Quotulatiousness

March 14, 2022

“Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover Warren Harding again …”

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Kind words for the oft-maligned 29th president of the United States? Daniel J. Mitchell is all over it:

Warren G. Harding, 14 June 1920.
Library of Congress control number 2016828156

Today, we’re going to celebrate the fiscal achievements of Warren Harding.

Most notably, as illustrated by this chart based on OMB data, he presided over a period of remarkable spending discipline.

Harding also launched very big — and very effective — reductions in tax rates.

And his agenda of less government and lower tax rates helped bring about a quick end to a massive economic downturn (unlike the big-government policies of Hoover and Roosevelt, which deepened and lengthened the Great Depression).

In an article for National Review last year, Kyle Smith praised President Harding’s economic stewardship.

    In a moment of national crisis, Warren G. Harding restored the economic health of the United States … America in 1921 was in a state of crisis, reeling from the worst recession in half a century, the most severe deflationary spiral on record … Unemployment, it is now estimated, stood somewhere between 8.7 and 11.7 percent as returning soldiers inflated the size of the working-age population.

    Between 1919 and August of 1921 the Dow Jones average plummeted 47 percent. Harding’s response to this emergency was largely to let the cycle play out … The recession ended in mid-year, and boom times followed. Harding and Congress cut federal spending nearly in half, from 6.5 percent of GDP to 3.5 percent. The top tax rate came down from 73 percent to 25, and the tax base broadened. Unemployment came down to an estimated 2 to 4 percent … Harding was a smashing success in a historically important role as the anti-Wilson: He restored a classically liberal, rights-focused, limited government, and deserves immense credit for the economic boom that kicked off in his first year and continued throughout the rest of the 1920s.

Smith’s article also praises Harding for reversing some of Woodrow Wilson’s most odious policies, such as racial discrimination and imprisoning political opponents (Wilson also had a terrible record on economic issues).

Of course, Harding’s term is much more often remembered for the scandals, and as most modern historians are far more interested in Woodrow Wilson’s bold progressivism they almost always decry Harding and then Coolidge for dismantling a lot of Wilson’s more enthusiastic progressive projects. Even H.L. Mencken — very much not a Wilson fan — found Harding to be not to his taste in turn:

On the question of the logical content of Dr. Harding’s harangue of last Friday, I do not presume to have views … But when it comes to the style of the great man’s discourse, I can speak with … somewhat more competence, for I have earned most of my livelihood for twenty years past by translating the bad English of a multitude of authors into measurably better English. Thus qualified professionally, I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and half a dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm … of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.

March 3, 2022

The amazing luck of Canada’s own cockwomble

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Larry Correia in his monthly round-up post:

C. Okay, the big one. WW3. Last time I did an update post about this I said I’m not an expert on global geopolitics, and unlike most of the internet I’m not going to pretend to be one. And the only thing I know about military issues is how the contracts work and how to fix the DOD’s terrible spreadsheets. So, just personal opinion, while recognizing my strategic limitations so all the self anointed Von Clauswitzes don’t come yell at me AGAIN, real brief version … fuck Vladmir Putin. I’m rooting for the little guy and I hope the clock is ticking towards when some oligarchs get pissed off enough Putin “commits suicide” by thirty rounds of 5.45 to the back or drinks a polonium milkshake.

C2. By root for, I mean I think we should have a 4 for $10 Javelin missile blow out sale. We’ve got ATGMS! We’ve got Stingers! We’ve got bombs and more bombs! You’ve got Russians? NOT ANYMORE! Because at Crazy Lockeheeds, everything must go!

C3. By root for, what I don’t mean is that I’m going to be a hypocritical scumbag like Stephen King, and expect my countrymen to kill and die so I can proclaim my virtue because I Care So Hard. If you feel that strongly there’s a Ukranian Foreign Legion and they’re taking volunteers … Oh wait … No. He didn’t mean like that. He meant your sons need to “take those punches” (i.e. get shot or burned to death). Not him.

[…]

E. On propaganda and the fog of war. Duh. Of course it exists. Its always existed. Every side does it. The internet just makes it faster.

However all those “legends” the deboonkers are so smugly debunking … You kind of miss the point. That emotional manipulation exists for a reason, and it’s important. You just need to try and recognized when it is aimed at swaying YOU, rather than to motivate the people doing the fighting.

[…]

O. Justin Trudeau is really super lucky WW3 rolled around to push his stupid doughy face out of the news cycle. Justin Trudeau makes Mitt Romney look like a vertebrate. What a scummy little wannabe tyrant.

P. But for Americans, the real lesson there is the tactics that dirt bag used against the people who stood up to him. In the old days they’d just kill you to shut you up. Now they freeze your bank accounts and make it so you can’t work or feed your family, until you comply. They take away your voice and your legal ability to push back, taking options off the table until only the worst apocalyptical options are left … and if you use those, then they’ve got an excuse to kill you.

P1. All of these effeminate little sneering leftists are one bad day away from being Pol Pot. All of them. Never forget that. Once they reveal who they are they need to be driven from office and never let anywhere near any sort of authority ever again. They will happily destroy you and everyone you love.

