Quotulatiousness

December 11, 2024

Norway finds the perfect tool to drive away those pesky entrepreneurs

Filed under: Business, Europe, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Don’t you just hate having all these bothersome start-up companies in your country, creating new jobs and new investment opportunities? Norway sure does, but good news: they’ve found an almost perfect way to not only deter existing entrepreneurs but to punish those who try to leave after they’ve been successful:

Norway is a fantastically beautiful country, but lately they’ve decided they want as few new companies as possible.
“Norway” by Nouhailler is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Norway’s entrepreneurs are disappearing. In the past two years alone, 100 of Norway’s top 400 taxpayers, representing about 50 percent of that group’s wealth, have fled the country to protect their businesses.

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand paints a vivid picture of a dystopian society where government overreach and socialist policies kill innovation and demonize entrepreneurs. Present-day Norway mirrors this scenario in unsettling ways. The Nordic countries have long operated on an egalitarian ideal—citizens pay high tax rates for a generous safety net and effective public services. But Norway has taken the ideal to destructive and bizarre extremes.

Norway spends 45 percent more than Sweden on healthcare per capita with approximately the same health outcomes. Norway spends 50 percent more than Finland on primary and secondary school with worse results. And it splurges on green virtue-signaling with, for example, a $3.2 billion offshore wind project that industry experts believe is financially unworkable. That $3.2 billion, by the way, is roughly equivalent to the total revenue raised by the wealth tax.

To socialist politicians in Norway, entrepreneurs are mere piggy banks to be raided for ever more spending. When confronted with the reality that you can’t pay taxes with money you don’t have, the response is a vague moralism like “those with the broadest shoulders must bear the heaviest burdens.” Any dissent is waved away, deemed invalid because. . . free healthcare.

Earlier this year, instead of scaling back the tax blowout, the government doubled down, not only increasing the wealth tax but adding a vise grip on business owners in the form of an “exit tax” on unrealized gains as well. That means if you move from Norway, you’re immediately liable to pay 38 percent of the market value of your assets. It doesn’t matter if you have no cash on hand, if your assets are risky and could plummet in value, or even if your company fails after you leave—you still owe the tax. (Luckily for me, I left before this tax became law.)

The intent is to corral entrepreneurs inside Norway, impeding them from heading for the exits. The inevitable result: They’ll leave even before starting their businesses. After shooting itself in one foot, the government is now aiming a bazooka at the other one.

December 5, 2024

Ontario’s housing market squeezed by the 35.6% combined tax rate on new builds

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The housing situation in Toronto and the rest of the province has been very tight for years. Lots of would-be buyers chasing the proportionally smaller number of new houses being built. This drives prices higher, but no matter how much of the final price is the builder’s profit margin, the government gets nearly four times as much on every new house sale:

The National Post previously reported that at least a third of a new home’s sticker price in Ontario was comprised of taxes, but an updated report, courtesy of the Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis (CANCEA), now puts the figure at 35.6 per cent.

(It gets even better when it comes to affordable housing — but more on that later.)

The Increasing Tax Burden on New Ontario Homes: 2024, which was commissioned by the Residential Construction Council of Ontario and released by CANCEA on Tuesday, is eye-opening for reasons beyond the fact that a compendium of largely superfluous taxes and production levies has reached 35.1 per cent of the final purchase price of a new home in the city of Toronto. It’s 35.5 per cent in the outlying 905 region, and 34.5 per cent in Ottawa.

The report needed only 16 pages to elucidate how bureaucratic machinations aren’t just gouging prospective homebuyers, but homeowners, too — especially the estimated 1.2 million whose mortgages, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, are due for renewal in 2025.

Read closely enough, CANCEA’s report makes a strong argument that, effectively, Canadians work for the government rather the other way around.

For example, CANCEA’s report demonstrates that 70 per cent of aforesaid taxes on new homes “consist of direct fees on the home, such as DC (development charges) and other fees”.

“For homes priced at $450,000,” which aligns with median income, “… the tax burden rises sharply to 45.2 per cent,” says the report, which also notes that economics often force developers to build smaller units that are insufficient for families.

December 1, 2024

QotD: Recording and codifying the land that William conquered

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, China, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I hesitate to recommend academic books to anyone, but I’ll make an exception for James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State. Subtitled “how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed”, it’s the best long-form exposition I know of, that explains how process and outcome first deform, then negate each other.

