… we do gain a lovely illustration of why nothing ever really gets done in this modern world. Sure, the politicians have demanded more [advanced logic] chips in a country that doesn’t have any spare chip technicians — TSMC has had to import their own from Taiwan — and so on and so on. But there’s also this:
Having pumped billions of dollars into building the next generation of computer chip factories in the US, the Biden administration is facing new pressure over the health and safety risks those facilities could pose. Environmental reviews for the new projects need to be more thorough, advocates say. They lack transparency around what kinds of toxic substances factory workers might handle, and plans to keep hazardous waste like forever chemicals from leaching into the environment have been vague.
A coalition of influential labor unions and environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, have since submitted comments to the Department of Commerce on draft environmental assessments, saying that the assessments fall short. The coalition’s comments flag lists of potential issues at several projects in Arizona and Idaho, including how opaque the safety measures that manufacturers will take to protect both workers and nearby residents are.
This is not a serious complaint. This is actually the national association of environmental studies writers spotting a gravy train passing by and desiring to dip their ladle in. And that’s all it is too. But it’s also that excellent example of why fuck all ever gets built. We’ve an entire — and politically powerful — class that makes their living producing the hundred tonne reports that accompany building anything. And they’re not going to allow anything to be built unless they get paid for writing hundred tonne reports. And, to complete the circle, if every activity requires a hundred tonne report then fuck all will ever get done.
There was, back a time, a law passed about blood minerals. The law said anyone who might use them must write to all suppliers to ask if they do. Then those said anyones must tell consumers whether they do. This cost $4 billion just in the first year. From what I’ve heard — and might take the trouble to prove one day — the bloke who led the campaign for the law requiring the letters now runs a very profitable consultancy advising large corporates on how to write the letters. $4 billion spent by society so that one bloke can gain a minor summer place in the Hamptons. This doesn’t make us richer as a whole, it’s pissing the wealth of the nation up the wall.
Carthage, it’s the only solution. The biggest problem who is who the hell would buy our nice new stock of enslaved environmental bureaucrats? Razing, salt, ploughs, these are easy but who’s mad enough to offer a positive price for the last part of the process?
Tim Worstall, “Why Fuck All Ever Gets Done In This Modern World”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2024-08-28.
November 29, 2024
QotD: Why nothing gets done in the Current Year
November 8, 2024
The McDonald’s ice cream machines are always broken because of bad IP laws
Even if you never to to a McDonald’s yourself, you’ve undoubtedly heard that the ice cream machines are always broken. I hadn’t really given it any thought — it’s been years since I visited one of the restaurants and I don’t eat much ice cream — but Peter Jacobsen explains the weird and infuriating reason for the phenomenon:
Image Credit: Magnus D via Wikimedia | CC BY 2.0
How could it be that the ice cream machines at McDonald’s are so consistently broken? It turns out that, until just recently, it was illegal to hire most people to fix them. To understand why, we’re going to have to take a detour into the world of intellectual property.
DMCA Woes
So why has it been illegal for McDonald’s to hire people to fix their ice cream machines? Well, that’s where the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) comes in. If you’re familiar with the DMCA, this is probably confusing to you.
Generally the DMCA is a big concern on content creation platforms like YouTube. If someone uses copyrighted music, he or she gets DMCAed. This is slang for when a video gets its monetization redirected to the owner of whatever copyrighted content was used.
DMCA takedowns draw a lot of ire, because the law is clumsily applied and often even legitimate uses of copyrighted content (e.g., fair use) are punished.
But the DMCA extends beyond content creation, as chronicled by Elizabeth Chamberlain of iFixit, an organization dedicated to ensuring that product owners have the right and ability to fix their property. Many machines ranging from phones to ice cream machines utilize copyrighted software to function. Sometimes, this software limits product users more than they’d like.
For example, iPhone software locks users into particular user interfaces. If a user wants to customize past some point, he’s going to have to modify the software more than the company intends. This process, called jailbreaking, involves breaking through “digital locks”. The DMCA often interprets breaking these locks as a violation of the intellectual property of the copyright holder.
The problem gets even worse when you recognize that fixing things — say, McDonald’s ice cream machines — means breaking past those digital locks. This means anyone hired to repair the machine would need an official blessing from the manufacturer.
However, things have changed. As of October 18th, the opening of digital locks for “retail-level commercial food preparation equipment” is now exempt from this DMCA rule. McDonald’s will now be able to hire from a larger group of people to fix their ice cream machines.