February 18, 2022

The “small fringe minority … holding unacceptable views” who can now have their bank accounts seized without recourse

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

Prime Minstrel Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act earlier this week, which gives the federal government the kind of powers previously reserved for wartime. Among other measures, it is claimed that the act gives the feds the power to have Canadian banks seize the accounts of Canadians holding unacceptable views. Even those of us who donated to the support of the trucker convoys in Ottawa and several border crossings are now “legally” able to be deprived of our property. This is far from the kind of free and democratic society most of us thought we inhabited before the public health crisis of the Wuhan Coronavirus somehow transmuted our country into a would-be dictatorship.

At Essays in Idleness, David Warren demands that we stop it now:

The idea that one has the right, under a “Charter”, to speak freely, demonstrate and protest, but not the right to occupy physical space and time, has long been apparent to persons of the cold-blooded, criminal disposition.

In this respect Justin Trudeau is hardly unique. Like, for instance, the New Zealish prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, he rose to his present eminence as the embodiment of an empathy, that was entirely fake. Indeed, he had no other skills or gifts, and like Miss Ardern, has only offered administrative incompetence. He is what we call “a nasty piece of work”.

He has now declared a national State of Emergency: because there are trucks parked illegally on Wellington Street in Ottawa. Had he been quicker with his proclamation, he could have mentioned a bridge in Windsor and border crossings in Manitoba and Alberta. But this would not have made his claim more plausible, as all the demonstrations were provocatively peaceful. The only chance of violence is to use force against them.

An economy is a controversial thing, for economic activity will often involve the use of space and time. For instance, truckers, and most others who are inclined to resist government “mandates”, are known to have bank accounts. They buy food to put in themselves, and fuel to put in their vehicles. By “freezing” these financial instruments, Trudeau vainly hopes to starve his opponents into panicked submission.

As Jen Gerson notes on Twitter, Canada is suffering a psychotic break. The technical term is “Bug Fuck Crazy”:

She continues:

I mean, perhaps this was inevitable. No country can be this uptight and stoic for so long without losing its collective bugfuck crazy mind eventually.

    @MacLeodKirk: Yeah, to be honest I’m rather tired of us measuring our level of excellence based on the batshit crazy happenings in the US.
    Perhaps we could aim just a tad bit higher?

The difference is that America can tolerate a certain baseline level of crazy. It’s like having an alcohol tolerance.

Canada, by comparison, is an 18-year-old Ontario girl crossing into Quebec and taking her first shot of Sourpuss right now. We can’t handle our shit.

“ALL OF YOU ARE ACTING LIKE CRAZY PEOPLE” she screamed into the Internet abyss before throwing her wine glass at the wall and disappearing for three days.

Earlier this week, the government’s spokesgoons in the media made not-so-veiled threats against the children of truckers and other supporters. On Thursday, Ottawa officially threatened to dognap any pets at the protest … for their own good, of course. Interestingly, Thursday was also the day that workers began to install a fence around the Parliament buildings, in imitation of the fortifications at the American Congress.

Malcom Kyeyune calls it “Justin Trudeau’s phoney dictatorship”:

When Justin Trudeau invoked emergency powers to quell protests against mandatory Covid-19 vaccinations this week, it was another sign that for Western liberal democracy, business as usual is over. This is the first time Canada’s Emergencies Act has ever been called upon by a Prime Minister. Its predecessor, the War Measures Act, was used three times: once for World War One, once for World War Two, and once to deal with a violent campaign of bombing, kidnapping, and murder by Quebecois separatists in 1970.

Yet Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergency Act is also a bizarre moment. Consider that the law stipulates that the government can fine people violating the act between 500 and 5,000 dollars. On the face of it, these are not numbers that seem commensurate to punish violators of the most powerful emergency law in the Canadian state’s armoury. But the reason these numbers seem so strange is simple: the law hasn’t been updated to keep up with the times, or inflation.

The oddness doesn’t end there. A law that in a real sense was forgotten — and designed to handle the most extreme situations a nation state can find itself in — is now dredged up to deal with a fairly routine political protest. Trudeau, and his finance minister Chrystia Freeland, have also called on financial institutions to freeze or suspend any bank accounts without a court order if they are being used to fund the protests. They believe, as David Frum writes in The Atlantic, that the truckers represent a “form of performative intimidation”.

Compared to the mass burning and vandalism of Catholic Churches in Canada last summer — which Trudeau both denounced and sympathised with, calling the arsons “understandable” at one point — the truckers hardly represent a nadir of public order. Across the border in the United States, the rioting that occurred there in the summer of 2020 involved loss of life, and massive damage to property. Back then Kamala Harris’s response was markedly similar to that of Trudeau — hand-wringing, sure, but also sympathy with the motivations of those who rioted.

Perhaps buildings being burned down, sometimes with their occupants still inside them, is just part and parcel of living in a vibrant democracy. Meanwhile, a protest that has led to zero loss of life and no torched buildings is cast as a grave threat to democracy. Put up bouncy castles for kids to play in and have public barbecues, as the truckers have done? Then, in the words of the New York Times‘ editorial board, you are “far-Right”, and represent a “test of democracy” itself.

Or you will be accused of “sedition” by the usually phlegmatic Mark Carney. The former Bank of England governor may support Trudeau’s use of emergency powers, but by all indications it is a spectacularly ill-conceived move. Many provincial leaders are already openly rejecting the necessity of such extreme measures.