[…]

In brief, Scott argues that the process of making a society “legible” to government officials obscures social reality, to the point where the government’s maps and charts and graphs take on a life of their own. It’s recursive, such that those well-intentioned schemes end up first measuring, then manipulating, the wrong thing in the wrong way, to the point that the social “problem” the process was supposed to address drops out entirely — all you have, at the end, is powerpoint girls critiquing spreadsheet boys because their spreadsheets don’t have enough animation, and vice versa.

Scott doesn’t use the Domesday Book as an example (IIRC from a graduate school class 20-odd years ago, anyway), but it’s one we’re probably all familiar with. The first thing William the Conqueror needed to know is: what, exactly, have I conquered? So he sent out the high-medieval version of spreadsheet boys to take a comprehensive survey of the kingdom. Turns out the Duke of Earl’s demense runs from this creek to that rock. He has five underlings, and their domains run from etc.

The point of all this, of course, was so that Billy C. could call the Duke of Earl on the carpet, point to the spreadsheet, and say “You owe me a cow, three chickens, and two months in the saddle as back taxes.” It worked great, except when — as, it seems, is inevitable — the high-medieval equivalent of the spreadsheet boys did the high-medieval version of “ctrl-c”; just copying and pasting the information over. Eventually the tax situation got way out of whack, as it did for most every pre-modern government running a similar system — one of the reasons declining Chinese dynasties had such fiscal problems, for instance, is that the tax surveys only got updated every two centuries or so, such that a major provincial lord was still only paying 20 silver pieces in taxes, when he should’ve been paying 20,000 (and his peasants were all paying 20 when all they could afford was 2).

In other words: unless the spreadsheet boys periodically go out and check that the numbers on their spreadsheets actually correspond in some systematic, more-or-less representative way to some underlying social reality, government policy is being set by make-believe.

Severian, “The Finger is Not the Moon”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-14.

November 17, 2024

Nazi Uniforms banned across three States – Rise of Hitler 06, June 1930

Filed under: Germany, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 16 Nov 2024

In June 1930, the Weimar Republic faces escalating tensions as Nazi uniforms are banned in three states to curb political violence. The French withdrawal from the Rhineland marks a major milestone while Saxony’s elections leave the state in political deadlock. Meanwhile, Chancellor Brüning battles to save his government amidst growing financial turmoil and party divisions.
(more…)

October 10, 2024

Trump’s tariff proposals will rival Smoot-Hawley for self-inflicted economic woes

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

J.D. Tuccille explains why Trump’s economic plans are very much a curate’s egg of good and bad ideas, but the proposed tariff plans would more than compensate for any good positive effects from the rest of his proposals:

Willis C. Hawley (left) and Reed Smoot in April 1929, shortly before the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act passed the House of Representatives.
Library of Congress photo via Wikipedia Commons.

Former president and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wants to extend the tax cuts passed when he was in the White House, which are due to expire next year. That would not just be welcomed by the many Americans who would benefit, it could boost economic activity. But there’s a big problem: The protectionist tariffs favored by Trump would undo the good done by his tax cuts, reducing rather than increasing prosperity.

Tariffs Not Seen Since the Great Depression

“Former President Donald Trump’s proposals to impose a universal tariff of 20 percent and an additional tariff on Chinese imports of at least 60 percent would spike the average tariff rate on all imports to highs not seen since the Great Depression,” warns Erica York of the Tax Foundation.

Trump has actually been a little vague on the size of his universal tariff, first floating it at 10 percent while allowing “it may be more than that”, and then upping the ante to 20 percent. Either way, it’s a cost that ends up being largely paid by Americans in terms of higher retail prices and more expensive imported parts and materials for domestic manufacturing.

The Trump administration’s 2018 “tariffs resulted in higher prices for a wide variety of goods that U.S. consumers and businesses purchase,” the Tax Foundation’s Alex Durante and Alex Muresianu concluded.

Even when tariffs don’t directly affect the cost of imported goods purchased by consumers, they still drive up the prices of many things made in the U.S. The Cato Institute’s Pierre Lemieux points out that “a tariff on an input (say, steel) is paid by the American importer who will typically pass it down the supply chain to his customers and eventually to the consumers of the final good (say, a car)”. Instead of boosting domestic production, that can do harm, instead.

“For manufacturing employment, a small boost from the import protection effect of tariffs is more than offset by larger drags from the effects of rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs,” Federal Reserve Board economists found when they researched the 2018 tariffs.

