Canadian Cincinnatus

David Miller – the liberal golden boy

Given Toronto Mayor David Miller’s initiative to shut down the gun ranges on city property while I was away, one would have expected that I would have excoriated Miller as soon as I came back. But I didn’t.

The reason I didn’t is that I don’t want to just rant and nor do I want to say what is simply obvious. Of course, I am against his proposal on a whole series of levels: it is an attack on the shooting sports, which I support; it does nothing to stop gun violence – criminals don’t patronize gun ranges, or likely even know of their existence; it prevents law-abiding citizens from learning the art of self-defence; etc. To me, and likely, the people who patronize this blog, this is all obvious true, so I didn’t want to write a post simply to reiterate these points.

Then I realized a good slant. The ineffectuality of Miller’s approach is a symptom of a much larger aspect of him. Miller is a liberal golden boy. He is lionized by the fashionable left because he espouses all the right ideas and says all the right things. Unfortunately, results and execution don’t matter a whit to these people, with the result that the liberal golden boy’s typical career starts out with big fanfare but ends in pedestrian failure.

Another liberal golden boy, who Miller has more than a passing resemblance to, is former Attorney General Alan Rock. He also started his career with much promise but ended ignominiously in a series of fiascos. The problem with liberal golden boys is not that they are stupid – they are usually quite bright, it is that they are entirely lacking in common sense. Enamoured by their own sophistication, they have no idea that the simple solution is usually the best. ‘After all I am not a cowboy’, they will sneer. They are sophisticated.

Take Allan Rock’s bid to ban guns. A simple and straightforward solution would be to ban them outright, offering a buy-back scheme and an amnesty to turn them in. Simple and effective. But because he didn’t have the guts (and likely also the political support) to do that, he instead created a Rube Goldberg-like gun registry that plodded along to seemingly no purpose consuming ever increasing amounts of taxpayers money. (As a Canadian gun owner, thank God Rock was a golden boy!) An even better example is the tainted blood scandal. All he had to do was to prosecute a bunch of Red Cross executives for criminal negligence and call it a day. But no, that is too simple and direct for the sophisticates like Rock. Instead, he created a whole new government agency, Canadian Blood Services, while almost forgetting to prosecute the people who were actually responsible for the tainted blood in the first place.

Stephane Dion would be another example, except that he is not charismatic or popular. His hopelessly complicated carbon tax scheme certainly fits the pattern.

I strongly suspect Obama is one too. He is certainly lionized by all the right people. But his resume is so thin, it remains to be seen how administratively incompetent he really is.

But back to Miller. Look at some of the fiascos he created before the gun range closures. He has taken a simple issue, garbage collection, and turned it into an expensive mess. The Adam’s Mine site, which he opposed, would have cost the city $35 million and had the capacity to receive Toronto’s garbage for the next 100 years. Problem solved. Instead, he bought a $220 million site on an Indian reserve. He also greatly increased to cost and complexity of Toronto’s existing recycing program with very little actual effect in reduced garbage output. Why locate a landfill site on an Indian reserve? Answer: because there is no environmental assessment there. And for good measure, he also greatly increased garbage collection costs by taking over garbage collection from those parts of the city that had private garbage collection, adding to the folly even more by paying a penalty to break existing contracts. In other words, he paid a premium in order to do the same thing more expensively!

Another example: public transit. Here he has pursued a fruitless but expensive campaign of building streetcar right-of-ways in places like Spadina Ave. and St. Clair West that have cost a fortune, but have dome little to actually increase transit efficiency while upsetting local residents. However, when it comes to building new subway stops, whoah there!, lets not get carried away and do something crazy. Its just like a liberal golden boy to focus on the least effective means of public transit that exists – the streetcar – and fund it at the expense of the most effective means of public transit – the subway. With all the money he spent on neighbourhood-destroying streetcar right-of-ways, we probably could have had another subway stop in the city.

Until recently his fiscal policy was to hound and pester the province and the federal government to pony up even more money. After exhausting the patience of even the provincial Liberals (and spending a fortune on the fruitless 1 cent GST campaign), it has finally started dawning on him that he has to carry his own water. The result has been a constellation of user fees, taxes and reduced services whose chief characteristics have been their complexity and the way they target the middle class.