Kim du Toit responds to a rant by one of Sarah Hoyt’s contributors:

As I see it, most ordinary Americans — if faced with the choice — would rather go to war against our own government than against Canada, present company included.

And as Mr. Free Market put it to me during a semi-drunken phone call last night: how bad does the Canadian government have to be, to have pissed off the nicest, politest people on the planet?

They’re so nice that SoyBoy Trudeau is highly unlikely to have a Ceaușescu Moment, even though it could be argued that he deserves one

As always, Canadians love it when foreigners (especially Brits and Americans) call us “nice” and “polite” … it shows they don’t follow hockey or know many actual Canadians. Canadians are polite, generally, but it’s a kind of passive-aggressive niceness that can snap unexpectedly under sufficient provocation, then the gloves come off and there’s blood on the ice. That last bit is only sometimes metaphoric.

December 4, 2021

Things I never expected to read on the CBC website — “…frantically firing up the gaslights and moving the goalposts on COVID restrictions and vaccinations”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Canada’s state broadcaster has been — as you would expect — a staunch supporter of every government initiative to limit free speech and the rights of Canadians in tackling the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic. They’ve consistently portrayed any concerns or doubts about draconian government action as irrational, anti-science conspiracy theories and the people raising such concern as effectively “enemies of the people”. As such, I never expected to see anything like this CBC Opinion piece by Allan Richarz:

Listen closely and one might be able to discern the unmistakable sounds of our elected and unelected officials frantically firing up the gaslights and moving the goalposts on COVID restrictions and vaccinations.

It was a precipitous but inevitable shift from “two weeks to flatten the curve” to get the jab or lose your job, and unsurprisingly, there is still more to come.

Met the provincial vaccination targets? Great; but now it’s time for a booster. Ready for the “temporary” vaccine passport system to expire? Sorry, we need to extend it through spring; proving once again that if you give the government an inch on your rights, they will go for the mile every time.

Less than a year ago, government and public health officials touted vaccination as a panacea to end the pandemic. It’s safe, effective and will allow the country to put COVID behind us, we were told. To that end, citizens were encouraged, prodded and eventually threatened to get their shots, with holdouts demonized by politicians at all levels. Yet, in Ontario, even as the province exceeded by weeks its vaccination and case number targets of the government’s phased reopening plan, citizens were offered only breadcrumbs in return: moving up Phase 3 reopening by just a few days, with no plans at the time for a complete reopening.

And now, with new case numbers in Ontario essentially split evenly between the unvaccinated and fully vaccinated and questions about waning vaccine efficacy, the goalposts shift again with the rollout of booster shots elsewhere in the country and calls for expanded eligibility.

One does not need to look hard to guess what the next step will be across Canada. In Israel and France, the definition of fully vaccinated was changed to include boosters; those six months out from their second dose, or first booster, are now considered unvaccinated, and their vaccine passport privileges suspended.

H/T to SDA for the link.

December 2, 2021

If there are no restrictions on voting age, what other expansions of the franchise might amuse the Supreme Court of Canada?

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

In Wednesday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh suggests that, given the SCC’s demonstrated preference for getting rid of restrictions on voting rights, we may be in for some interesting legal times:

A band of plucky teens, we are told, are suing to have Canada’s voting age lowered. They are not the first to try, and it goes without saying that the youngsters are a front for a gaggle of do-gooder groups who think that it would somehow purify our democracy in the fires of justice if 16-year-olds could vote. NP Platformed thinks this is a terrible idea that has logical problems on its face. If the age-18 voting limitation can’t be defended, how can any such limit be defended?

Rest assured that the grown-up lobbyists who have a sore bum about the voting age won’t be recruiting four-year-old boys to articulate their cause or serve as litigants. It will all be photogenic, politically sophisticated, fantastically unrepresentative teenagers.

But let’s set the snark aside for a moment. You may be asking, as we here at NP Platformed world headquarters did, how a charter challenge to the voting age can happen at all. Surely there’s solid caselaw about this? If you look into the matter, as we did, you might find yourself saying “Uh oh.” As we did.

The most revealing discussion we could find is tucked away in a footnote in a 2019 paper by University of Ottawa Prof. Michael Pal. Within this wad of small print, Prof. Pal outlines the whole issue. The charter says flat out that “Every citizen of Canada” has the right to vote in elections, and various species of legal voting disability have been removed over time, leaving persons under 18 as the only citizens within Canada who cannot exercise this right.

[…]

“The analogy between youth voting restrictions and inmate disenfranchisement breaks down because the type of judgment Parliament is making in the two scenarios is very different. In the first case, Parliament is making a decision based on the experiential situation of all citizens when they are young. It is not saying that the excluded class is unworthy to vote, but regulating a modality of the universal franchise. In the second case, the government is making a decision that some people, whatever their abilities, are not morally worthy to vote — that they do not ‘deserve’ to be considered members of the community and hence may be deprived of the most basic of their constitutional rights. But this is not the lawmakers’ decision to make.”

We’re just gonna say it: “regulating a modality of the universal franchise” is drivel. If this is the bedrock on which age restrictions on voting rest, age restrictions on voting are in trouble.