That’s not to say Trump is alone in his protectionism. Last month, Bob Davis noted for Foreign Policy that “the Biden administration is the first since at least President John F. Kennedy’s time to fail to negotiate a major free trade deal, instead embracing tariffs” while Trump pursued both tariffs and trade deals.

September 26, 2024

Glimmers of hope for lower taxes on US taxpayers

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

J.D. Tuccille welcomes the discussion among the Presidential candidates about lowering the taxes Americans have to pay, and points out that the economic distortions of the current tax code (including “temporary” measures introduced during WW2) make everyone less well-off:

Three months after proposing to end federal taxing of tips — an idea promptly confiscated without compensation by Kamala Harris’s campaign — Donald Trump doubled down by saying “we will end all taxes on overtime” if he’s elected president. Without a doubt, millions of Americans who resent government’s ravenous bite out of their paychecks immediately began contemplating just how much of their income they could shield from the tax man that way.

Tips and Overtime for Everybody!

“Can someone get paid in primarily tips and overtime?” quipped the Cato Institute’s Scott Lincicome. “Asking for a few million friends.”

On a more serious note, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Sean Higgins thought exempting overtime pay “wouldn’t necessarily be a bad idea … but, overall, it is not likely to make that much of a difference to most workers because overtime isn’t that common”. He’d been more strongly supportive of exempting tips because that “would put more money directly in the pockets of working Americans without either costing employers more or raising prices for customers”. He also liked that freeing tips from taxation would “keep tipping out of the reach of the regulatory state”.

But what if overtime pay becomes more common precisely because it’s not taxed?

The people at the Tax Foundation expect that’s exactly what will happen, just as Lincicome joked. Thinking through the implications of exempting overtime pay from taxation, Garrett Watson and Erica York warned that “exempting overtime pay from income tax would significantly distort labor market decisions. Employees would be encouraged to take more overtime work, and hourly or salaried non-exempt jobs may become more attractive if the benefit is not extended to salaried employees who are exempt from Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) overtime rules.”

The Tax Foundation’s Alex Muresianu had a similar reaction to the proposals to exempt tips from taxes from both Trump and Harris. He thinks “the proposal would make more employees and businesses interested in moving from full wages to a tip-based payment approach”. He foresaw “substantial behavioral responses, such as previously untipped occupations introducing tipping”.

Of course, a world in which more Americans receive their pay beyond the reach of the tax man is a welcome prospect to many of us. If politicians want to phase out income taxes, even unintentionally, who are we to complain? Hang on a minute while I set up my virtual tip jar. In fact, there’s precedent for government policy around wages to cause major unintended consequences. Take, for example, employer-provided healthcare coverage.

Government Policy Has Distorted Compensation Before

“One of the most important spurs to growth of employment-based health benefits was — like many other innovations — an unintended outgrowth of actions taken for other reasons during World War II,” according to the 1993 book, Employment and Health Benefits: A Connection at Risk. “In 1943 the War Labor Board, which had one year earlier introduced wage and price controls, ruled that contributions to insurance and pension funds did not count as wages. In a war economy with labor shortages, employer contributions for employee health benefits became a means of maneuvering around wage controls. By the end of the war, health coverage had tripled.”

Given that health benefits became a substitute form of compensation to escape a wage freeze, it’s not difficult to imagine the United States moving toward a situation in which a lot more people receive the bulk of their pay from untaxed tips and overtime pay.

September 12, 2024

QotD: The collapse of early civilizations in Mesopotamia

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

Early states were pretty time-limited themselves. [In Against The Grain,] Scott addresses the collapse of early civilizations, which was ubiquitous; typical history disguises this by talking about “dynasties” or “periods” rather than “the couple of generations an early state could hold itself together without collapsing”.

    Robert Adams, whose knowledge of the early Mesopotamian states is unsurpassed, expresses some astonishment at the Third Dynasty of Ur (Ur III), in which five kings succeeded one another over a hundred-year period. Though it too collapsed afterward, it represented something of a record of stability.

Scott thinks of these collapses not as disasters or mysteries but as the expected order of things. It is a minor miracle that some guy in a palace can get everyone to stay on his fields and work for him and pay him taxes, and no surprise when this situation stops holding. These collapses rarely involved great loss of life. They could just be a simple transition from “a bunch of farming towns pay taxes to the state center” to “a bunch of farming towns are no longer paying taxes to the state center”. The great world cultures of the time – Egypt, Sumeria, China, whereever – kept chugging along whether or not there was a king in the middle collecting taxes from them. Scott warns against the bias of archaeologists who – deprived of the great monuments and libraries of cuneiform tablets that only a powerful king could produce – curse the resulting interregnum as a dark age or disaster. Probably most people were better off during these times.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Against The Grain“, Slate Star Codex, 2019-10-15.

