaign to shut down a voice that conflicted with an over-arching agenda. And in the scheme of things, I was nothing. But in fact, I was almost the only one, everyone else had been chased out. I was an easy kill, required few resources. It was personal, it was vicious beyond belief, and it had nothing to do with truth. If I had continued my work in newspapers, they would have attacked my mother and my brothers, two of the three of whom were fragile.
As of now, this has happened to hundreds of thousands of people in every sector of the economy. The chronicles of the cancelled are many and varied, and they all start with the furies, unbalanced, easily triggered and marshalled to hunt down and kill an enemy. These programs, pogroms, are meticulously planned, they analyze you, find your weakness, and attack it. In my case, it was my solitude, my income, my need to look after my family that made me an easy sacrifice.
I was such an innocent. I thought with my hard-won skills, my ability to reason, to number crunch, to apply economic theory and legit charting, and report, the truth would be valuable, useful.
Every single member of the cancelled has had their faith in the culture badly shaken. They all thought, as I did, that we were in this together, we needed the truth in order to make good decisions, decisions that would promote the good of all.
Not now. Not anymore.
The truth I found behind the fields and forests of the natural world is animating people on the streets in Europe today, the Dutch, French and German farmers. It animated the revolution in Sri Lanka.
Because what I and hundreds of others had found was censored, the destructive agenda has advanced to the point where their backs are against the wall. They don’t have a choice. They have to win. And they are in the millions.
Same with Trump’s people. They aren’t mindless fans or acolytes or sub-human fools. Their backs are against the wall. They have no choice but to fight.
But because I and the many like me, who know what happened, were shut down, disallowed from writing about it, cancelled and vilified, no one understands why this is happening in any depth. City people mock and hate rural people. My photographer colleague/best friend in New York: “racists as far as the eye can see”. My old aristocratic bf London: “Pencil neck turkey farmers”. No city person can take on board that they have allowed legislation and regulation which is destroying the rural economy because they have been brainwashed by the hysteria in the environmental movement. This destruction is not the only reason but it is the fundamental reason for our massive debts and deficits. The base of the economy has been destroyed. We have lost two decades of real growth.
And we did it via censorship.
There is a truism about revolutions in China. All of a sudden, across this great and massive country with its five thousand year culture, people put down their tools and start marching towards the capital, hundreds of millions all at once.
We are almost there. But this time it will be worldwide.
July 19, 2022
Drawing the proper lessons from the massive Rogers outage earlier this month
In The Line, Matt Gurney explains the really important lesson that seems to have escaped a lot of the critics who covered the Rogers internet/cell/TV outage that took a third of the country offline for 24 hours or more:
Most of the conclusions reached after the Rogers telecommunication outage two weeks ago are wrong. Millions of people lost home internet, television and cellphone service for the better part of a day (some for much longer). For those who had all their services bundled with Rogers, this meant being entirely cut off, including from access to emergency services. It was a big deal, both in terms of lost economic productivity and for those Canadians who needed help and could not access it.
The problem isn’t with Rogers, though. The problem is with everyone else.
I don’t want to be misunderstood. Rogers is bad. It did have a big problem. I am not a fan. Their customer service is generally awful. Their reliability and performance is decidedly meh and the meh costs a fortune. So don’t take this column as some sort of apologia for Rogers. I am one of their customers, but I’m only one of their customers because none of the other options are much better.
But still. The lesson of two Fridays ago shouldn’t be that Rogers is bad. It also shouldn’t be that the CRTC is bad or that our politicians are spineless and that our regulators are thoroughly captured. All of those things are true, but they’re not the lesson. That wasn’t the failure of two Fridays ago. The failure of two Fridays ago was that when one of our telecom companies went down, a pretty horrifying cross-section of Canadian society had no back-up plan.
