Quotulatiousness

October 24, 2011

Wendy McElroy: Get government out of the food-banning business

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:51

Wendy McElroy thinks that governments should get their “greasy hands” off her food choices:

Thus, when government dictates what you may or may not eat — takes away your choice — it is restricting your heritage, your religious and political choices, the control over your own body; telling you that a choice every bit as personal as freedom of speech or the art you view is not yours to make. It is making a fundamental decision for you, and they try to make it better by telling you it’s for your own good.

Imagine if the government had literary experts that decided that certain books weren’t good for you. They didn’t make you smarter or teach you anything. They weren’t classic pieces of literature. And even though you were happy to buy your books with your own money and read them privately, the state still decided it didn’t want you to have access to them. People would be outraged. Why is it any different when the government is counting calories instead of artistic merit?

The typical counter-argument is to say that since society pays for our health care, we owe it to society to lead healthy lives. In short, your neighbour has a vested financial interest in what goes into your body. If you won’t take care of it, the government will make you.

This line of reasoning — rather than justifying a Nanny State or a nosy neighbor dictating your personal choices — constitutes a powerful argument against socialized medicine, but it doesn’t do much to say that the government should control what you eat. If socialized medicine had been advertised decades ago as a government mandate to control the minutia of your daily life, then it would probably have never been implemented.

All of us should of course take care of ourselves, but for our own sake. We are the architects of our own lives and that includes our health. It is not the place of the state to try and control what we can eat because some people make bad decisions. Though it seems trivial to many, it’s an important point to make. Food is part of who we are and how we related to the world. We need to kick the government out of our kitchens.

October 2, 2011

Tyler Cowen on why “no new taxes” won’t work this time

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:03

Almost everyone (except Warren Buffett) agrees that higher taxes are a bad thing, and the GOP candidates are all singing from the same hymn book about not imposing higher tax rates. Under normal circumstances, this might work. Tyler Cowen explains why these aren’t normal times and how “no new taxes” isn’t a serious way to deal with America’s financial problems:

Consider the example more closely. Cutting $10 in spending for every $1 in tax increases would result in $9 in net tax reduction. That’s because lower spending today means lower taxes tomorrow, and limiting the future path of government spending does limit future taxes, as Milton Friedman, the late Nobel laureate and conservative icon, so clearly explained. Promising never to raise taxes, without reaching a deal on spending, really means a high and rising commitment to future taxes.

Furthermore, this refusal to contemplate a tax increase — which I’d characterize as an extreme Republican stance — has brought what seems to be an extreme Democratic response: President Obama’s latest budget plan is moving away from entitlement reform and embracing multiple tax increases on the wealthy. We may be left with no good fiscal options.

The problems with a no-new-taxes stance run deeper. Because it’s unlikely that spending cuts alone can balance the budget, politicians who espouse extreme antitax views often end up denying the scope of our long-run fiscal problems.

[. . .]

The more cynical interpretation of the Republican candidates’ stance on taxes is that they are signaling loyalty to a cause, or simply marketing themselves to voters, rather than acting in good faith. It could be that candidates are more worried about having to publicly endorse tax increases than they are about the tax increases themselves. If that’s true, it is all the more reason to watch out for our pocketbooks; it means that the candidates are protecting themselves rather than the taxpayers.

The final lesson is this: Many professed fiscal conservatives still find it necessary to pander to voter illusions that only a modicum of fiscal adjustment is needed. That’s an indication of how far we are from true fiscal conservatism, but also a sign of how much it is needed.

August 29, 2011

Kaus: Ten things Obama should have done differently

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

Mickey Kaus thinks the President would have been much better off (and the US economy too) if he’d done several things differently:

Excessively well-sourced Obama boosters are now channeling, not just White House spin but White House self-pity. Both Ezra Klein and Jonathan Alter wonder aloud why our intelligent, conscientious, well-meaning, data-driven President is taking a “pummeling.” ”What could Obama have done?” (Klein) “What, specifically, has he done wrong .. .?” (Alter)

They’re kidding, right? There are plenty of things Obama could have done differently. Most of these mistakes were called out at the time. Here, off the top of my head, are ten things Obama could have done:

[. . .]