DMCA has allowed a lot of intellectual property owners to collect unearned rents while neglecting the needs of the customers who’ve bought, leased, or rented things that incorporate their IP.
Note, this is only an exemption to the rule. The rule itself has not changed. Second, other regulations still hamper McDonald’s franchise owners from fixing their own machines. As Chamberlain points out:
While it’s now legal to circumvent the digital locks on these machines, the ruling does not allow us to share or distribute the tools necessary to do so. This is a major limitation … few will be able to walk through it without significant difficulty.
It is still a crime for iFixit to sell a tool to fix ice cream machines, and that’s a real shame … Without these tools, this exemption is largely theoretical for many small businesses that don’t have in-house repair experts.
So your chance of getting a McFlurry has improved, but you can’t quite celebrate a total win yet.
The battle against these DMCA laws isn’t limited to ice cream machines. The “right to repair” movement spearheaded by organizations including iFixit has already battled for exemptions for medical devices, consumer devices like phones and tablets, vehicles, and assistive technologies for people with disabilities.
January 20, 2023
“… any association with Davos should put an individual or organization under notice of suspicion”
CDR Salamander wants to sign up — like so many of us — for a post-Davos world:
The whole World Economic Forum/Davos experience is one part Bond villain parody, one part clout seeking billionaires, one part megalomania, a heaping cup of greed, and a dash of rent seeking.
In 2023 things have reached the point where any association with Davos should put an individual or organization under notice of suspicion. Amazing to see people who claim to be American conservatives or lovers of liberty attending in an non-ironic, non-protesting capacity.
This wannabee gaggle of quasi-oligarchs and autocrat throne sniffers represents everything that is wrong with the human desire for control, power, and to crush the individual for fun and profit.
They pretend to be the world government in waiting that no one asked for, no one wants, and trust me on this — no one wants to live under. Being unaccountable to the people is their ideal state.
If you don’t know what I am referring to above, shame on you. Google it yourself, but I couldn’t help but giggle when I read the title from this article by Gideon Rachman at The Financial Times; Geopolitics threatens to destroy the world Davos made.
Really? It is? Then by all means let’s have MOAR!
…the 2023 WEF — the first to take place in its regular winter location since the pandemic began — could be seen as signalling a return to normalcy. However, China’s sudden abandonment of its zero-Covid policy has raised fears that a new wave of variants could emerge.
And, even if a fresh pandemic phase is avoided, Covid has left its mark on the way governments and businesses think about globalisation. The assumption that goods and commodities can always be shipped easily around the world has been shattered.
Except for the mentally fragile few and those who leverage power through them, the world is over COVID like it is over the flu. The last three years has been a clarifying event bringing in to stark relief those autocracy worshipers and hypocrites who hold individual rights in contempt. It also helped us see the existential danger a free people can face when they put themselves at the mercy of governments who see a crisis opening a door for an easy grasp at additional powers they will never want to give back.
The past the Davos set desired failed the future that is our present, but that doesn’t give pause to any of them. The Davos view of the future where everyone (except for those at the top) lives in a pod, eats bugs, owns nothing but is “happy” is at best dystopian, at worst justifies at some point if they are not stopped, open global revolt against the ruling class with all the violence and blood that comes with it.
[…]
Simply unacceptable in democratic nations that the will of the people might promote change in political leadership. Next thing you know, they might want even more free speech and redress of grievances.
Those world leaders who are present might do well to take the funicular up to the Schatzalp Hotel, which served as Mann’s model for the sanatorium in The Magic Mountain. The hotel’s view is the best in Davos — it may offer a chance for quiet reflection on how to prevent war and natural disaster from once again engulfing the global economy
Unspoofable.
Perhaps they should reflect on how they encouraged Russian aggression and European vulnerability to hydrocarbon blackmail? Should they take a moment to see how they look the other way as the PRC engages in wholesale oppression of their Muslim minority? Are they proud of their dividends derived from almost unimaginable levels of air and water pollution flowing out of PRC’s slave labor run factories?
Unlikely — they might miss out on the next party.
A post-Davos world?
How do we bring it here faster?
May 17, 2022
The Canadian government has a much more expansive view of “use of journalistic content” than most Canadians do
Michael Geist continues looking at the differences between what the Canadian government says they’re trying to do with their Online News Act (Bill C-18) and how the actual wording of the bill will operate:
Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.