August 28, 2024

1974 – Britain’s nadir

Filed under: Books, Britain, Economics, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the second part of Ed West‘s appreciation of Dominic Sandbrook’s Seasons in the Sun, Britain was described as “sliding, sinking, shabby, dirty, lazy, inefficient, dangerous, in its death throes, worn out, clapped out, occasionally lashing out” by Margaret Drabble in her 1977 novel The Ice Age, and it certainly seems to fit the bill quite well:

The Times reported in October of that year that London’s West End was in a “sorry state”, with parts of Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road “in the sort of condition that, in Birmingham or Manchester, would qualify them for wholesale slum clearance”.

Journalist Clive Irving wrote that London had become “a semi-derelict slum”, a city blighted by “tacky porno shops, skin movies, pinball arcades, and toxic hamburger joints” while “behind neon facades the buildings are flaking and unkempt”.

The capital had lost a million and a half people since its peak in 1939, and would continue its decline for another decade. Whitehall Mandarin Ronald McIntosh declared that “London is evidently losing population quite heavily [and] services are steadily deteriorating, and nobody seems to have the least idea of how to deal with it”.

The country as a whole was haemorrhaging people, and in 1975 its population fell for the first time since records began. In the spring of 1974 applications for emigration to Canada went up 65 per cent, while New Zealand even felt compelled to put restrictions on people fleeing the old country.

Doctors in particular were leaving in droves, and recruitment agency Robert Lee International estimated that the number of professionals wanting to move abroad rose by 35% in just six months, from January and July 1975. Interest was keenest among engineers, accountants, scientists and teachers.

Many high earners were fleeing excessive tax rates, so punitive that even the Bond producer Albert R Broccoli left to make the iconic British movies elsewhere, and Moonraker would be filmed in France.

Gone were the days of the Swinging Sixties; instead, the London of George Smiley was “the city of the Sex Pistols and The Sweeney, not the Beatles and The Avengers; a city of tramps and hooligans, hustlers and muggers, the downtrodden and the disappointed, haunted by the deadly figure of the IRA bomber”.

Britain’s second city was in an even worse state. During Wilson’s first term Birmingham had been hailed as “the most go-ahead city in Europe”. Now the Times admitted it looked like a “large and chaotic building site”.

Travel writer Jonathan Raban described Southampton’s Millbrook estate as “a vast, cheap storage unit for nearly 20,000 people”. The country’s increasing problem with crime, hooliganism, graffiti and drug addiction meant that residents wouldn’t even hang their clothes in communal areas, for fear of theft.

The great architectural feats of the post-war era were beginning to look like a miserable failure, and none more so than the utopian social housing schemes, which had often entailed destroying closely-knit and organic communities in overcrowded and run-down – but rescuable – terraced housing.

Christopher Brooker visited Keeling House in Bethnal Green and found “its concrete cracked and discolouring, the metal reinforcement rusting through the surface, every available inch covered with graffiti”. Here was the story of modern Britain, “the bright, anticipated dream followed by a seedy, nightmarish reality”.

The National Theatre’s Peter Hall visited the New York Juilliard School and upon return home “found it depressing to compare it with our own already run-down, ill-maintained South Bank building”.

“The English apparently no longer care enough about material surroundings,” he wrote: “They even seem to take a positive pleasure in defiling them.”

August 3, 2024

QotD: Grain farming and the rise of organized states

Filed under: Food, Government, History, Middle East, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

For most of the Stone Age, this problem was insurmountable. You can’t tax hunter-gatherers, because you don’t know how many they are or where they are, and even if you search for them you’ll spend months hunting them down through forests and canyons, and even if you finally find them they’ll just have, like, two elk carcasses and half a herring or something. But you also can’t tax potato farmers, because they can just leave when they hear you coming, and you will never be able to find all of the potatoes and dig them up and tax them. And you can’t even tax lentil farmers, because you’ll go to the lentil plantation and there will be a few lentils on the plants and the farmer will just say “Well, come back next week and there will be a few more”, and you can’t visit every citizen every week.