3. Made the UAW take a pay cut. Whoever else is to blame, the UAW’s demands for pay and work rules clearly contributed to the need for a taxpayer-subsidized auto bailout. To make sure that future unions were deterred from driving their industries into bankruptcy, Obama demanded cuts in basic pay of … exactly zero. UAW workers gave up their Easter holiday but didn’t suffer any reduction in their $28/hour base wage. Wouldn’t a lot of taxpayers like $28 hour jobs? Even $24 an hour jobs?

[. . .]

5. Not pursued a zombie agenda of “card check” and “comprehensive immigration reform”–two misguided pieces of legislation that Obama must have known had no chance of passage but that he had to pretend to care about to keep key Democratic constituencies on board. What was the harm? The harm was that these issues a) sucked up space in the liberal media, b) made Obama look feckless at best, delusional at worst, when they went nowhere; c) made him look even weaker because it was clear he was willing to suffer consequence (b) in order to keep big Democratic constituencies (labor, Latinos) on board.

6. Dispelled legitimate fears of “corporatism” — that is, fears that he was creating a more Putin-style economy in which big businesses depend on the government for favors (and are granted semi-permanent status if they go along with the program). I don’t think Obama is a corporatist, but he hasn’t done a lot to puncture the accusations. What did electric carmaker Tesla have to promise to get its Dept. of Energy subsidies? Why raid GOP-donor Gibson’s guitars and not Martin guitars? We don’t know. At this point, you have to think the president kind of likes the ambiguity–the vague, implicit macho threat that if you want to play ball in this economy, you’re better off on Team Obama. That’s a good way to guarantee Team Obama will be gone in 2013.

Oh, and for a bonus bit of unwelcome news for President Obama, his uncle has just been arrested for drunk driving. His illegal alien uncle, who now faces deportation.

August 22, 2011

US government spending: “we’ll pay for it all by raffling off unicorn rides and following leprechauns to find pots of gold”

Filed under: Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:10

Steve Chapman notes the difficult transition from supporting spending cuts in general to supporting specific program cuts:

The good news is that the idea of serious spending restraint has more support than ever before. The bad news is that getting people to support the concept is easy. The hard part is getting beyond the concept, and there is no sign so far of doing that.

Several Republican presidential candidates, including Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, and Rick Santorum, have taken what sounds like an uncompromising stand. They’ve signed on to a plan sponsored by a group called Strong America Now to eliminate the federal deficit by 2017 without tax increases.

But the plan is not a plan. It’s a fantasy. As Strong America Now’s website explains, it is supposed to “detect and eliminate 25 percent of spending per year across the federal government.” Per year. Seriously.

Not only that, but those cuts are supposed to excise nothing but vast quantities of waste — rather than programs that actual people care about. And my impression is that we’ll pay for it all by raffling off unicorn rides and following leprechauns to find pots of gold.

[. . .]

Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid soak up some 40 percent of the budget, and their share will expand as baby boomers sidle off into retirement. But in an April Economist/YouGov survey, only 7 percent of Americans — including just 9 percent of Republicans — favored lower funding for Social Security. Medicare? Also 7 percent, with 11 percent of Republicans agreeing.

Even the rise of the Tea Party and the fight over the debt ceiling have not caused people to come to grips with fiscal reality. An August Economist/YouGov poll found that 56 percent of Americans said we can bring spending under control without reductions in Social Security and Medicare. Only 24 percent admit what every fiscal expert knows.

August 17, 2011

Ontario enables a “snitch line” in the fight against private health care

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:28

The Ontario government is fighting back against even the hint of privatization of health services in the province by, among other things, setting up a new snitch line:

“There’s no doubt in my mind that people are trying to get around (the law)…. I think it’s really important that we all protect our universal health-care system,” the Health Minister said in an interview. “It’s just important that we are ever-vigilant.”

Critics, however, call the initiative a politically motivated waste of money that could be better spent on improving actual medical services. In the lead-up to this fall’s provincial election, the Liberal government seems anxious to portray itself as a steadfast defender of public health care.