Let’s imagine an alternate universe where things in Canada simply functioned better. Close your eyes and just dream it up. You’re in a different Canada now. The CRTC is awesome. Our politicians are terrific. Rogers is an incredibly good company that is masterful at delivering services that are overwhelmingly reliable and affordably priced. Even in this increasingly far-fetched parallel timeline, no telecom company is going to bat a thousand. You will never have 100 per cent service reliability. This alternate Canada still has outages — maybe they’re rare and brief, but they’re not unheard of or impossible.
And that’s why we can’t look at what happened two weeks ago as a failure at Rogers. Obviously Rogers failed. But the real failure was a failure of imagination and planning on the behalf of millions of individuals, and a worryingly diverse set of institutions, that did not have a back-up plan.
July 11, 2022
Canadians deserve better than “core network maintenance problems” for critical cell phone and internet services
Our internet service provider, Rogers, suffered a major network failure early on Friday morning, taking down not just wired internet services, but also cable TV, and cell phone services and causing knock-on issues that utterly disrupted many emergency 911 services, government websites, banks (including ATM and point-of-sale terminals) and many more. I subscribe to both Rogers internet and Rogers cell phone services, but fortunately my wife has a different wireless phone provider so we weren’t completely offline all of Friday and most of Saturday. Michael Geist and his family weren’t as lucky:
Like many Canadians, I spent most of the massive Rogers outage completely offline. With the benefit of hindsight, my family made a big mistake by relying on a single provider for everything: broadband, home phone, cable, and wireless services on a family plan. When everything went down, everything really went down. No dial tone, no channels, no connectivity. Work was challenging and contact with the kids shut off. It was disorienting and a reminder of our reliance on communications networks for virtually every aspect of our daily lives.
So what comes next? We cannot let this become nothing more than a “what did you do” memory alongside some nominal credit from Rogers for the inconvenience. Canada obviously has a competition problem when it comes to communications services resulting in some of the highest wireless and broadband pricing in the developed world. Purchasing more of those services as a backup – whether an extra broadband or cellphone connection – will be unaffordable to most and only exacerbate the problem. Even distributing the services among providers likely means that consumers take a financial hit as they walk away from the benefits from a market that has incentivized bundling discounts. Consumers always pay the price in these circumstances, but there are policy solutions that could reduce the risk of catastrophic outages and our reliance on a single provider for so many essential services.
First, there is a need to better understand what happened and why. Rogers CEO says the problem lies with maintenance to the core network, which caused some routers to malfunction. But that’s just tech talk. Canadians deserve answers that explain not only how this happened, but how we find ourselves in a position where malfunctioning routers at one company cause a nationwide payment system to go down, government services to be taken offline, and emergency services to be rendered inaccessible. It is one thing for my household to make a mistake, but another for Interac to do so. That means conducting an open CRTC process into this outage alongside a Parliamentary hearing on the broader issues since this is a matter that requires both regulatory and political response. There is no need to wait: these hearings must happen this month with the goal of identifying the scope and source of the problem along with potential policies that might mitigate future harms.
Neither the CRTC nor the current government has shown much inclination to challenge the big telcos. CRTC Chair Ian Scott has reversed years of a consumer-focused Commission into one more comfortable supporting the big providers, while the government has been far more interested in sabre rattling or shaking down Internet companies than taking on big telecom. Yet as we were reminded on Friday, the linkage to the availability of essential services – payments, health care, government services – runs through the telcos, not the Internet companies.
This is the second object lesson in concentrated power in a small number of government-approved hands this year. Our first wake-up call was when the government prompted chartered Canadian banks to cut off some of their customers from all financial services even though no crimes had been committed and no charges were laid. It’s not clear how many people were affected, but arbitrarily denying people access to their bank accounts and credit cards should have rung alarm bells for many people. Now, we’ve been shown how dangerous it can be to allow a very small number of companies to divide the mobile phone and internet service market between them and use the power of government to keep out potential competitors. Will enough Canadians notice?