But such is the usual trajectory of the liberal golden boy. Lofty ideals and a world of promises end up in tatters when reality finally catches up to him.

Hopefully, in Toronto’s next municipal election 3 years from now, this boy wonder will be consigned to the ash heap of hsitory.

The diversity recession

Steve Sailor has an interesting blog entry on the role of ‘diversity’ as a contributing cause to the present economic slowdown (I hesitate to use the term recession, since the US economy has not yet posted a decline in its GDP – as in, “dude, where’s my recession”). briefly the argument is that, in the interest of increasing the percentage of the public that owns a home, the Federal government promoted low interest (i.e. sub-prime) loans to minority applicants who otherwise wouldn’t (and therefore shouldn’t) qualify.

Cincinnatus

Education and Equality

Steve Sailor has an interesting article on the state of education in the US vs. Europe and Japan. His argument can be summarized as follows:

“American higher education today -- ultra-elitist Social Darwinism masked by politically correct rhetoric
German higher education -- leftist egalitarian mediocrity
American lower education -- leftist egalitarian mediocrity
German lower education -- hardheaded realism about human differences”

The basic theme is that treating everybody equally is very detrimental to educational results.

Cincinnatus

I'm baack

I am now back from Europe and more regular blogging will resume.

I hope you enjoyed the vintage articles I posted when I was absent. Also, thanks to Mike Downtown for the articles he submitted in my absence. I hope he continues to submit the occasional article. I very much enjoyed reading them.

Cincinnatus

Misconceptions about inflation

The chief misconception of many economistsis the belief that there is a tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. i.e. that if the economy 'heats up' the specter of inflation will rear its ugly head. What is really surprising is how prevalent this view is among people who are called 'experts on the economy'.
The source of this misconception is John Maynard Keynes, the early twentieth century economist who was the architect of Roosevelt's New Deal and postwar Labour government policy in England after Clement Atlee was elected. Though his principles have been discredited since the late seventies when the internal contradictions of the policies he midwifed came to a head, many of his ideas still permeate university economics departments so that, on second thought, the widespread prevalence of misconceptions is not as surprising as it first seems.
Keynes' basic principle is that there is a tradeoff between unemployment and inflation, known academically as the Phillips curve. The idea is that if you want to decrease unemployment, the government, in the form of the central bank, prints more money to stimulate the economy. Since printing money causes inflation, the more inflation there is, the lower the unemployment rate should be. As a result high unemployment and high inflation can't coexist with one another. The stagflation of the late seventies (high unemployment and a stagnant economy) blew this theory out of the water. Unfortunately, it didn't blow the flip-side of this theory out of the water - the idea that a booming economy (and therefore low unemployment) must inevitably cause high inflation. This idea, though totally false, has lingered on in the mind of almost every economic commentator.
Suppose that at any given time, there is only a given amount of money in circulation? Also suppose that at any given time, there is only a given amount of goods and services in the economy Now suppose that we increase the amount of goods and services being produced by the economy while keeping the number of dollars circulating in the economy fixed. Then, on the average, there are less dollars to go with each individual good. This means deflation. Increasing the number of goods and services - i.e. growing the economy - causes deflation. Conversely, decreasing the number of goods and services means that there are more dollars available to buy each good produced. Therefore, an economy in recession produces inflation. Now suppose we increase the number of dollars in circulation while keeping the number of goods and services fixed. On average there are more dollars chasing the same number of goods. This is inflation. How do we increase the number of dollars in circulation? There is only one way. Print more money. The only people who can do this is central banks and counterfeiters.
So much for theory, what about practice? The eighties had high inflation but also produced a booming economy. The stock market inflation of the twenties produced the depression of the 30's. At first glance it seems Keynes was right. But not so, if we stop to examine what actually went on. Take the case of the twenties. The economy was booming but contrary to what we might expect, the twenties actually produced deflation. Just because the stock market was involved in a speculative bubble doesn't mean that there was a general inflation. The thirties produced an even worse deflation. Consider the eighties. Yes there was high inflation and low unemployment. But the high inflation occurred during the early eighties during the recession. As the decade progressed the economy gradually improved and inflation gradually declined. Rather than being an example of Keynsianism at work, it is an example of how wrong Keynsianism actually is.
But wait a minute. What about the great depression? If high inflation produced high unemployment in the eighties, why was there deflation in the thirties? The answer is that while inflation can produce high unemployment in the form of stagflation, it is not the only cause of high unemployment. Remember that the only thing that can cause inflation (and deflation) is the monetary policy of central banks, since they are the only outfit around that can print money. That is precisely why an expanding economy cannot produce inflation. The economy cannot overheat. An overheated economy is a fictitious problem, at least as far as inflation is concerned. The reason we have inflation at all in times of economic growth is that the ghost of John Maynard Keynes has not entirely been exorcised. While the reckless printing of money has been banished from western economies (though not in Russia), a little bit of money printing is still going on everywhere.
So the next time pundits blame inflation on a vigourous economy, don't believe it. Look instead toward Clinton, Chretien and Britain's Tony Blair who want to balance the budget the easy way.