But is it reasonable to legislate that posting a news headline constitutes making that news content available? Can Canada even do that and still remain compliant with international copyright laws under the Berne Convention which require countries to feature an exception for quotation? Indeed, international copyright law recognizes the critical importance of enabling quotation free from limitations as an essential element of expression, yet Bill C-18 adopts an approach that may violate that principle by requiring compensation for quotation.
Sub-section (b) moves far beyond reproduction into a realm that bears little resemblance to use or a reasonable definition of “making available”. It covers facilitating access to news by any means. In what way is facilitating access to news the same as making it available (much less using it)? A facilitating access to news standard is virtually limitless: newsstands, news screens in elevators or taxis, television manufacturers, or newspaper box makers can all be said to be facilitating access to news. The bill limits its scope to DNIs, but the policy principle that this bill is simply compensating for the use of content is twisted beyond all recognition.
In fact, it is clear that this extreme approach is precisely what the government intends. By citing examples such an indexing, aggregation or ranking of news content it is saying that virtually anything that a platform does – linking to news articles or merely to news organizations, indexing content at the request of the news organization (even if the actual content is not openly available as is the case with paywalled sites), or creating a list of news articles on a given topic are all “facilitating access to news content” which requires compensation.
Would Canadians agree that this link to the front page of the Globe and Mail is making the Globe‘s available? If this link appears on Google or Facebook, the government says that it is. If someone searches for newspapers in Montreal to learn more about developments in the city, is the list of newspapers in that city making the content available? Once again, the government says that it is.
The initial debate on Bill C-18 featured several interventions about the problems of misinformation. In light of the actual provisions in the bill, claims that it simply requires compensation for use might ironically be fairly characterized as misinformation. Unfortunately, the problematic claims associated with the bill don’t stop there as tomorrow’s post on market intervention will illustrate.
January 8, 2022
QotD: You can’t fight City Hall
My daughter’s home schooled. And generally, I ignore my city government because I have far bigger fish to fry (or I’m taking the coward’s way out, you may decide for yourself which). But because I’m willing to bet that one city government across this country is pretty much like another (they should all be given 24 hours to get out of town) and the trends they set have a regrettable tendency to spread upward and outward, I think it’s appropriate to discuss them from time to time, so that we’ll all have an idea of what we’re up against.
If it were only a matter of good old-fashioned Chicago-style graft, we could probably accept it philosophically. For example, say some city council somewhere passed a law that lawn sprinkling systems (which our hypothetical city government urged us to install because they save water) must now be inspected and a whopping fee collected for this “service”. Never mind that the Earth got along perfectly well for the last four and a half billion years without the fee-collecting lawn sprinkling system inspectors who lobbied for this law. What we have here (and as usual, employing government as a truncheon) is sheer, primitive, plug-ugly greed, which I happen to define as an inordinate and potentially violent desire for the unearned.
L. Neil Smith, “Feeding the Ducks”, Libertarian Enterprise, 1995-10-01.
September 18, 2020
From innovation to absolutism — English inventors and the Divine Right of Kings
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes looks at how innovations during the late Tudor and Stuart eras sometimes bolstered the monarchy in its financial battles with Parliament (which, in turn, eventually led to actual battles during the English Civil War):
King Charles I and Prince Rupert before the Battle of Naseby 14th June 1645 during the English Civil War.
19th century artist unknown, from Wikimedia Commons.
The various schemes that innovators proposed — from finding a northeast passage to China, to starting a brass industry, to colonising Virginia, or boosting the fish industry by importing Dutch salt-making methods — all promised to benefit the public. They were to support the “common weal”, or commonwealth. And to a certain extent, many projects did. The historian Joan Thirsk did much pioneering work in the 1970s to trace the impact of various technological or commercial projects, revealing that even something as mundane as growing woad, for its blue dye, could have a dramatic impact on local economies. With woad, the income of an ordinary farm labouring household might be almost doubled, for four months in the year, by employing women and children. In the late 1580s, the 5,000 or so acres converted to woad-growing in the south of England likely employed about 20,000 people. That may seem small today, but at a time when the population of a typical market town was a paltry 800 people, even a few hundred acres of woad being cultivated here or there might draw in workers from across the whole region. In the mid-sixteenth century, even the entire population of London had only been about 50-70,000. As Thirsk discovered, innovative projectors also sometimes fulfilled their other public-spirited promises, for example by creating domestic substitutes for costly imported goods, or securing the supplies of strategic resources.