July 6, 2022
The ongoing protests by Dutch farmers demand your attention
Protests in many countries in the western world can get violent and even be claimed (by the targets of the protest) to be “insurrections”, but protests in the Netherlands always have more of an edge to them than elsewhere, because when the Dutch really get angry they have, in the past, gone so far as to kill AND EAT their prime minister. The current protests haven’t gone that far yet, but politicians should keep in mind that Dutch farmers can react primally to being treated in the way the Soviets treated the kulaks:
This is really important – you know, on the level of “pay attention or your food supply is next”.
We reported last week that Dutch farmers were attacking government vehicles, blocking roads, and dumping manure on government buildings in response to a new “climate” policy that shut down numerous family farms because their cows were farting too much.
These farmers are now banned from working their own land to feed their families.
Let me explain what’s happening and why it is of the utmost importance as I randomly drop in videos of what the Dutch farmers are doing to keep your attention.
Unelected elites at the World Economic Forum, World Bank, United Nations, and BlackRock think us little people are rodents that are polluting the Earth, and that it’s their job to cull us and tame us so we can follow their smartypants amazingness into what is obviously a glorious future.
These elites get corporations to fall in line by promoting “Environmental-Social-Governance” metrics (a scorecard, if you will) that shows how many woke policies a company is adopting. Do they have a climate pledge? Are they hiring based on skin color, gender, and sexual fetish? Do they fly a rainbow flag over their headquarters? Do they have at least a few dozen “equity” executives to make sure everyone is a good little Marxist?
Companies lose customers by joining this radical, perverse cult, but they get access to the trillions of dollars represented by the elites and the corrupt organizations, from the WEF to the WHO to the mega-investment firms. They don’t care if you boycott them because they are expecting to simply outlast you.
The elites then get governments to fall in line by lobbying, pushing big money into local elections, and taking over school boards and classrooms to ensure good little disciples are being churned out to vote for the right people. They get young people riled up, telling them the planet is burning and that unarmed black men are yelling “Hands up, don’t shoot!” while being gunned down by racist white cops in the streets. Good people watch as their cities burn and politicians bail out the rioters.
July 4, 2022
A first, tentative step to reining back the juggernaut that is the modern administrative state
Brad Polumbo has words of praise for US Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch:
Panorama of the west facade of United States Supreme Court Building at dusk in Washington, D.C., 10 October, 2011.
Photo by Joe Ravi via Wikimedia Commons.
“Vesting federal legislative power in Congress [rather than bureaucrats]”, Gorsuch writes, “is vital because the framers believed that a republic — a thing of the people — would be more likely to enact just laws than a regime administered by a ruling class of largely unaccountable ‘ministers’.”
But what about those, like dissenting Justice Elena Kagan, who say that federal bureaucrats need wide latitude because Congress is failing to, in their view, adequately address climate change?
“Admittedly, lawmaking under our Constitution can be difficult,” Gorsuch acknowledges. “But that is nothing particular to our time nor any accident.”
“The framers believed that the power to make new laws regulating private conduct was a grave one that could, if not properly checked, pose a serious threat to individual liberty …” he said. “As a result, the framers deliberately sought to make lawmaking difficult by insisting that two houses of Congress must agree to any new law and the President must concur or a legislative supermajority must override his veto.”
With an empowered, unelected bureaucracy, “agencies could churn out new laws more or less at whim”, Gorsuch adds. “Intrusions on liberty would not be difficult and rare, but easy and profuse.”
This isn’t hypothetical speculation — it’s exactly what we’ve seen under the status quo.
For a glaring example, just consider the Centers for Disease Control’s pandemic-era “eviction moratorium”. The federal agency unilaterally declared that evictions nationwide were prohibited in many circumstances by citing an old statute that gave the CDC director the ability to order in specific places “such measures to prevent such spread of the diseases as he/she deems reasonably necessary, including inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, and destruction of animals or articles believed to be sources of infection.”
They went from that to a nationwide “eviction moratorium”. Stretch, much?
That’s right: Unelected government officials effectively commandeered the nation’s rental market, which caused tremendous dysfunction, trampled over property rights, and sabotaged the supply of rental housing. (For which prices are now surging. Shocker!) And, it was years before the courts finally stopped them and struck down the “moratorium”.