“How is this going to improve patient care for anybody?” Brett Skinner, president and health-care analyst at the conservative Fraser Institute think-tank, asked about the snitch line. “It’s not helping patients get better access. In fact, it’s designed to prevent patients from getting better access.”

The Canada Health Act generally forbids health-care providers from charging patients directly for services that are covered under medicare. Various private health services have cropped up in Quebec, B.C. and Alberta in recent years, however, with little interference by the federal government.

The Ontario Liberals, on the other hand, have presented themselves as strenuous foes of private health care.

July 18, 2011

It won’t hurt just the “rich”

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:00

Michael Boskin illustrates just what the current levels of US government spending will mean when translated into personal tax rates:

Many Democrats demand no changes to Social Security and Medicare spending. But these programs are projected to run ever-growing deficits totaling tens of trillions of dollars in coming decades, primarily from rising real benefits per beneficiary. To cover these projected deficits would require continually higher income and payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare on all taxpayers that would drive the combined marginal tax rate on labor income to more than 70% by 2035 and 80% by 2050. And that’s before accounting for the Laffer effect, likely future interest costs, state deficits and the rising ratio of voters receiving government payments to those paying income taxes.

It would be a huge mistake to imagine that the cumulative, cascading burden of many tax rates on the same income will leave the middle class untouched. Take a teacher in California earning $60,000. A current federal rate of 25%, a 9.5% California rate, and 15.3% payroll tax yield a combined income tax rate of 45%. The income tax increases to cover the CBO’s projected federal deficit in 2016 raises that to 52%. Covering future Social Security and Medicare deficits brings the combined marginal tax rate on that middle-income taxpayer to an astounding 71%. That teacher working a summer job would keep just 29% of her wages. At the margin, virtually everyone would be working primarily for the government, reduced to a minority partner in their own labor.

Nobody — rich, middle-income or poor — can afford to have the economy so burdened. Higher tax rates are the major reason why European per-capita income, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, is about 30% lower than in the United States — a permanent difference many times the temporary decline in the recent recession and anemic recovery.

While policy makers may shrug off the impact of higher tax rates, it has a significant effect on individual choices when it comes to part-time jobs, overtime, and even raises. Even if in reality working a few hours of overtime won’t make a difference, psychologically, the higher tax burden can act as a deterrent: “why put in the effort if the government gets more out of my effort than I do?”

June 6, 2011

“How are we supposed to have a mature debate when any criticism is seen as treason?”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Health — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:18

Mark Piggott on the need to be honest about the state of the British NHS in order to improve healthcare:

The UK National Health Service is like a relative: we are allowed to slag off this national treasure, but woe betide anyone else who tries it. I have no idea if the health secretary, Andrew Lansley, really wants to improve the institution or dismantle it and sell it off to the highest bidder, but whatever his motives, anyone who uses the system knows it needs surgery; no amount of knee-jerk op-eds will change that salutary fact.

In this unhealthy climate I feel obliged to state that I believe in the NHS; many medics do a fine job and healthcare should be free at the point of need. Yet having witnessed the care provided to my grandmother, 89, following a diagnosis of lung cancer, I believe that unless the NHS is willing to admit and tackle its flaws, it will have to shoulder some of the blame if the private sector convinces politicians it can run things better.

[. . .]

After collecting my father from the lobby, we went back to the ICU. A bossy woman at the nurse’s dock insisted she wasn’t on that ward; I had to point nan out, in one of the few occupied beds behind her. The woman compounded her mistake by acting as if we were in the wrong. Many users of the NHS will be familiar with this attitude: that ill people and their relatives are simply a nuisance preventing the otherwise smooth running of the system.

[. . .]

The doctors organisation, the British Medical Association (BMA), reacting with customary promptness, has called Lansley’s reforms ‘mad’. They may be right, but the BMA, like the politicians, has a vested interest in how the NHS is run. As can be witnessed by its endless lectures on the evils of alcohol, the BMA appears to be in the fortunate position of being able to get any message, no matter how authoritarian, to the media, who then obligingly splash it across every front page and news bulletin. Perhaps we haven’t really changed that much from the days of my grandparents, who always believed that doctor knew best.