But the ideal of benefiting the commonwealth could also, all too frequently, be elided with serving the interests of the Crown. Projectors might promise the monarch a direct share of an invention’s profits, or that a stimulated industry would result in higher income from tariffs or excise taxes. Increasingly, they proposed schemes that were almost entirely focused on maximising state revenue, with little evidence of new technology. They identified “abuses” in certain industries — at this remove, it’s difficult to tell if these justifications were real — and asked for monopolies over them in order to “regulate” them, then making money by selling licences. Last week I mentioned patents over alehouses, and on playing cards. They also offered to increase the income from the Crown’s property, for example by finding so-called “concealed lands” — lands that had been seized during the Reformation, but which through local resistance or corruption had ostensibly not been paying their proper rents. The projectors would take their share of the money they identified as “missing”. And they proposed enforcing laws, especially if the punishments involved levying fines or confiscating property. The projectors offered to find the lawbreakers and prosecute them, after which they’d take their share of the financial punishments.
Projectors thus came to present themselves as state revenue-raisers and enforcers, circumventing all of the traditional constraints on the monarch’s money and power. They provided an alternative to Parliaments, as well as to city corporations and guilds, in raising money and propagating their rule. Taking it a step further, projectors offered the tantalising possibility that kings like James I and Charles I might rule through proclamation and patents alone, without having to answer to anybody. They thus experimented with absolutism for much of 1610-40, only occasionally being forced to call Parliament for as briefly as possible when the pressing financial demands of war intervened.
In the process, with the growing multitude of projects — a few bringing technological advancement, but many merely lining the pockets of courtier and king — the designation “projector” became mud. It was as if, today, the Queen were to use her prerogative to grant a few of her courtiers monopolies on collecting all traffic fines, or litter penalties, to be rewarded solely on commission. Or if she were to award an unscrupulous private company the right to award all alcohol-selling licences (perhaps on the basis that underage drinking was becoming common). The country would soon be awash with hidden speed cameras and incognito litter wardens, and the price of alcohol would go through the roof. The people responsible would not be popular. A recent book by economic historian Koji Yamamoto meticulously charts the changing public perceptions of projects, describing the ways in which innovators then struggled, for decades, to regain the public’s trust.
August 20, 2020
QotD: Manipulating minimum wage laws to harm your competitors
The logic of such rent-creating legislation is plain: producer group A competes for many of the same customers against producer group B. Producer group A, however, uses for its production a mix of inputs (most importantly, capital and labor) that differs from the mix used by producer group B. Also, producer group B might compete most effectively against producer group A not by producing outputs as nearly identical as possible to that of A but, instead, by producing “substitute” goods or services that sell at prices lower than those charged by producer group A.
For example, producer group A might consist of locally owned restaurants with tablecloths and serving food freshly prepared by skilled chefs, while producer group B consists of chain restaurants serving food less exquisite but priced much lower. Members of producer group A are upset that producer group B is competing successfully for some diners who would likely otherwise eat more frequently at the restaurants of producer group A. What are the members of producer group A to do?
They could accept the fact that competition is not tortious — indeed, that economic competition is healthy for the economy at large — and do nothing other than compete harder to win more consumer patronage. That’d be the honest and honorable path to take. But government is in the picture, standing ready to escort those with little interest in honesty and honor down the rent-seeking path.
“So just pass legislation outlawing chain restaurants in our state,” suggests the leader of producer group A.
“Wish I could,” responds Sen. Slimey, “but that’s too blatant. Plus, it might not pass muster with the courts. But I’ve got an alternative plan that’s just as good.”
“Do tell!” exclaims the leader of producer group A.
“Well, I understand,” replies Sen. Slimey, “that the restaurants run by producer group B use many more low-skilled workers in their kitchens than your restaurants use.”
“That’s correct. We serve only fine food, so we hire experienced, high-skilled chefs, whose market wages are high.”
“So,” observes Sen. Slimey, “let’s enact a statute that raises the minimum wage above the average wage now paid to the average worker in producer group B’s restaurants, but lower than the average wage paid to workers in your — producer group A’s — restaurants.”
“Brilliant!” declares the leader of producer group A, who sees immediately that, while the minimum-wage legislation will on its face — de jure — apply to all restaurants, it will in fact have a differentially harsh effect on the restaurants in producer group B. The minimum wage will artificially raise producer group B’s costs of operation, causing them to reduce their outputs. One consequence of producer group B’s reduced outputs will be artificially increased demand for meals served at producer group A’s restaurants.