The constitutionality of a voting age was also discussed in the Supreme Court’s 2019 Frank case, which annihilated the voting eligibility restrictions for Canadian citizens living abroad. In that case it was dissenters, specifically justices Suzanne Côté and Russell Brown, who brought the matter up. If legislatures can’t restrict the voting rights of Canadians who have been living in Cucamonga or Timbuktu, how can they impose any limit at all?

The dissenting pair quietly pointed out (at paragraph 144) that the phrase “regulating a modality” is gaseous nonsense, and that the Supreme Court, in its endless lust for making the franchise more inclusive, seems to have made any restrictions at all untenable. (Why, indeed, should the franchise be limited to citizens? Municipalities are already asking this question!)

November 6, 2021

QotD: Michael Bellesisles

Filed under: Books, Education, History, Politics, Quotations, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… I offered a very limited defense of the History Biz. It’s not just that they’re rabid Leftists, I said. I mean, yeah, they are, no denying that, but outright “writing the conclusion before you even start asking the question”-type fraud, Michael Bellesisles-type fraud, is a lot rarer than you probably think.

Bellesisles, you might recall, is the guy whose revolutionary revisionist thesis was that the Founders weren’t really all that enthusiastic about guns, and didn’t own that many, and that whole 2nd Amendment thing was just an afterthought. Yeah, right. That one was written conclusion first, and since no remotely objective look at the evidence could ever possibly support it, he resorted to making lots of “evidence” up. But the reaction of the rest of the profession was interesting: They lauded Bellesisles to the skies. He won the Bancroft Prize for his work, which is the biggest one you can get in American history. Now, I’m sure you’re saying “of course they praised him, he was telling them exactly what they wanted to hear!”, and you’re right …

… but only to a point. Because eggheads are — as you might imagine — the pettiest, most envious bunch of little bitches this side of a junior high cheerleading squad, there’s no piece of research so meticulous, no conclusion so solid, that someone isn’t going to tear into it in one of the professional journals, for base personal reasons if no other. Lest you think I’m kidding, I personally know of a woman at a big league school whose husband was seduced, and her marriage ruined, by an open, obnoxious lesbian colleague, all because she, the hetero, had dared to question some of the lesbian’s work at a conference in their mutual field.

That’s the level of pettiness we’re dealing with here. And I can’t say for absolute certain that Bellesisles received no criticism whatsoever; he doesn’t work in my field, so even though I was certain that Arming America was bullshit of the purest ray serene, it wasn’t my problem, professionally speaking. But whatever, point is, in my fairly well-informed opinion, merely “telling them what they want to hear” doesn’t account for the entire profession ignoring the huge, blinking, neon red flags surrounding Arming America. Rather, I suggest it’s more of a Pauline Kael thing.

I actually kinda pity Kael — much like John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, she was a fairly big wheel back in her day, but if she’s known at all now, it’s for something entirely peripheral to her life’s work. In Kael’s case, it’s her declaration that it was impossible for Richard Nixon to have won in 1972, since “nobody I know voted for him” (it was one of the biggest blowouts in American electoral history). The Arming America thing is, I think, like that — nobody in academia owns a gun, or knows anyone who owns a gun, or knows anyone who knows anyone who owns a gun. So, yeah, they know all the scary statistics about how there are sixty gorillion more guns than people in America, but all of that iron belongs to the Dirt People, far away over the horizon. They’d never in a million years even be in the same zip code as someone who thinks Arming America was absurd on its face. Hence, it never occurred to them to question it.

It helped that Bellesisles was telling them what they wanted to hear, no doubt, but the main reason nobody challenged it was that they lacked the cognitive toolkit to even consider the possibility he might be wrong.

Severian, “Are They Trying to Lose?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-15.

October 22, 2021

Explaining why British police clearly favour road-blocking protestors over the rights of ordinary Britons

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Andrew Tettenborn believes it can be traced back to a change in the oath that new police constables take and the changed emphasis in police training to support that change:

Metropolitan Police at G20 protests in London, 2009-04-01
Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Last week Insulate Britain magnanimously announced it would suspend its forcible road-blocking campaign. Apart from noting the impudence of this announcement (remember the IRA sanctimoniously calling its Christmas ceasefires, as if this were something we should be grateful for?), commentators on Twitter, the tabloid press and indeed many of the general public, have found another question troubling. Why, in the face of deliberate criminality aimed at discommoding ordinary people (most of whom will have been less well-off than many of the protesters), did the police hold back, at times apparently chatting with the obstructionists and threatening with arrest any exasperated driver who tried to take steps to remove them? We aren’t told, but we can make some educated guesses.

[…]

Nearly twenty years ago in 2002, there was a subtle, little-reported but very symbolic change in the oath sworn by all constables on appointment. Instead of the 19th century undertaking to serve the Queen “without fear or favour, malice or ill-will” in the course of keeping the peace and preventing crime, there is now a much more tendentious promise preceding the duty to keep the peace: namely, to act with “fairness, integrity, diligence and impartiality, upholding fundamental human rights and according equal respect to all people”. This requirement, thoroughly reflected as it is in police training today and imbued in policing culture, has two effects.