May 26, 2011

Here’s a different way to pay for socialized medicine

Filed under: Economics, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:35

Kevin Drum has an interesting proposal in Mother Jones:

So here’s an idea: why not reform Medicare by means testing it? Conservatives should love this idea.

Here’s how it works. Basically, we leave Medicare alone. Oh, we can still go ahead with some of the obvious reforms. Comparative effectiveness research is a no-brainer for anyone who’s not part of the Republican leadership. Ditto for some of the delivery reforms on the table. Or allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower prices. It would be great if that stuff works. But if it doesn’t, then people will need to pay more for their care. So why not have dead people pay? They don’t need the money any more, after all.

So Medicare stays roughly the same, but every time you receive medical care you also get a bill. You don’t have to pay it, though. It’s just there for accounting purposes. When you die, the bill gets paid out of your estate. If your estate is small or nonexistent, you’ve gotten lots of free medical care. If it’s large, you’ll pay for it all. If you’re somewhere in between, you’ll end up paying for part of the care you’ve received.

Obviously this gives people incentives to spend all their money before they die. That’s fine. I suspect they wouldn’t end up spending as much as you’d think. What it does mean, though, is that Medicare has first claim on their estate, not their kids. But that seems fair, doesn’t it?

It has the virtue of acknowledging that free healthcare isn’t actually “free” at all.

May 13, 2011

QotD: The financial legacy of the Baby Boomers

Filed under: Economics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:05

Greg Mankiw links to a WSJ piece about our negative bequest to our children. It’s a point I’ve made many times myself (and am sometimes accused of bashing the elderly because of this). A good quote from the WSJ piece:

     [R]egardless of how much they have contributed, the hard reality is that the federal government has already spent it. No matter how deserving they are, it is younger generations of workers who have to come up with the money.

It is morally wrong to force young people to make good on false promises made before they were even born. It is an outrage, a scandal, a shame on our society. A society that invests in the old at the expense of (actually, to the large detriment of) the young cannot survive. A caring and kind society cares for the weak and elderly and helpless; a dynamic and just society allows the young to grow and prosper on their own merits. If America is to prosper as a nation, the young must be given room to build families and careers. To build lives, without the onerous, crushing burden of debt run up by their forebears.

Never mind questions of ethics or “fairness”: it’s just math. The numbers do not, cannot, and will not ever even up, no matter what accounting tricks the government uses. Until we fundamentally change how the Big Three entitlement programs (SS, Medicare, Medicaid) work, we will continue to load up our young people with a crippling load of debt they had no hand in accruing.

“Monty”, “A hot cup of DOOM!, no cream, no sugar”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2011-05-12

May 9, 2011

What’s coming up in the next set of Canada Health Act revisions

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:06

This is an old post from 2005, but now that we have a majority federal government, we can expect to see much or all of this program implemented fairly quickly:

As we’ve all been made aware by the constant drumbeat of media-generated panic, obesity is the biggest problem facing the Canadian healthcare system. Canadians are getting much fatter, getting less exercise, and generally imperilling their own health and, in the aggregate, the entire healthcare system — the core of the Canadian identity. The government is moving to confront this looming problem in the very near future.

Tackling Obesity

Because voluntary measures have failed, the federal government, in consultation with the provinces and territories, is going to amend the Canada Health Act, the cornerstone of the healthcare system. Poor health is no longer an individual problem: it affects the entire country. This means that the government is going to get very serious about tackling the causes of the problem, not just treating the patient after the problem becomes severe.

The current provincial health ID cards will become federalized: this is to ensure that all Canadians are able to get consistent treatment when travelling outside their home provinces. The new ID cards will carry biometric information and it will be mandatory to carry these cards at all times.

To ensure that we comply — it is for the sake of our healthcare system — the health ID card will be requested on boarding all public transit, commuter rail, airplanes, ferries, and ships. Inexpensive card readers will speed processing. No ID? No travel. Simple as that. Our healthcare system is too important to risk for minor concerns like individual rights, privacy, or freedom of movement.

It is expected that the major banks will quickly realize the advantage of integrating their ABM networks with the new universal ID card, obviating the need for them to maintain their own card issuing services. Any who do not quickly adapt will find it difficult to get government business. But it will be strictly voluntary, of course.