Sen. Slimey smiles, knowing that the news media, as well as most of the intellectuals in town, will applaud him for his apparent humanity and “Progressive” values. It’s a win-win for Sen. Slimey and for members of producer group A. And too few people will pay close-enough attention to the members, workers, and customers of producer group B to suspect that Sen. Slimey is anything other than a socially conscious public servant.
Don Boudreaux, “Doing Bad By Pretending to Do Good”, Café Hayek, 2018-05-13.
February 9, 2020
The lightbulb conspiracy again
I’ve banged on a few times over the years about lightbulbs, specifically about our government’s passionate desire for us to abandon the tried-and-tested (and cheap) incandescent bulbs to move first to (ultra-expensive, dim, and potentially dangerous) compact fluorescent bulbs and now to (cheaper, but still not living up to longevity promises) LED bulbs instead. Tim Worstall explains how governments were persuaded to enforce this crony capitalist plot over the years (he’s discussing the European market, but Canadian regulators were doing exactly the same thing):
We all recall when we used to use incandescent light bulbs. Simple, cheap, the result of a century’s worth of fiddling with the basic technology to make it around and about right for the use to which it was put.
A spiral compact fluorescent bulb (CFL).
Image by Sun Ladder via Wikimedia Commons.Then they were banned. Sure, there was that energy and thus planet saving argument but that was always very weak indeed. It was an excuse, not the actual reason itself. The reason was that the big three manufacturers, Phillips, Osram and GE, had invested heavily in the next generation of technology, compact fluorescents. These cost not pennies per bulb but pounds. Rather better profit margins that is. Oh, and also, not subject to that crippling competition from China.
So, we get the EU ban on incandescents, driven entirely by the manufacturers. There’s a lot of the Baptist and Bootlegger in here given the environmentalist support for it.
The problem with the technology being the use of mercury in those bulbs.
An aside, I made my living for a number of years selling weird metals that are added to that mercury. I do actually know quite a bit about the nuts and bolts here. I’m also out of the business and have been for a decade and more. So it’s knowledge driving this, not knife sharpening.
Mercury’s not good stuff to have floating around. So, what happens next? Yep, a decade or a bit more after the incandescents were banned so now they’re coming for the CFLs.
The mercury issue was not as well publicized here in Canada as it was in Australia, for example:
How many of them have looked up the Environment Department’s website to find what its bureaucrats falsely describe as the “simple and straightforward” precautions to take against poisoning should one of these lamps smash:
- Open nearby windows and doors to allow the room to ventilate for 15 minutes before cleaning up the broken lamp. Do not leave on any air conditioning or heating equipment which could recirculate mercury vapours back into the room.
- Do not use a vacuum cleaner or broom on hard surfaces because this can spread the contents of the lamp and contaminate the cleaner. Instead scoop up broken material (e.g. using stiff paper or cardboard), if possible into a glass container which can be sealed with a metal lid.
- Use disposable rubber gloves rather than bare hands.
- Use a disposable brush to carefully sweep up the pieces.
- Use sticky tape and/or a damp cloth to wipe up any remaining glass fragments and/or powders.
- On carpets or fabrics, carefully remove as much glass and/or powdered material using a scoop and sticky tape; if vacuuming of the surface is needed to remove residual material, ensure that the vacuum bag is discarded or the canister is wiped thoroughly clean.
- Dispose of cleanup equipment (i.e. gloves, brush, damp paper) and sealed containers containing pieces of the broken lamp in your outside rubbish bin – never in your recycling bin.
- While not all of the recommended cleanup and disposal equipment described above may be available (particularly a suitably sealed glass container), it is important to emphasise that the transfer of the broken CFL and clean-up materials to an outside rubbish bin (preferably sealed) as soon as possible is the most effective way of reducing potential contamination of the indoor environment.
September 29, 2019
QotD: Crony capitalists and corrupt politicians love tariffs
Many who agree with me here will nevertheless scold me for using, à la Bastiat, the provocative word “plunderers.” But I stick to my choice of words.
“Plunderers” is descriptive, for plunder is in fact what trade restrictions are all about. For two and a half centuries now we proponents of free trade have played mostly on the rhetorical turf of protectionists. On this turf there are language biases galore, such as “trade deficit,” a lowering of home-country tariffs described as “concessions” to foreign countries, the arrival in the home country of especially low-priced imports condemned as “dumping,” and, indeed, the word “protection” itself. Also, don’t forget the constant, clanking parade of inapposite military and sports metaphors.