Cincinnatus, 1997

Speed limits are the root of all evil

I have come to a conclusion: Speed limits are the root of all evil in today’s nanny state. Think about it. Before speed limits existed, the cop and the citizen were on side on every issue. When the citizen saw a cop, all he felt, if he felt anything at all, was an increased sense of personal security and well being. After all, the cop is a public servant with a gun hired by his tax dollars to protect good citizens like himself. The cop’s presence only meant that he was less likely to get mugged or beaten.

But with speed limits, this changed. Today, when a citizen sees a cop, he instinctively covers his brake and hopes the cop did not notice him. Today, the cop is no longer on the same team as the citizen - even though the citizen still pays his salary. Today, the cop is not viewed first as a protector. He is viewed as a nuisance first and a protector second. Today, the first thing that pops into the citizens head when he sees the cop is how do I avoid the harassment he metes out.

This is not good, for it has set up a bad precedent - a bad precedent that the government has gotten into the habit of increasingly applying. First it is speed limits. Then its tickets for creeping through 4-way stop signs. Then it is RIDE spot-checks. After that came police helicopters searching for marijuana plants. The latest innovation is SWAT teams shooting homeowners who resist their assault on a wrong address. Looking at the headlines of a newspaper, and one is left with the impression that the government has declared war on its citizens. And you don’t have to be a pot smoker or a gun owner to feel this way. It seems the only citizens our justice system really empathizes with are convicted murderers who get released after 10 years of day passes.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville compared the attitudes of Americans and Europeans with regard to law enforcement. In America, de Tocqueville observed that the citizens seem genuinely interested in catching law-breakers. Formally, they participate in the posses organized by the cops. Informally, they help whenever they can. By contrast, Europeans look with disinterest and maybe even a little sympathy for the crooks as they watch the professionals do their work. De Tocqueville wrote this in 1842. How times have changed. Today, if a citizen defends himself successfully, or even if he takes the initiative and captures a crook, instead of getting a medal and an attaboy, he gets an upbraiding. The very idea. How dare a citizen take work away from a professional! In the 1940 movie, Its a Wonderful Life, the cop who found Jimmy Stewart drunk behind the wheel his car after he had crashed it into a tree - but caused no real damage to anybody but himself, turned off the ignition and made sure Jimmy got home safe. Today, he would have thrown the book at him.

The problem with our speed limits, and the reason they presaged many bad things, is not from the nature of speed limits themselves - in the abstract. There is nothing, in principle, wrong with making sure organ-donor ninja bikes don’t go 200 km/h down residential streets. The problem is that they were one of the first laws that were used as an instrument of social engineering. Any driver with a scintilla of common sense knows that the speed limits are set lower than can be justified by safety concerns. The fact that everybody routinely exceeds these limits on almost every road they use is proof positive that this is the case. The 55 mph limit on divided highways designed for 70-80 mph in the US is the most blatant example of this. The fact that police tend to enforce these limits in areas where it is safest to exceed them, is proof that the cops realize this.