One is that all officers must keep at the front of their minds not only the law of the land but also two other guidelines: considerations of fairness and equality (whatever those mean), and human rights laws — something peculiarly complex and frequently opaque, even to lawyers. Human rights laws involve a subtlety well beyond the average constable called out to police a tense situation. Put yourself in the position of a policeman, faced with a choice whether to intervene in a case involving illegality and an intent to inconvenience people, but where no-one is actually engaging in violence — exactly the situation with Insulate Britain or Extinction Rebellion. You might well think that, if you wish to avoid future trouble and possible complaints of discrimination or unfairness, discretion and inaction would be the better part of valour.

Thanks to the pervasiveness of human rights culture, the constable’s traditional function of upholding the law ceases to be a black-and-white matter, and becomes a potential mire of conflicting duties. Even if the letter of the law says you should arrest a middle-aged protester or at least drag them off the M25 to prevent them obstructing it, there is always a possibility that someone somewhere will hold that this was contrary to their human rights. Once again, a cautious police officer intent on avoiding disciplinary hearings and a possible black mark, may well conclude that it is better to let sleeping dogs lie (at least for the moment), condone the illegality and avoid possible violence.

The police constable on the scene is extremely well advised to avoid doing anything that might possibly be construed as infringing on the human rights of everyone at the scene, for fear of becoming the scapegoat if clever lawyers convince a judge or jury that the police acted contrary to their revised oath.

September 24, 2021

QotD: The LGBT advocacy group Stonewall proves Hoffer right — “every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Health, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There is a law of nature that governs campaigning groups and charities, which is that an organisation set up to deal with a particular problem will always find a way to exist even after that problem has been addressed.

The reason is simple: by the time an issue has been solved, or almost solved, the business is at its peak. Employees’ salaries and pensions are at stake, reputations have been built and influence has been secured. And so it is that Eric Hoffer’s great insight is fulfilled: every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket.

Very few causes have degenerated into a racket so completely as the former gay-rights group known as Stonewall. When it was founded in 1989, gay rights in Britain, as across Europe, had some way to go to reach equality. Back then, there was a different age of consent for homosexuals and heterosexuals, homosexuals did not have the right to marry or to have their partnerships legally recognised and, most pertinently, a Conservative government had made it impossible for young gay people to be in any way informed about their sexuality during their time at school.

There was certainly a long way to go, and Ian McKellen, Matthew Parris, Simon Fanshawe and the rest of the group’s founders faced an uphill battle for many years. But it was a battle which they helped to win.

Once most of their objectives had been achieved, though, what were Stonewall to do? There were several options in front of them. The most obvious, one might think, would have been to scale down and remain in place to deal with residual issues, such as the existence of homophobia in schools and other remaining pockets of society.

Douglas Murray, “How Stonewall sacrificed gay rights”, UnHerd, 2021-05-25.

August 9, 2021

The modern-day threat of being made an “unperson” is real and very dangerous

Filed under: Britain, Business, Economics, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sean Gabb explains why even libertarians need to consider the non-state power in the hands of corporations that can — and does — force people out of their jobs, their homes, and even deprive them of the ability to communicate or to access financial services merely for expressing unpopular opinions. As I said in a different venue, it’s a short step from “no fly lists” to “no eat lists”, especially when the enforcing entity is a nominally private organization:

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

The old pressures to conform were wrong. So are the new. And they are wrong simply because they are pressures to conform. I find myself at last appreciating a part of Mill’s essay On Liberty for which I never used to have much time. Until recently, I would insist that the only real oppression was by the State: all else was the working of private choice. If the authorities fined a man £5 for having sex with another man, that was outrageous tyranny. If his tastes became public knowledge, and he was unable to find work, that was merely unfortunate. This is, I still believe, essentially true. Indeed, I could argue that, without a State having centralised and corporatised powers of discrimination that ought to be widely distributed, there would be no problem — or there would be a problem that was bearable. But these powers were centralised and corporatised a long time ago. They are now being used to achieve a uniformity of opinion outside the home in which the formal organs of compulsion have no obvious part. This is not the “tyranny of the majority” that worried Mill. I find it inconceivable that anything close to a majority could believe the insane drivel pouring from the regime media. Neither, though, is it the kind of oppression against which liberal bills of rights have traditionally been written. Because of this —

    when society is itself the tyrant …, its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them …

    (J.S. Mill On Liberty, 1859, “Introductory“)

We need protection indeed. But the protection we need is not yet another law telling the police to leave dissidents alone. We already have a stack of these, and they are protections against a threat that largely does not exist. The answer, I suggest, is an amendment to the anti-discrimination laws to outlaw discrimination on the grounds of what may be loosely called political opinion.

I say hardly anyone read my original essay. Sadly, most of those who did read it stand in the more wooden reaches of the libertarian movement, and these set up a cry that I had become a Communist. I was suggesting that private organisations should be coerced in their choices of whom and whom not to employ, and even in their choices of customer and supplier. I had abandoned the non-aggression principle. Here, briefly expressed, is my answer to these claims.

