Canadian Cincinnatus

Conservative pessimism

Personally, I am sick of all the gloom and doom heard in conservative circles of late: exploding government debt, the ever expanding welfare state, the ratchet effect, demographic decline, the impossibility of cutting back middle-class entitlements, yada, yada, yada. Yes all of those are big problems. Yes, all of those are very big problems. I agree.

But what the pessimists don’t see is that the glory days of conservatism are NOW. On precisely the issues enumerated above.

I know, I know. According to historical evidence, government spending will keep going up, middle-class entitlements will never stop and government debt will accumulate until the crack of doom. But as the economist Herb Stein once put it, “if something can’t go on forever, it will stop.”

And right now, we are at the point in history when it can’t go on. The welfare state first made its appearance in the late 19th century when Otto von Bismarck created old age pensions for German citizens. For a long time it was a great deal. But as entitlements expanded, longevity rose, retirement ages went down, the age when people entered the workforce went up, the family unit broke down and, most importantly, fertility went down, the system became unaffordable. Right now it is broke. Not only in North America but in Japan and the European Union as well (where things are far worse in this regard than here). So instead of grumbling about the triumph of socialism, conservatives should be realizing that we are at a pivot point in history.

In a crisis, things that used to be impossible become not just possible but inevitable. When it is all sorted out we will have private, defined-contribution pension plans (as they do in Chile), government budgets will be balanced, middle-class entitlements will be chopped and people will be relying much more on their family and themselves. The latter will mean that the family unit - which suffered so much damage in the 60’s with the adoption of the New Morality - will begin to heal itself.

Will this transition be a good time? No. Especially for our elected officials - regardless of party.

But we must remember that the time Winston Churchill correctly called Britain’s Finest Hour wasn’t all that fine for Britons at the time. It was, properly speaking, terrifying - with almost all of continental Europe under the grasp of totalitarianism. Nazi Germany had just destroyed France in less than a month - a nation that was able to field over 100 divisions on the first day of the war! And when Churchill was giving his speech, Nazi Germany was right across the channel, bombing London every day. But it was still Britain’s finest hour. 

In the same way, this will be conservatism’s finest hour. And like Great Britain, we will win. Entitlements will be privatized, deficits will be tamed, debts will be paid off, people will become self reliant, the family unit will be repaired, and - as a result of the latter development - the fertility rate will climb to replacement rate and beyond.

So buck up, and get ready for the scary ride to victory!

Gulf oil spill demonstrates the ineffectiveness of excessive government regulation

ig government cheerleaders wants to portray the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as a failure of ‘unregulated’ free enterprise – a classic case of what happens of private companies running amok without oversight. While it is almost certainly true that negligence on the part of British Petroleum caused this disaster, it is also true that this disaster is a failure of ‘big regulation’ as well. Let me explain.

For starters, there is a phenomenon that economists call regulatory capture. This is when regulators and legislators get into a cozy and mutually beneficial relationship where regulations are bent in the regulatees favour. All of the presents showered on the Department of Interior officials by BP are evidence of this. When control freaks push for more and more regulation of ever increasing complexity for the public good, the tacit assumption is that the regulators and legislators work selflessly for the public good. But what allows them to assume that? Have we found angels in the form of politicians and bureaucrats? I don’t think so. In the real world, the people burdened with the regulations have the biggest in the regulatory process. The rest of the public lazily assumes that the problem has being taken care of, and indeed it has, just not quite the way they think it has been. The more regulations you have, the worse this problem gets because the legal framework gets more obtuse and complicated. For instance, how many special favours are buried in the 2,700 pages of Obamacare?

As an example, take the remote arctic community of Hall Beach. The town is partially dry in that there is an alcohol committee that decides who gets a license to import booze and who doesn’t. The joke around town was that all the biggest drunks are on that committee. And why wouldn’t they be? They’ve got a big incentive to make sure that they get to keep drinking. If you don’t drink, you don’t really care enough to attend all those boring committee meetings.

A bigger example: Bill Clinton’s legal crusade against big tobacco in the 1990’s. The assumption in the media covering the story was that these lawsuits hurt big tobacco, because they are forced to make restitution for Medicare expenses incurred by aging smokers. Wrong. The tobacco companies benefited handsomely. How? Though they did have to pay hefty penalties to the states, their payoff was that upstart competitors were banned from setting up shop. You see it would be ‘unfair’ because those new companies would not have any restitution to make. Not having sold cigarettes before, they were not yet responsible for any medical bills and therefore weren’t a cash cow for the states yet. Those fines were money well spent as far as big tobacco was concerned because their payoff was a government guaranteed monopoly.

The second problem with excessive regulation is that regulations often have unintended consequences that actually make the problem they are intended to fix even worse. Take oil drilling. Drilling on land in the ANWAR region of Alaska? Banned for environmental reasons. Drilling for oil in the shallow continental shelf of the west coast? Banned, same reasons. Drilling for oil in the shallow continental shelf of the east coast? Banned. Shale oil production in Wyoming and the Dakotas? Banned. What’s left? Drilling for oil off the continental shelf in extremely deep water, where fixing blowouts is extremely difficult – that’s what’s left. Considering the cost and complexity of drilling there, nobody would be doing it if they had been allowed access to oil in the much less challenging regions that are now off-limits. 