The reason behind the excessively low limits is an impulse by certain politically influential segments of the population who want to micromanage their fellow citizens. These people are convinced they know better than everybody else what is good for them, and are not happy unless they are modifying for the better, coercively if necessarily, the lives of their less enlightened peers. The phrase, “He who governs best, govern least” is totally alien to them. I think Mencken was right when he opined that what motivates these people “is the brooding fear, that somehow someone somewhere is out there having fun.”

Of course, the intent of the law quickly becomes obvious to people when they see how it is applied. They realize that there is no good reason for the speed limits to be as low as they are, and they ignore them. The flow of traffic reflects the general consensus on what the correct speed limit should be, and most likely, this choice is much closer to the mark that what the poke-noses determined.

The problem is that now everyone is now a lawbreaker, and consequently now shares a fellowship with their fellow lawbreakers who only choose to break the commandments against rape and murder instead.
The cops who are unwilling participants in all of this (after all, they have no choice but to obey orders), is to feel embittered and take their bitterness out on people who should be their allies.

Cincinnatus, 1997

Socialism's dirty secret

Right-wingers, specifically Reformers, have long had to bear the brunt of taunts suggesting that they are Nazi's. As a result, many would-be Reform supporters, people whose views on specific issues are almost identical with those of the Reform Party, have been alienated away to vote for less 'extremist' parties. Reformers all know this and get understandably angry and frustrated when the subject comes up. Not only Reformers, but also almost all vigourous politicians of the right, from Ronald Reagan to Mike Harris, have felt the sting of these insults. When asked who is to blame for this state of affairs, Reformers point the finger at Liberal (or PC or NDP) politicians and a hostile news media. Unlike most Reformers, I point the finger of blame back at the Reform Party.
Consider this: when hasn't mudslinging, name-calling, character assassination and invective not been a part of the political process. People, especially small-c conservatives, tend to remember the past through rose coloured glasses. As a result we imagine the politicians of yesteryear conducting themselves with the decorum suitable for the dignified statesmen that we imagine that they were. Nothing could be further than the truth. They were hurling insults at each other like no tomorrow. To invoke left wing clichés, they behaved in a partisan and mean spirited fashion. This description sounds like it is equally applicable to today's political scene - almost. The difference is that while Liberals, NDPer's and PC's indulge in much name calling at Reform's expense, when they get to their most serious accusations, Reform gets sheepish and apologetic in its rebuttal. For example, "Well, harrumph..., if the people really examine, eh, our platform, they will discover that we are not really Nazi's." Reformers are better off keeping their mouths’ shut than defending themselves with such half-hearted denials. Any disinterested observer who doesn't know anything about Canadian politics who hears statements such as these cannot help but conclude that Reformers really are Nazis. I think that this statement describes the state of mind of a lot of Canadian voters. For example, if I call somebody a child molester in a bar, and he responded by getting weakly defensive and uncomfortable rather than taking a swing at me, I would quite reasonably conclude that he probably really is a child molester. Why didn't he get indignant when I insulted him?
What is to be done? First of all, Reformers should remember that they aren't Nazi's. Nobody in the party higher than an unvetted low-level campaign worker believes that there should be organized racial discrimination in Canada. Indeed, the party platform calls for removing racism from Canada's law books - i.e. removing what is better known as affirmative action. Second of all, Reform believes in a decentralized federal government with a free enterprise economy unencumbered by government controls, and all legitimate government functions parceled out to the lowest level of government that can effectively handle them. This doesn't sound like the election promises of National Socialist Adolph Hitler. They sound more like the policies of Thomas Jefferson. Instead of apologizing for these policies, Preston Manning should be trumpeting them from the high heavens as proof that his party isn't Nazi.
Second of all, Reform should counterattack vigourously. Remember what Thomas Jefferson said - "An insult unpunished is the parent of another." If this sounds like a 'mean-spirited' strategy that 'lowers the level of debate in the country', it does because that is precisely what it is. But Reformers can take solace in the fact that they didn't start lowering the bar. One can also hope that, by vigourously counter-attacking, the perpetrators are sufficiently stung that they refrain from starting these mud-slinging contests in the future, so that the ultimate effect of Reform's counterattacks is to elevate rather than lower the level of debate in the country. Though taking human fallibility into account, this may be too much to hope for.
This brings up the question, what on earth could Reform bring up to counterattack accusations of Nazism? The very presence of this question is evidence of how effective Liberal propaganda has been; Reformers even half believe it. The right answer to the question is plenty. They should reveal socialism's dirty secrets, buried away in the broom closet of history. Consider the following items:

Item #1 - The sterilization laws of Alberta, which have recently been in the news, are not the product of mean-spirited right-wing Alberta as the news media has suggested, but were brought in by the United Farmers Party. The United Farmers are a predecessor of the Progressive Party, which is a predecessor of the CCF, which is a predecessor of the NDP.

Item #2 - Tommy Douglas, Canada's first socialist premier, and the NDP's patron saint, wrote an interesting master's thesis while a Baptist Seminary student in MacMaster University in the 1930's. In it he recommended the compulsory sterilization of criminals, "people of low moral character" and natives. Imagine! The patron saint of the NDP actually advocated sterilizing all of Canada's Indian and Inuit population! Or perhaps he would have referred to them as our Indian problem. Why doesn't Preston Manning sing this out at the top of his lungs when Alexa what's-her-name calls Reformers Nazi's?

Item #3 - What about the Liberals? Consider this item - the Canadian government under the direction of Liberal PM William Lyon Mackenzie King instituted a policy where Inuit had ID numbers tattooed on their arms for better identification by government officials, and this after semi-coercively herding them into newly built government towns! I don't know what this sounds like more - Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany?

These are just some items that I have casually come across. Perhaps with a little historical digging, even more damning skeletons could be uncovered. Remember that eugenics laws were very popular among the left before Hitler depopularized them. The left wing institution - Planned Parenthood - was set up to promote just such laws. Where do you think Hitler got them from? Before World War II, the only significant opposition to them was by religious conservatives. Preston Manning, with his fundamentalist Protestant upbringing, is well positioned to say I told you so. It’s just that he never does.
Admittedly this strategy is not for the faint-of-heart. But we must remember that politics is not for the faint-of-heart either. Implementing this strategy would produce explosive headlines and a firestorm of criticism from left wing sympathizers in the press. But I bet it would end accusations of Nazism for a long time. And remember that a dog once bitten, is twice shy. After the shouting and screaming dies down to a dull roar, Reform will have much more maneuvering room to present its substantive policies to Canadian fence sitters. The alternative for Reform is death by entropy.

Cincinnatus, 1997

Why Greg Olsen and Anousheh Ansari Are My Heroes

Not because they each spent twenty million dollars on a ride on the Soyuz up to and down from the International Space Station.

Ansari and Olsen shared their experiences on the space station at a panel at the International Space Development Conference in Washington last weekend.

The whole temper of a fascinating panel was disturbed when someone asked them, "Shouldn't you have just given the $20 million dollars to the poor instead?"

Rather than flinch, Olsen immediately explained that his charitable donations far exceeded the 20 million spent on the Soyuz, but that's not all.  Since then he's made over three-hundred appearances at schools, dress in his space suit, to tell kids about his trip and to encourage them all to go into maths and sciences so that America can continue to be the leader in technology.

The audience applauded, but Ansari wanted a crack at answering the question too. 

She told us about coming to America from Iran with nothing when she was sixteen.  She didn't know the language or the culture and was very intimidated.  But this is a country of opportunities, she went on to tell us, and she seized every opportunity.  She told us how frustrating it was as an immigrant to see many people who grew up here take all these opportunities for granted and just let them go by.

"But I seized these opportunities.  I worked hard.  It's my money, and I'll spend it how I want to."

The audience applauded enthusiastically.  As they should.  Good for her.  She and Olsen made it big, and there's nothing wrong with spending it.

Besides, they did each give $20 million to the poor.  Poor Russian rocket engineers.  They need to feed their families too.  One other thing I learned this weekend: the Russian space program is desperate for cash, but I guess that's obvious.  That's why they're taking up tourists with the Soyuz rockets.

Mike Downtown