But you can tax grain farmers! You can assign them some land, and come back around harvest time, and there will be a bunch of grain just standing there for you to take ten percent of. If the grain farmer flees, you can take his grain without him. Then you can grind the grain up and have a nice homogenous, dense, easy-to-transport grain product that you can dole out in measured rations. Grain farming was a giant leap in oppressability.

In this model, the gradual drying-out of Sumeria in the 4th millennium BC caused a shift away from wetland foraging and toward grain farming. The advent of grain farming made oppression possible, and a new class of oppression-entrepreneurs arose to turn this possibility into a reality. They incentivized farmers to intensify grain production further at the expense of other foods, and this turned into a vicious cycle of stronger states = more grain = stronger states. Within a few centuries, Uruk and a few other cities developed the full model: tax collectors, to take the grain; scribes, to measure the grain; and priests, to write stories like The Debate Between Sheep And Grain, with immortal lines like:

    From sunrise till sunset, may the name of Grain be praised. People should submit to the yoke of Grain. Whoever has silver, whoever has jewels, whoever has cattle, whoever has sheep shall take a seat at the gate of whoever has Grain, and pass his time there

And so the people were taught that growing grain was Correct and Right and The Will Of God and they shouldn’t do anything stupid like try to escape back to the very close and easily-escapable-to areas where everyone was still living in Edenic plenty.

… turns out lots of people in early states escaped to the very close and easily-escapable-to areas where everyone was still living in Edenic plenty. Early states were necessarily tiny; overland transportation of resources more than a few miles was cost-prohibitive; you could do a little better by having the state on a river and adding in water transport, but Uruk’s sphere of influence was still probably just a double-digit number of kilometers. Even in good times, peasants would be tempted to escape to the hills and wetlands; in bad times, it started seeming crazy not to try this. Scott suggests that ancient Uruk had a weaker distinction between “subject” and “slave” than we would expect. Although there were certainly literal slaves involved in mining and manufacturing, even the typical subject was a serf at best, bound to the land and monitored for flight risk.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Against The Grain“, Slate Star Codex, 2019-10-15.

July 15, 2024

QotD: Sticking it to “the Man” in Collegetown, USA

Filed under: Education, Humour, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Back in College Town, it was as predictable as sunrise: Every election year, a group of Leftie goofs would picket Republican Party headquarters. It was an exercise in futility, of course — since College Town was exactly that, and it totally dominated its surrounding county, no Republican had bothered even making a whistle stop there since the 1950s. A Republican couldn’t get elected dog catcher; the token county headquarters was, no fooling, located in an all-but-abandoned strip mall next to a thrift store.

But it made a certain type of college kid, and of course xzhyr professors, feel good about themselves, sticking it to The Man like that, so they kept on keepin’ on. In the grand tradition of puerile student protest, they’d routinely chalk up the parking lot and sidewalk in front of the building with catchy slogans like “this sidewalk brought to you by socialism!” Yes, they really thought that, and if you’ve followed my “inside the ivory gulag” posts, you can easily suss out why: Sidewalks are public services; public services are paid for by taxes; “conservatives” are against taxes; “conservatives” are also against socialism; therefore sidewalks are socialist.

No, really — I’ve heard more than one professor make a version of that “argument”. If it’s a public service of any kind — police, trash pickup, whatever — it’s by definition “socialist”, because it’s paid for by taxes, and “conservatives” think all taxes, everywhere, are totally illegitimate.

College these days runs about $20K per year on average, by the way. What a deal, huh?

Severian, “Caveat Emptor”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-16.

June 23, 2024

California has “a governing class that wants you to give them power, then shut up and go away”

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray illustrates some of the many ways that California’s elected politicians are working to ensure that mere voters won’t interrupt their urgent and necessary work:

The Taxpayer Protection Act, a proposed referendum that got enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot, would have required voter approval for all new state and local taxes. State election officials agreed that it met the qualification threshold, and planned to put it before the voters. Democratic officeholders sued, with considerable support from public employee unions and interest groups, and the California Supreme Court ruled this week that the measure may not be placed on the ballot — because it improperly proposes to revise the state constitution, rather than merely amending it. You can watch them try to parse that distinction here, for seventy murky pages. You can change the state constitution through the referendum process, but you can’t change the state constitution through the referendum process. See, totally clear.