For two and a half centuries now we proponents of free trade have typically treated the efforts of rent-seekers and rent-dispensers to portray their use of the state to enrich themselves at the expense of others with intellectual and moral respect. Why?
No one attempts to intellectually rationalize the theft and violence committed by street gangs. No one attempts to rationalize shoplifting, vandalism, armed robbery, arson, or rape. (It would, do note, be child’s play for a competent economics graduate student to develop a coherent theory of “optimal gang violence” that shows that, under just the right set of circumstances, there is an “optimal” amount of gang violence that improves the national welfare.) We call these destructive exercises of theft, coercion, and violence “theft,” “coercion,” and “violence.” We call these predatory activities what they really are.
By calling protectionism what it really is – the plunder of the many by the politically powerful few – we more vividly and widely expose protectionism’s ugly and cruel reality.
Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2019-08-04.
September 17, 2019
QotD: Rent-seeking
By the same token, the state’s personnel, seeing opportunities to sell favors, are just as likely to initiate the privilege-seeking process. In this sense, public choice scholars are right when they see the political arena as a series of exchanges. The big difference with the marketplace, however, is that in the political arena the largest group of people is forced to participate.
The bottom line on privilege-seeking, which should interest the left, is this: the people with the greatest access to power will not be those the left cares most about, but those who run Boeing and ExxonMobil and GE and Lockheed Martin. Wealth transfers will tend overwhelmingly to be upward.
Sheldon Richman, “TGIF: What the Left Should Like about Public Choice”, The Libertarian Institute, 2017-07-28.
August 1, 2019
QotD: Small government provides little scope for special interest lobbying
The growth of government, in turn, raises the payoff available to special interest groups. With a higher payoff to special interest groups, this encourages the formation of new special interest groups to share in the payoff. A larger government can support a larger number of special interest groups. Thus, as government grows, more special interest groups form. The formation of special interest groups in turn increases the demand for special interest legislation, cause a further growth in government spending.
Randy Holcombe, An Economic Analysis of Democracy, 1985.
May 20, 2019
A “cutting-edge mediaeval Catholic” view of the modern economy
David Warren explains some of his disquietude about our modern world:
Gentle reader may object that none of these entities is a government department, except insofar as it is the subject of taxes and regulations, and as it grows larger, an ever more formidable force in lobbying for subsidies and legislation favourable to itself. Objection sustained. Verily, this is just my point.
Each entity made its way until the gobbling by means of mass consumer advertising, in which morally illegitimate methods of persuasion — principally hype, actual lies, irrelevant claims and endorsements — are instrumental to sales success. Honest advertising (e.g. catalogues with exact descriptions) is theoretically possible but practically extinct; campaigns are based on the tawdry manipulation of human “perceptions” — behaviourist psychology at the level of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, but elaborately quantified, with financial and pricing arrangements factored in.
Indeed, one may link most disastrous marketing decisions to the decline of intuitive reasoning, as statistical reasoning takes its place. The manager who knows in his gut, from experience, what might work and what won’t, or can’t, is displaced by the young analyst with computer modelling skills and all the jargon of “science” to express the platitudes he was drip-fed in school.
But here, too, “private” and “public” enterprise are fully integrated. Both are adapted to the “planning” paradigm, and each is utterly dependent on the other, in what is misleadingly called “the mixed economy.” The critics of abstract Capitalism, on the one side, and abstract Socialism, on the other, draw a false contrast between two administrative orders, when they are both bureaucratic in nature, inhumanly oversized, and habitually dedicated to the pursuit of monopoly.
Several of the readers with whom I correspond are under the immovable impression that I am against making money, or improvements in technology, per se. In fact my outlook is cutting-edge mediaeval Catholic. The moral questions are instead such as, How is the money made? And, for what are the improvements to be used? As I must remind e.g. my Chief Texas Correspondent, I am not against electricity or indoor plumbing. But I am against worshipping such things, or making them the criteria for high civilization.