Once the banks have adapted, the government can phase out the production of printed money . . . there will be no need for it since you will always carry your combined ID/ATM card. This will be a boon to shopkeepers, banks, and anyone involved in handling money right now.

One of the biggest advantages of this will be that the government will be able to act decisively to combat the scourge of obesity: all food purchases will be directly traceable to show who is eating too much or too much of the wrong kind of food. Within a few years, as the existing printed “Nutrition Facts” information is encoded into RFID tags, it will be possible for your ID/ATM card to restrict the amount of food you purchase to the recommended daily allowance for your diet. Won’t that be great? You won’t even need to think about what to eat, because you’ll only be allowed to eat the “right” amount of the “right” foods, as determined by the government.

Of course, those Canadians who have allowed themselves to eat too much should not be given the same top-priority access to healthcare that their less weighty fellow citizens should have . . . overweight patients will be treated in inverse proportion to their deviation from the norm. That’s only fair, and fairness is nearly as important an aspect of Canadianness as Universal Healthcare.

There may be some bleeding hearts in the civil liberties movement who decry this extension of government power, but we can safely ignore them. The only thing that makes Canada the great place it is today is universal healthcare. This has been repeated so often that most of us accept the concept without any doubt or uncertainty.

Universal healthcare is Canada; Canada is universal healthcare.

Universal healthcare matters more than anything else, again as uncounted public opinion polls and government surveys have discovered, so anything that strengthens the healthcare system is good for Canada. Critics of the system are clearly not acting in the best interests of the healthcare of all Canadians, so we must move to suppress such unpatriotic — even treasonous — talk.

Snuffing Out Smoking

After obesity, the next greatest threat to the system is already being addressed by all levels of government: smoking. It will soon be possible, using the same combination of mandatory ID/ATM cards and RFID tags to completely stamp out the purchase of tobacco products. The government would be remiss if they failed to take full advantage of the current wave of public support to make tobacco use illegal everywhere. Canadians are naturally law-abiding: they will quickly adapt to the need for vigilance for signs of illegal tobacco use. Snitch lines may be required in certain areas to provide more support to those Canadians who want to ensure the health of their fellow citizens — and, of course, the essential healthcare system!

Other methods can be used to ensure compliance, especially in the delivery of healthcare: patients who have smoked will be required to wait longer for all services, to be fair to those patients who never smoked. In the model of “plea bargaining”, patients may be able to get faster aid by reporting others who supplied them with tobacco.

Annihilating Alcohol

Alcohol abuse is the next problem to be overcome. The cost to the healthcare system from treating the direct results of alcohol abuse are staggering. It is manifestly unfair that non-drinking Canadians must pay to rectify the self-inflicted damage of alcohol by drinkers. Earlier Canadian and American governments tried to stamp it out during the last century, but they failed. This government will not: we have the tools to enforce compliance that earlier governments lacked.

As a first step, all sales and production of alcoholic beverages will be nationalized. All citizens must apply for permits to allow them to drink alcoholic beverages, which will only be available from government outlets at strictly controlled times. Sensible limits will be applied, so that packaging that encourages abuse (24-packs of beer, 1.18 litre bottles of alcohol, etc.) will be quickly removed from use. Purchase limits will be strictly enforced, to ensure that so called “binge drinking” can be controlled and eliminated. Drunkenness will be dealt with as sabotage of the healthcare system.

Importing alcohol will be eliminated as a source of health problems, and domestic production will be gradually curtailed and then eliminated in turn. Home brewing and winemaking will be very quickly made illegal: snitch lines will certainly be needed to enforce this, but good Canadians will realize that the health of all requires us to clamp down on those who do not follow good health guidelines.

Enforcing Exercise

It’s not going to be easy to make Canadians as healthy as possible, but the vigour of our Universal Healthcare system can only be enhanced by improving the physical well-being of all Canadians. Voluntary efforts to encourage healthy exercise have been a dismal failure, so mandatory exercise is the only way to move forward. In the short term, all public and private schools, offices, factories, and other workplaces will be required to add exercise periods to every workday.