At the same time, California Governor Patrick Bateman is telling the organizers of a ballot measure that would increase penalties for drug and theft crimes — after a decade of sharply reduced penalties — that he’ll punish them by blocking criminal justice reform measures in the legislature unless they pull their measure from the ballot. The intended message is a very clear threat: If you insist on your ballot measure and lose at the polls, you’ll be punished with a complete blockade on your agenda through legislative means, for as long as we can manage it.

And a parental rights proposition that aimed for a place on the November ballot — falling short in its efforts to gather enough signatures — ran into a wall when the attorney general’s office assigned it a misleading label that would have described it to voters as a repressive measure that was intended to hurt children.

So a Progressive reform, the great 20th-century transition to direct democracy, is running into a progressive wall of resistance in the 21st century. California Democrats are fighting to limit the likelihood that voters will interfere with their agenda.

People outside California often shrug at the decline of the state, because Californians are just getting what they voted for. But that view misses a bunch of strangeness and ambiguity in a place that has tended to put Democrats in office, then limit their efforts with an ideologically inconsistent hodgepodge of conservative and libertarian ballot measures. The governor and the state legislature just sued to prevent their own voters, the people who sent them to public office, from voting on the new taxes they create. Democrats against direct democracy — a governing class that wants you to give them power, then shut up and go away.

This is not merely a California problem. I wrote a few days ago about the scumbag Robert Kagan and his idiotic book warning that America is facing a rebellion. Here’s the back cover of the book, and I’ve used sophisticated media software to circle the important part:

“The problem is and has always been the people and their beliefs.” This is what the American governing class believes, now. See also the pro-democracy warrior Tom Nichols and his recurring theme about the repulsive people of an ignorant country. We need to protect democracy by getting all the trash that makes up the population to somehow go away and stop bothering their wise and benevolent betters.

The great point of cognitive slippage in American governance has been the degree to which Americans have been willing to vote for officeholders whose agendas they then try to block through lawsuits, referendums, and popular resistance. We’ve voted for shit sandwich over and over again, then declined to eat the whole sandwich. The governing class is now announcing that we’re no longer allowed to refuse the complete meal. You may not have a ballot measure on that.

In the near term, and in the medium term, that pivot leads to greater friction and accelerated decline. In the longer term, preventing people from limiting the aggressive failure of the governing class can only make that failure more apparent. Geological faults that have a lot of small movements release tension in a series of minor earthquakes; faults that can’t release tension through small movements eventually have one big one. We’ll eventually recognize the California Supreme Court’s decision this week as a Pyrrhic victory. There will be more of these, in a political system of increasing brittleness.

June 21, 2024

“Neoliberal ideology is antidemocratic at its very core. Its aim is to give free-reign over our societies to corporations, not citizens”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tim Worstall responds to a recent Medium essay by Julia Steinberger which illustrates that “neoliberal” has joined “fascist” as a generic term to indicate strong disapproval of a person, organization, or idea:

The idea that an adult woman can believe these things is just amazeballs. But here we are. A tweet from Julia Steinberger leads to her Medium essay about what’s wrong with the world.

An upheaval in 10 chapters:

    1. The cause. We know the climate crisis is brought to us by highly unequal and undemocratic economic systems.

Err, no? Emissions are emissions. 100 people emitting one tonne each is exactly the same as 1 person emitting 100 tonnes. Sure, it’s true that a more unequal society will have more people emitting those 100 tonne personal amounts. But a more equal society will have more people able to emit another 1 tonne each. For, more equality is by definition the movement of some of those assets of the richer to those poorer — the economic assets which either allow or do the emitting. Sure, Jim Ratcliffe’s £50,000 private jet flight emits more than my £100 Easyjet one. But if we take the £50k off Jim and give it to 500 folk like me then all 500 of us might spend the marginal income on an Easyjet flight each — which would be more emissions than Jim’s spending of the money.

It simply is not true that economic inequality is the heart, the core or the cause of climate change. It’s idiocy to think it is too.

Of course, we know what’s happening here. Climate Change is Bad, M’Kay? Which it is, obviously. Economic inequality is Bad, M’Kay? Well, there the evidence is a great deal more mixed but whatever. But in the minds of the stupid all bad things have the same cause. So, if inequality is bad, climate change is bad, then they must be the same thing because they’re Bad, M’Kay?

    2. The rise. The recent history of these economic systems, in the Americas and Eurasia, is dominated by the ascendance of neoliberal ideology.