I run the Centre for Ancient Studies. This provides a range of tuition services in Greek and Latin. It is a sole tradership. As such, I reserve the unconditional right to decide what services I offer and to whom. If I dislike the colour of your face, or the status of your foreskin, or your tastes in love, or anything else that I may think relevant, it should be my right not to do business with you. It may be that only a fool turns away customers with money to spend, and I am not that sort of a fool. Even so, I do claim at least the theoretical right, and I ground it on my right to do as I please with my own. But I claim these rights as a human individual. A limited company is not a human individual. Whatever entrepreneurship may exist in them, these companies are artificial persons and creatures of the State. Their owners have the privilege of limited liability. That is, they have the right, in the event of insolvency, not to pay the debts of a company if these are greater than the assets of the company. If this were not a valuable right, there would not be so many limited companies. There are almost no large companies, and none lasting more than a single generation, that do not have limited liability.

This being so, limited companies benefit from a grant of privilege from the State, and are legitimate subjects of regulation by the State for as long as they are receipt of this privilege. No doubt, some forms of state regulation are bad in their objects, or bad as regards the means to their objects. But regulation is not in itself an aggression by the State. It follows that, whether or not we can get it, libertarians should not feel barred from demanding laws to prevent limited companies from discriminating against their employees on the grounds of political opinion, and to require them to do business with customers and suppliers regardless of political opinion.

I appreciate that I am asking for more than the regulation of limited companies. The anti-discrimination laws we have make no distinction between incorporated and unincorporated associations. Even so, the extension of these laws to cover political opinion would mainly affect only the larger limited companies. At the same time, there is an obvious and overriding public interest in the protection of political opinion. People are now scared to speak their minds. Whether intended or just revealed, this is part of the strategy. The reason why the collapse of both freedom and tradition is gathering pace is because no one dares stand up and protest. In the absence of protest, everything will carry on as it is. Given a restored right of protest, there is a chance of stopping the collapse. The only way to lift the blanket of fear that now lies over all but approved opinion is somehow or other to get a law making it clear that no one who speaks his mind can be loaded with shadow punishments.

“Somehow or other!” In a sense, I am making a fool of myself. I am asking the politicians to make a law against what they themselves may not be doing, but that has no effect on their main reason for being in politics, which is to fill their pockets. I am asking them to take on the entire mass of the non-elected Establishment. I am asking a lot of these people. On the other hand, the politicians still need to be elected, and that was the weak point in the Establishment’s plan to stay in the European Union. We had to spend four years voting and revoting, but we did eventually get what we wanted. It is conceivable that, if enough of us call loudly enough for protection, some kind of protection will be granted.

Short of that, we are lost.

June 19, 2021

Proposed new firearms rules “… are ultimately unenforceable, and […] they are dangerous end-runs around due process that threaten fundamental rights”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

J.D. Tuccille reports on the latest US federal government proposals on changes to firearm regulations:

As expected, the Biden administration released proposed new rules for pistol braces and model legislation for “red flag” laws that make it easier to confiscate privately owned firearms. Also as expected, the proposals are ludicrous. On the one hand, they are pointless and nitpicky rules that are ultimately unenforceable, and on the other hand they are dangerous end-runs around due process that threaten fundamental rights. Taken together, they illustrate the unserious nature of gun regulations which are crafted more to appeal to political audiences than to achieve positive results.

The silliness inherent in this sort of rulemaking is apparent from the Department of Justice’s announcement of “a notice of proposed rulemaking that makes clear that when individuals use accessories to convert pistols into short-barreled rifles, they must comply with the heightened regulations on those dangerous and easily concealable weapons.”

For those new to this controversy, stabilizing braces were developed to help disabled veterans more accurately shoot pistols (usually those built around AR-15 receivers) one-handed. The “problem” is that many resemble shoulder stocks and can be used in that role. By no means does an attachment that lets a pistol be fired from the shoulder make it especially “dangerous and easily concealable.” Instead, it makes it less concealable since it has a brace sticking off the back. Braces do render pistols more accurate, which could be interpreted as dangerous if you’re upset by shooters hitting where they aim.

But a pistol that can be fired from the shoulder is arguably a short-barreled rifle under the National Firearms Act (NFA), and subject to special restrictions, taxes, and registration requirements that don’t apply to regular pistols or regular rifles, but do apply to (among other weapons) rifles with barrels shorter than 16 inches. These regulations are not evidence that short-barreled rifles are particularly dangerous, but that, like many laws, the NFA is thoroughly idiotic.

Braces have been treated as legal devices for years but have recently been targeted by the sort of people who see advantage in pretending that a firearm with a buttstock and a short barrel is more “dangerous and easily concealable” than stock-less pistols and long-barreled rifles. In compliance with White House direction, proposed rules from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) would impose new requirements to determine if braced pistols achieve Great Pumpkin-level sincerity, or are super-dangerous and concealable short-barreled rifles in disguise.

Among other tests, the rule would set the maximum length of a pistol at 26 inches (because 27 inches is super-dangerous and concealable). These tests add up to a four-point assessment, ranging from “1 point: Minor Indicator (the weapon could be fired from the shoulder)” to “4 points: Decisive Indicator (the weapon is designed and intended to be fired from the shoulder)” with four points the ultimate sign that a firearm crosses the line into very naughty territory indeed.

[…]

But foolish stabilizer brace rules affect mostly disabled shooters and fanciers of a particular type of firearm. Red flag laws affect potentially any gun owner by allowing for property seizures and confrontations with law enforcement without due process.