November 7, 2018
Quebec cabbies sue provincial government for declining revenues and lost capital cost due to Uber competition
William Watson makes the argument that it’s the ripped-off taxi customers who should be suing, not the cabbies:
There are at least two problems with the court case, one technical, one regarding fairness. The technical one: Cabbies want compensation for both declining revenue and the capital loss on their permits. But that’s double-counting. The permit is an entitlement to earn the revenues. Its value falls only because expected revenues have fallen. Give operators one or the other, if the law eventually says you must, but not both. They can have their compensation but not eat it, too.
The fairness question concerns where the taxi cartel’s surplus came from all these years, which is no mystery: It came from taxi users. But what are we, chopped liver? Why don’t we start a class action suit of our own to get back all the money ripped off from us over decades of artificially restricted taxi supply?
Basic fairness would certainly require that. Unfortunately, the law may not. The taxi drivers’ case against the government is that, despite statutes on the books about needing a taxi permit in order to provide taxi services, when Uber came along the government decided not to enforce the law. That created two classes of taxi driver: Uber drivers, whom the government turned a blind eye to, and regular taxi drivers, whom it continued to subject to close regulation. That double standard was an unfairness, yes, but a minor one compared to the long-lasting aggravated rip-off of consumers.
Bottom line: Taxi drivers lobby for and get a law allowing them to overcharge their customers. When in a bout of good policy sense (a “Taxi Spring” you might say) the government decides not to enforce it, the taxi drivers set about suing taxpayers instead. However unfair that may seem — and it’s exasperating! — I suppose, in the end, supply-and-demand must take notice of the principle of rule of law.
July 15, 2018
QotD: “Temporary” government programs
Obamacare will not collapse imminently — or maybe not even ever. But that is not because it is “working” as a public policy. Countries around the world have carried the husk of their far more socialized health-care systems for generations. Rent control, the minimum wage, and countless other economically ridiculous policies endure because they satisfy the political needs of politicians, bureaucrats, and a whole phylum of remora-like rent-seekers. That’s why Milton Friedman said, “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” He should know, given how it was basically his idea to implement tax-withholding from paychecks as a wartime measure.
You might say that these programs also help real people too. And that is true. But wealth distribution efforts always help someone. And those someones become vested interests who demand perpetuation of the status quo. If the federal government implemented a program to give every left-handed person in the country $20,000 a year free and clear (no doubt to compensate for the fact that such people are witches), you can be sure the Left Handed Association of America would work assiduously to protect their entitlement.
Jonah Goldberg, “The Consequences of Overpromising on Obamacare”, National Review, 2016-10-08.
June 30, 2018
QotD: In government regulations, complexity is a subsidy to existing companies
One of the major themes of the book I’m working on should be familiar to longtime readers of this “news”letter. It boils down to a simple insight: Complexity is a subsidy. The more complex you make the rules, the more you reward people with the cognitive, material, or social resources necessary to get around them. Big corporations tend not to object to more burdensome regulations because they can afford to comply with them. Dodd-Frank was great for the “too big to fail” crowd. But it has been murder on community banks that don’t have the resources to comply. As Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, put it:
It’s very hard for outside entrants to come in and disrupt our business simply because we’re so regulated. We hear people in our industry talk about the regulation, and they talk about it with a sigh about the burdensome of regulation. But in fact in some cases the burdensome regulation acts as a bit of a moat around our business.
But you’ve been hearing this stuff from me for years. Let’s get back to the arrogance thing. It seems to me a big part of the problem with progressive elites these days is that they lack self-awareness. That elites arrange affairs for their own self-interest is an insight that was already ancient when Robert Michels penned his Iron Law of Oligarchy. But ever since the progressives concocted their theories of “disinterestedness,” they’ve convinced themselves that they are not in fact a self-serving elite. Give feudal aristocrats their due: They were a self-dealing crop of rent-seekers and exploiters, but at least they were open about the fact that they believed they had a divine right to sit atop the social pyramid. Today’s progressive aristocracy is largely blind to the fact that their cult of expertise isn’t really about expertise; it’s about organizing society in a way that reinforces their status and power.
Well, most of them are blind to it. Occasionally the mask slips. Jonathan Gruber, one of the chief architects and financial beneficiaries of the health-care “reform,” told audiences that Obamacare was designed “in a tortured way” to hide the fact that “healthy people pay in and sick people get money.” They had to do it this way to get around the inconvenient “stupidity of the American voter.” A feudal lord who talked this way about his serfs wouldn’t get any grief for it. But in America such honesty gets you rendered an un-person.
Jonah Goldberg, “The Consequences of Overpromising on Obamacare”, National Review, 2016-10-08.