Mandatory exercise, however, will not be allowed to encourage carelessness and risk-taking — so-called “extreme” sports are all foreign concepts to Canadian culture, and should be discouraged at all cost. The healthcare system must not be held hostage to stupid, careless victims of unnecessary accidents. They’ll be in last place for healthcare services, after the obese, the smokers, and the drinkers.

The End Result

Let’s be honest . . . this is going to be a gruelling regime, and some will not have the intestinal fortitude to pull through. By phase IV of our program, we should expect to see some weaker souls emigrating to escape the rigours of our brave new healthy world. We should let them go, but ensure that they have paid a fair price for the privilege of living in the healthiest country in the world: a sliding scale tax on property maxxing out at 90% for the wealthiest.

But what a wonderful country it will be without them: everyone at the absolute peak of health and vitality (because getting sick will be illegal).

April 19, 2011

Things that keep on rising in price … like healthcare costs

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

Kevin Libin points out that Michael Ignatieff may have been even more accurate than he himself realized:

The politicians are finally talking about it, but if you listened to what Mr. Ignatieff said during last week’s English-language debate, you might have found yourself feeling a bit depressed. Perhaps because the Liberal leader effectively argued that if Canadians wanted to keep getting decent medical treatment, they were going to have to learn to live without lots of other things.

“This comes down to a moment of choice,” Mr. Ignatieff intoned. Canadians could either vote for personal income tax breaks, planned corporate income tax cuts, new equipment for the Canadian Forces, all promised by the Conservatives, or, he said, “you can support health care.”

To be accurate, he used language that was far more politically loaded (“multi-million dollar expenditure on prisons … big gifts to upper-middle class Canadians”), but his message was the same: affording public health care means sacrificing other possible priorities.

There’s certainly much to suggest he’s got a point.

If our healthcare costs keep rising, unbounded by any kind of cost control, it will either consume the economy, or cause its collapse. And, of course, the large number of soon-to-retire Baby Boomers are about to need much higher health spending as the natural aging process starts taking its inevitable toll. Fun times ahead, folks.

Already, nine out of 10 provinces spend the majority of their own source revenues (which excludes federal transfers) on health care, according to the Fraser Institute’s report “Canada’s Medicare Bubble.” Only Alberta is just barely under 50%; Nova Scotia spends 88%.

With all the good will in the world, the government can’t keep increasing their healthcare spending . . . they’re almost out of money already.

March 5, 2011

Expanding the already expansive interpretation of the “Commerce Clause”

Filed under: Government, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:51

Rich Lowry explains why the recent court decision by Judge Gladys Kessler has such wide-reaching implications:

The easy-to-grasp distinction between an activity and inactivity is one of the most powerful legal arguments of ObamaCare’s opponents. But they hadn’t yet run up against a jurist as ingenious as Judge Kessler. She brushes aside the activity/inactivity distinction because not doing something is a choice and therefore “mental activity.”

Why hadn’t someone thought of this before? The sophists in Eric Holder’s Justice Department must be embarrassed that they didn’t themselves dredge up this killer rejoinder.

[. . .]

Kessler writes, “It is pure semantics to argue that an individual who makes a choice to forgo health insurance is not ‘acting,’ especially given the serious economic and health-related consequences to every individual of that choice. Making a choice is an affirmative action, whether one decides to do something or not do something.”

[. . .]

Under the Kessler principle, there’s no nonconduct that the federal government can’t reach. Every day, most Americans engage in nonactivities that affect interstate commerce. If you decide not to buy a house, not to buy a Chrysler or not to buy a Snuggie, you’ve impacted interstate conduct through affirmative mental actions. We’ve gone from the Constitution giving Congress the power to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes,” to regulating on the basis of the mental activities of individuals deciding not to do something.

If this precedent stands, the Commerce clause has effectively swallowed the bill of rights: there will be no sphere of human activity that the US federal government can’t regulate.

H/T to David Harsanyi for the link.