Red flag laws “make it easier for states to craft ‘extreme risk protection orders’ authorizing courts to temporarily bar people in crisis from accessing firearms,” insists the Department of Justice. “By allowing family members or law enforcement to intervene and to petition for these orders before warning signs turn into tragedy, ‘extreme risk protection orders’ can save lives.”

Maybe such orders “can save lives”—all sorts of restrictions on personal liberty theoretically “can save lives” if that’s your only criteria. But the model legislation proposed by the Biden administration requires same-day issuance of orders that “prohibit the respondent from possessing, using, purchasing, manufacturing, or otherwise receiving a firearm” with a hearing to be held only after the fact. That certainly deprives those affected of their rights without due process of any sort before cops show up on their doorsteps to search the premises and confiscate property.

March 31, 2021

QotD: The first and only “inalienable” right

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

Oversimplifying a bit for clarity, “republican” political philosophy after Hobbes is an attempt to use Hobbes’s tools and methods without arriving at his conclusions. That baloney about “inalienable rights” in the US Declaration of Independence is the most famous of these attempts. If you want to know how we got from there to here – from the Founders to the Tyranny of the Intersectional Genderfluids – just recall what those supposedly “inalienable” rights are: Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of Happiness.

It would’ve been far better to have kept the trio in Locke’s original words – life, liberty, and property – but even that wouldn’t have saved us, because the proposition is flawed from the beginning. The full quote is:

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness …

… and pretty much all of that is wrong.

As we’ve seen, it was a major part of Hobbes’s project to prove that men do in fact have such rights, because it’s not at all “self-evident.” That was the whole point of the Wars of Religion – heretics have NO rights, because they have put themselves beyond the pale of the human community. For the Wars of Religion to end, political legitimacy had to be secularized.

That was Hobbes’s goal. That’s what the “State of Nature” thought experiment was about. Does man has any rights in himself, that flow only from his existence as a human being? In other words, does he have rights NOT endowed by his Creator?

Hobbes argued that we DO have such rights, of course … but, crucially, we only have the full exercise of them in the State of Nature. For Hobbes, all rights are, at bottom, the right to self-defense. Getting out of the State of Nature involves laying at least part of that right down – “alienating” it, in the Latinate English of the 17th century – creating in the process a “corporate person” who “represents” us all. Far from being “inalienable,” then, Life and Liberty, at least, have to be alienated, at least to some degree, if civilization is to exist at all …

… at least according to Hobbes, and do you see what I mean about people trying to adopt his terms while dumping his conclusions?
Hobbes had plenty of examples to hand, writing as he was in the last, nastiest phase of the Wars of Religion. According to Hobbes, the Leviathan – who, let’s recall, can be a Senate or something just as easily as a monarch – absolutely has the right to your life and liberty, since your voluntary surrender of them is what creates the Leviathan in the first place. How else could wars be fought in the gunpowder age? A medieval king leading his personal affinity into battle didn’t have to worry about political theory. An Early Modern king, fielding armies of tens of thousands, did. Without an animating ideology, they’re just mercenaries – ask Machiavelli how that works out.

We’ll skip over that “pursuit of happiness” crap, since that’s probably just Jefferson’s noodle-headed way of alluding to Classical political theory, and circle back to the start: “all men are created equal.” As we’ve seen, this was central to Hobbes’s “State of Nature” thought experiment … but, as is obvious to anyone with real-world experience, it only applies there.

Severian, “Hobbes (II)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-11.

January 20, 2021

“Canada Post … is not to act as the censor of mail or to determine the extent of freedom of expression in Canada”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Colby Cosh on a recent incident in Regina where a Canada Post employee took it upon himself to act as a local censor for people on his delivery route:

Today’s idiot of the day is not, perhaps surprisingly, the Regina postman who got suspended for refusing to deliver the Epoch Times, the oddball anti-communist newspaper that’s affiliated with China’s persecuted Falun Gong religious movement. Don’t get us wrong: Ramiro Sepulveda is clearly a bit of a nitwit. He seems to believe that a newspaper founded by commie-hating Chinese-Americans is designed to provoke hatred toward “Asian communities in North America.”

Sepulveda didn’t want to deliver free copies of the Times to non-soliciting customers because it “spits lies.” Perhaps regrettably, the strong reaction by Canada Post means that our junk mail, quite a lot of which consists of boastful missives from politicians, is not destined to be fact-checked and aggressively suppressed by the corporation’s rank and file.

Sepulveda was properly punished for not doing his job. And Canada Post used the opportunity to promote its content-neutrality as an agent of the state, although it did not quite dare to use the phrase “statutory monopoly.” In a statement to the broadcasters who reported on Sepulveda’s off-piste personal fact-checking, the agency said: “Canada Post is obligated to deliver any mail that is properly prepared and paid for, unless it is considered non-mailable matter. The courts have told Canada Post that its role is not to act as the censor of mail or to determine the extent of freedom of expression in Canada.”

They might have added that access to the mail has been denied to individuals for spreading hatred only a handful of times in the history of the country; this, too, is as it ought to be, and it is certainly not postal employees who ought to be improvising such bans. Ideally, all postmen would be doing their best not to create the suspicion that they are eyeballing what is sent to our homes with the intention of ringing up a reporter and causing a fuss. Say what you like about these poor toilers: most of them never give us any reason to doubt their discretion.