Oh, that is good. Given that I am a neoliberal — a fully paid up one, Senior Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute and all — that’s very good. Given HS2, looming wealth taxation, the increased bite of idiot regulation and all that I can’t say that I see neoliberalism as winning right now but that might depend upon your starting point. If you’re a socialist — or an idiot but I repeat myself — you might well regard the plenitude of bananas in the supermarket as neoliberal. After all, that is something that socialism never did achieve.

    3. The threat. Neoliberal ideology is antidemocratic at its very core. Its aim is to give free-reign over our societies to corporations, not citizens.

And, well, you know, bollocks. The very beating heart of neoliberalism is that corporations need to be controlled and they’re best controlled by the citizens. In the form of free markets rather than voting on which bureaucrats get the gold plated pension, true. But neoliberals are between indifferent and actually against capitalist power. The whole nub of the idea is that markets do the job of controlling capitalists better than bureaucrats, politicians or, obviously, capitalists.

There’s not really any way for her thesis to survive after getting so much of the basics wrong, is there?

But just one more tidbit:

    Hayek and his neoliberal colleagues now needed another, antidemocratic way, to organise society. They didn’t want democracy, but they wanted some kind of self-maintaining organisation — by which they meant hierarchy. Organisation was supposed to be supplied by the market, and hierarchy by competition within markets. (It’s worth noting that neoliberals in the 1950s did not, although they should have, predict that unfettered markets lead to concentrations in monopolies or cartels. They would arguably disapprove of the vast corporations running our current economies, even though their market-above-democracy policies predictably brought them into being.)

Well, that wasn’t actually the last tidbit. But the idea that Friedman, Mises, Menger, Hayek and the rest didn’t worry about monopolies? Jesu C is really bouncin’ on that pogo stick right now. And then the idea that democracy will be better bulwark against monopolies than markets? Can you actually do backflips on a pogo stick?

June 17, 2024

Inside the deputy PM’s thoughts

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

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper imagines what Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland might be thinking as she pushes her capital gains tax increase:


Screencap from a CPAC video of Chrystia Freeland speaking in October, 2022.

On Monday, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland defended her government’s raising of the capital gains tax by delivering a weirdly catastrophic lecture speaking of a Canada beset by poverty, division and angry mobs.

“Do you want to be in a country where those at the very top live lives of luxury but must do so in gated communities behind ever higher fences using private health care and airplanes because the public sphere is so degraded and the wrath of the vast majority of their less privileged compatriots burns so hot?” she said.

[…]

Monday
Rivers of blood. Mothers consuming their offspring. Houses of worship employed only as makeshift storehouses for the dead.

Abundance will cease. Colour will vanish. The people you now know as loved ones will first become strangers, and then they will become enemies.

These are but some of the fates that realistically lie in store for a Canada that refuses to raise its capital tax inclusion rate from 50 per cent to 67 per cent on gains realized after June 25, 2024. While I am sympathetic to those who have worked hard and wish to retain what they have earned, I would urge them to consider the value of money in a Canada where the only remaining currency is one’s readiness to kill.

Tuesday
As deputy prime minister of Canada, I am fully aware that carbon taxes are an electoral liability for this government. But this is a problem not of policy, but of messaging.

If we’re not able to tax carbon-emitting fuels to a rate of $170 per tonne by 2030, the most optimistic scenario I can offer is the complete breakdown of the natural world as we know it.

Agriculture will become a memory. Cities will become unapproachable due to the overwhelming smell of decay. Language will devolve and then disappear. Any surviving art or culture will only inspire fear, because people will not know what it is.

The air may be breathable, but we will wish it was not.

June 8, 2024

Eco-terrorism – it’s all over Canada

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

Elizabeth Nickson on the strong likelihood of any given wildfire in Canada being not just man-made but deliberately set for political reasons:

“Forest fire” by Ervins Strauhmanis is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

A Google Earth satellite video is making the rounds on twitter. it shows the moment an arc of fires began in northern Quebec, the smoke rising. It looks like people calculated the prevailing winds so that the smoke would blow south. Then connected via sat phone, they lit them. It’s another psy-op from our gracious overlords. We aren’t afraid enough, despite every nasty limiting idiotic play they have visited upon us in the last four years. Monkey Pox failed, more plague warnings were greeted by a shrug. But this one, the world bursting into flame? Be very very afraid.

Justin Trudeau lost no time in announcing that the fires were from “climate change” and the carbon tax, which is impoverishing everyone not in government or on lush pensions, is just the beginning of the restrictions he must institute or we are all gonna die.