February 17, 2011

I believe this is my first-ever reference to “Justin Bieber”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

And it’s prompted by Jimmie Bise, Jr, who also observes (most accurately) that “We bloggers are a mercenary lot who’ll find reason to write about almost anything if it’ll bring us that sweet, sweet blog traffic.”

The bad news is that Rolling Stone actually thinks anyone, anywhere, truly cares what Justin Bieber thinks about political parties, socialized medicine, or anything else beyond singing the word “baby” several times in a row.

Look, I get that we like to get inside the heads of entertainers we admire, but there really does have to be a limit. Rolling Stone, once upon a time, was a magazine that published real journalism from writers like Hunter S. Thompson, P.J. O’Rourke, and Lester Bangs. It was probably the go-to publication for details of the Patty Hearst abduction and its interview with Charles Manson in 1970 is one of the most chilling looks into a mind stuffed full of madness I’ve ever read. Now, thanks to the decline started by ardent progressive Jann Wenner, we just get a fluff interview with a 16 year-old kid on issues in which he has almost no knowledge or experience and wretched hacks like Matt Taibbi.

If nothing else, the Justin Bieber interview shows us what we lost. I’m actually sorry for it.

While a lot of what Hunter S. Thompson produced was vivid and entertaining, it probably skirted well clear of formal “journalism” even in the golden glow of nostalgia. But other than that little quibble, and that Jann Wenner was a co-founder of Rolling Stone . . . which means the decline he’s lamenting was actually baked in to the original recipie . . .

August 28, 2010

QotD: The Canadian (lack of) taste for charismatic leadership

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

Canadians like their politicians dull. Perhaps at some point, many moons ago, this was a defense mechanism of sorts. A dull politician is unlikely to do anything rash and interventionist, thereby mucking up the daily life of the nation. This is no longer a safe strategy. Lester Pearson was politely dull, and unleashed Medicare, an ahistorical flag and Pierre Trudeau on an unsuspecting nation. Never was so much harm, done by so few, in so short a period of time, than in Mike Pearson’s five years in office. Much of what people blame Trudeau for was actually begun by Pearson. But who could hate Mike? He was such a nice guy. He wore a bow tie.

There have been only three genuinely charismatic Prime Ministers in Canadian history: Wilfred Laurier, John Diefenbaker and Pierre Trudeau. John A Macdonald might be a weak fourth, depending on how fond you are of boozy charm. What did they all have in common? What the Elder President Bush disdainfully called the “vision thing.” You may not like their visions, but they were about something and attracted a train of almost fanatical — by Canadian standards — followers.

You can’t run into an aging baby boomer in Toronto, they are ubiquitous here, without being bored to tears with their particular Trudeau story. They campaigned for him. They met him walking down some solitary Montreal street. You get the odd Trudeau in the wilderness stories. The funny ones usually involve a disco, a blond and something that happened after the third cocktail. Urban legends used to surround Laurier as well. Dief, as Peter C Newman noted, had the presence of an Old Testament prophet.

Their vision and their charisma were not coincidences, but corollaries. Just being charming and interesting will get you only so far.

Publius, “Iggy Why”, Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2010-08-26

June 18, 2010

A “new chapter in U.S. history”

Filed under: China, Economics, Government, Humour, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

Ron Hart congratulates President Obama for delivering on his promised change:

We are so in debt to China that President Obama had to visit their president in his first year in office. It was an important meeting between the most powerful communist leader in the world and the president of China.

Obama is so popular in China that a nightclub named after him opened in Beijing. In keeping with the Obama theme, the club opened with $10 trillion in debt. It will, hopefully, close in just four years with $15 trillion in debt and no apologies to its “hope-based” investors.

[. . .]

To sum up our situation just short of two years into this Obamanation of an administration: Our debt is much higher, an unwanted ObamaCare bill that will cost us at least $2 trillion more than predicted was rammed through Congress, more troops are in Afghanistan, unemployment is much higher even after a union handout “stimulus” bill, and the biggest tax increase in American history is coming in 2011. So yes, Mr. President, technically I guess you can say you have brought about “change.”

As for your assertion, Mr. Obama, that you are going to usher in a “new chapter in U.S. history,” it looks like you will make good on that too. Unfortunately, it will be Chapter 11.

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord.

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