November 18, 2020

The Consumer Privacy Protection Act

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Michael Geist looks at Bill C-11, which was introduced by Navdeep Bains on Tuesday:

Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.

Canada’s privacy sector privacy law was born in the late 1990s at a time when e-commerce was largely a curiosity and companies such as Facebook did not exist. For years, the privacy community has argued that Canada’s law was no longer fit for purpose and that a major overhaul was needed. The pace of reform has been frustrating slow, but today Innovation, Science and Industry Minister Navdeep Bains introduced the Consumer Privacy Protection Act (technically Bill C-11, the Digital Charter Implementation Act), which represents a dramatic change in how Canada will enforce privacy law. The bill repeals the privacy provisions of the current Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and will require considerable study to fully understand the implications of the new rules.

This post covers six of the biggest issues in the bill: the new privacy law structure, stronger enforcement, new privacy rights on data portability, de-identification, and algorithmic transparency, standards of consent, bringing back PIPEDA privacy requirements, and codes of practice. These represent significant reforms that attempt to modernize Canadian law, though some issues addressed elsewhere such as the right to be forgotten are left for another day. Given the changes – particularly on new enforcement and rights – there will undoubtedly be considerable lobbying on the bill with efforts to water down some of the provisions. Moreover, some of the new rules require accompanying regulations, which, if the battle over anti-spam laws are a model, could take years to finalize after lengthy consultations and (more) lobbying.

August 24, 2020

How to rectify a serious error the Founding Fathers made in the US Constitution

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

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith suggests that despite his respect for the founding fathers, they made a couple of serious mistakes in drafting the Constitution and it needs fixing quickly:

Founders’ Mistake Number Two: lies in the enumeration of the powers of Congress, to wit:

    “They [congress] shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.”

With those fifty-four words, the Founding Fathers gave birth to a permanent criminal class, as surely as the city councils of Seattle, Minneapolis. Philadelphia, New York, and Portland. Even “treason, felony, and breach of the peace” are for all practical purposes excepted, now, or three quarters of these miscreants would be languishing in prison. That heinous, stupid clause must be repealed or rewritten at once.

For many years, I have advocated reopening Alcatraz strictly for government criminals, although lately it occurs to me that Antarctica might be even better. Cash-poor Russia and the other two-for-a-nickel satrapies that lay claim to slivers of that frozen continent would give them up for thirty-seven cents and a good bus token. And I kind of like the ring of “McMurdo Sound Federal Penitentiary”.

But, as usual, I have, once again, digressed.

Another cure — with similar delightfully frostbitten consequences — might be to incorporate United States Code, Sections 241 and 242 directly into the Bill of Rights, probably as Amendment Zero. They establish the crimes of depriving folks of their rights “under color of law”, conspiring to deprive them of their rights under color of law, and prescribe extremely specific penalties.

To my knowledge, those laws are never properly applied, and that is a travesty and a tragedy. Make them an Amendment, and they might prove more effective. I would consider every American deprived of his or her rights to represent a separate punishable offense. How about three billion years in the freeze-dried slammer, Nancy, for your decades of malfeasance, misfeasance, nonfeasance, upfeasance, and downfeasance as a member in evil standing of the Viet Congress?

August 23, 2020

The right of asylum

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall is writing here about the situation in the United Kingdom, with would-be asylum claimants risking their lives to cross the English Channel so they can legally claim asylum in Britain, but exactly the same situation should apply with claimants entering Canada from the United States:

An asylum seeker, crossing the US-Canadian border illegally from the end of Roxham Road in Champlain, NY, is directed to the nearby processing center by a Mountie on 14 August, 2017.
Photo by Daniel Case via Wikimedia Commons.

Everyone at even risk – let alone reality – of substantial discrimination in their home country has the right, the right, to asylum. This is one of those international things that we should indeed agree with too. Few of us have anything but contempt for those who wouldn’t let Holocaust fleeing Jews (and or gypsies, gays, whatever, it’s just that we have substantial documented evidence about Jews who were turned away) tarnish their national doormats. Few of us think those who abused such limitations are anything but heroes. I even know of one monk who married Jewesses multiple times to bring them out by train. Umm, married multiple people, not one many times. People working within the too restrictive rules even gave us one of the finest moments of TV ever.

So, asylum, good thing.

And here’s the next thing. That right is restricted. To claiming it in the first safe place you get to. This has some oddities, if you leave Sudan by plane and step off at Heathrow then the UK is where you can – righteously – claim asylum. If you come by land then you have passed through many safe places before reaching the UK. You don’t have the right to asylum in the UK and, to be strict about it, don’t even have the right to apply.

So, people drowning in the Channel because they have to make their asylum application once in the UK? This could be true of those who are being oppressed in France. It’s not true of anyone not being oppressed in France. So there is not that need to take the open boat the 26 miles.

Sure, there’s the desire, we all understand that. But that’s a desire, not a right to asylum.

Here in Canada, we had this arrangement with the American government under the Canada-United States Safe Third Country Agreement, which our Federal Court struck down last month — incorrectly, in my opinion — as being in violation of section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The court allowed six months for the federal government to act, but as we all know, the federal government is unlikely to do anything as politically radioactive as passing legislation that could — and would — be seen as anti-refugee.

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