The stupidity and cruelty of this is almost unimaginable. But fires have worked over and over again to terrify people into quiescence. The rumours that they were deliberate were the stuff of fantasy until people started getting arrested. Alberta shows that almost 60 percent of fires in that province are human caused. And in Canada, as of today, we have arrested dozens. They will be released, their bails paid by a high-priced lawyer because most of them act as agents of the hyper-rich, paid through a cascade of environmental NGOs. The richest people among us are burning the forests in order to force compliance.

When I moved back to the country 20 years ago, the movement adopted me because I was writing for the Globe and Mail and Harper’s Magazine. I interviewed hundreds of local activists, the ones who, with the inspiration of RFK, Jr. had shut down the biggest industrial forest in the world in an action called “The War of the Woods“. They were mostly ordinary people, socialists and scientists of one stripe or another and deeply profoundly committed to saving the earth. The fact that they had eliminated the principal source of funding for health care and education — forestry — their own in fact, went right over their heads. It didn’t matter. “Climate Change” was an existential threat and those trees must stand to suck up “carbon”, or CO2, as it used to be known.

I met Denis Hayes too, the founder of Earth Day, head of the Bullitt Foundation in Seattle, founded by the heiresses to Weyerhaeuser. He excitedly told me how he created the storm of protest that led to Bill Clinton shutting down the western forests of the U.S., during the same period that Clinton was giving away American manufacturing to China. The result was devastation in forested communities from northern California to the Canadian border. Hayes, a tall, attractive Ivy Leaguer married to a woman whose father won a Nobel in chemistry, slithers through every institution. When I hung out with him, his target was Bill Gates’ climate initiatives and clearly, he has succeeded.

His “work” turned the forests into a tinderbox. Today, the 9th of June, 2023, a full thirty years too late, the Wall Street Journal editorial board finally acknowledges that sustainable forestry management may be the principal cause of the forests burning down. Holly Fretwell, a fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center, and professor at Montana State, gives, in this book, a thoroughgoing analysis of how wrong-headed and destructive “green” has been in the forests. Also this book by me, and a follow-up policy paper, also by me. These were not popular opinions, but they were, in fact, right. It is not “climate change” burning down the forests, it is government in the hands of brutal greens, in pursuit of an impossible goal.

May 25, 2024

Justin Trudeau – “a large percentage of small businesses are actually just ways for wealthier Canadians to save on their taxes”

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

Even before he became Prime Minister, the signs were there that Justin Trudeau was instinctively anti-small-business and that this would inform his approach to taxation and regulation of the private sector:

Changes to capital gains tax in this year’s budget were aimed at the wealthy, said the Trudeau Liberals, but the move has angered small businesses owners who have been snared by the increase.

Maybe that was part of the plan, since Justin Trudeau appears to view small business owners as rich Canadians trying to dodge taxes.

In an illuminating interview with the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge in 2015, Trudeau didn’t directly answer a question about whether he would lower taxes for small businesses.

But he did say, “We have to know that a large percentage of small businesses are actually just ways for wealthier Canadians to save on their taxes and we want to reward the people that are actually creating jobs and contributing in concrete ways.”

It was a remarkable denigration of small business owners and may have passed unnoticed because Trudeau was still a month away from becoming prime minister.

For the record, businesses with fewer than 100 people employ almost 12 million private workers in this country.

And the government’s own statistics state that in the 20 years up to 2020, the number of small businesses increased every year except for three — 2013, 2016 and 2020 — so a decrease in two of the Trudeau years.

Meanwhile, Trudeau’s apparently tax-dodging wealthy small businesses seem to be having a hard time of it. Businesses that began with four or less employees were only 62 per cent likely to still be operating five years later.

Earlier this year, Reuters news agency warned that a 38 per cent spike in bankruptcies of small businesses in the first 11 months of 2023 could rise even further.

Small businesses are “an integral engine of Canada’s economy,” said the budget, but 72 per cent of the owners fear that the new changes to capital gains tax will harm the climate for investment and growth.

Interestingly, when Trudeau was asked in that 2015 interview how he planned to balance the budget by 2019, because that was what he promised, it was investment and growth that was the answer.

Then prime minister Stephen Harper had tried to cut his way out of the deficit, said Trudeau. “That doesn’t work.”

“He has been unable to create growth. He has the worst record on growth of any prime minister in 80 years.”

But as the Fraser Institute has pointed out, in the last nine years under Trudeau, Canadian living standards have declined.

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