The third problem is the stupidity of the regulations themselves. Quite often regulations concentrate on irrelevant minutiae while leaving critical issues untouched. For instance, does anybody believe that BP drilling operation was completely unregulated before the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up? Of course not. Likely, they were subject to thousands and thousands of pages of regulations covering all kinds of details – most trivial. In all probability that’s why the Department of the Interior gave them a safety award. All those forms and all those requirements were filled out - to a t. The only problem was that those regulations left the elephant in the room – what do you do when the blowout valve fails? – untouched.

 

Newspapers Crave CBC-style Funding

As old media newspapers all over North America watch their advertising base run to the internet and their bottom lines collapse, they've suddenly all fallen in love with France.

The French government, bowing to the pressure of journalists, has spent 600 million Euros to subsidize the fading newspapers.

The National Post's Diane Francis shamelessly states that we, the public, owe the newspapers for protecting democracy, as if they have published for over a century without renumeration.  The former publisher of the Toronto Star, John Honderich, longs for non-profit left-wing think tanks to come to the rescue, but his true hope for income rests with the federal government.

What Francis and Honderich have in common is that they both mention the CBC in glowing terms as worthy of public funding.  I guess they missed that piece on The National during the US federal election--the CBC claimed that Sarah Palin's son, Trig, was actually her daughter Bristol's son.

The problem is that Bristol was already pregnant with a different child the day Trig was born.  Anyone who knows anything about human female conception could have told them that it is next to impossible to conceive a second child while pregnant with the first.

The CBC did not apologize for running such a false and slanderous story, which is surprising since if this story had come from the internet, the CBC would have pointed it out as an example of why new media is unreliable.  But here's the real fun: internet bloggers had already debunked this rumour two days BEFORE the CBC ran their hit-piece on The National.  One quick google search could have saved them a lot of embarrassment.

Taxpayers are coughing up over one billion dollars per year for the CBC, and in return we're getting "news" that half a dozen internet bloggers had already proved false (oh, and yet another season of Degrassi).

Newspapers now want the same funding, claiming they'll save democracy.  Diane Francis' argument is that billionaires with questionable reputations are buying the newspapers and will subvert journalistic integrity.  Of course, rich men have always owned media empires, and Francis' attempt to brush off men like Randolph Hurst and Conrad Black as freak exceptions is lame.  Not to mention that Pravda was fully funded by the government of the Soviet Union, but that didn't make it a journalistically unbiased publication or a savior of democracy.

Of course, all of these newspapers have suddenly forgotten about the crisis they usually preach about: global warming (oh, sorry, global climate change).  Wouldn't it be better if we stopped printing newspapers and driving all those diesel trucks around delivering them?  Didn't the carbon footprint of France go up when the government purchased a subscription to a newspaper for every adult in the country, whether they wanted it or not?

Well the new attack is on the internet, claiming it's not environmentally friendly either because server farms and computers require coal-fired electricity.  Of course, the study makes no comparison between the carbon footprint of server farms and diesel trucks, and the study ignores the fact that as cleaner electricity is generated (like here in Ontario, where the coal fired generators are slated to go off line), the carbon footprint of computers and server farms will decrease.

This new attack is just another a desperate attempt to discredit new media and cling to the 19th century polluting models of news distribution.

Newspaper journalism has declined over the last thirty years in part because their left wing focus is biased and has disenfranchised a whole segment of the population.  The conservatives were the first to embrace blogging to fill this void in communications.

Now that an alternative has come along, the newspapers face a day of reckoning.  They will survive on-line or in a reduced format, but for our government to fund them would be unspeakable.

Luckily, the banks and car companies got to the front of the line first for free money.  The resistance to further handouts grows daily, and the younger generation that elected Obama aren't nostalgic about newspapers.  Who needs a hard copy when you've got the internet?

Mike Downtown

How Obama's intention to gut NASA could be good

Obama may be elusive on many of his plans, but he's been upfront about what he has in mind for NASA's 16 billion dollar budget: slash it and transfer the money to education.  He says he'd like to "delay" the Constellation program for five years.  This is tantamount to killing it.

But is that a bad thing?  NASA is already going over budget on their Apollo redux, a journey to where we've been before using hardware from the shuttle.  Indeed, even Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the moon, has joined a growing crowd of ex-NASA engineers who want a review of the whole program and a simpler, cheaper approach.

The Ares crew launch vehicle is to be propelled off the launch pad by a single five-segment solid rocket booster (the shuttle had help from two four-segment boosters).  Some engineers have concluded that this single five-segment configuration will suffer a catastrophic harmonic vibration that will shake the astronauts to death.

NASA agrees but says it can eventually fix this problem, and I believe they can, but how much will it cost and how long will it take?

If Obama is elected this becomes a moot point.  The program will be shut down.  So as the Chinese improve their space systems, America will have to rely on the Russians for launch.  Or will they?

Spacex, a company run by Paypal founder Elon Musk, is striving to develop a crew launch vehicle called the Falcon capable of taking six astronauts to the International Space Station.  But his dreams are even bigger than that: he's put a price beside the Falcon Nine Heavy of 104.5M for TLI--Trans Lunar Insertion.  Yup, he wants to send astronauts to the moon.

Now critics will point out that we're talking about a capsule with six people making it to lunar orbit with no hardware.  But why not buy two or three Falcons?

Falcon A takes the crew to lunar orbit.  Falcon B takes the lander to Lunar orbit.  That's where they will need to link up to land.  Falcon C actually goes first and lands cargo, say a habitat, a lunar rover, or whatever else they will need.

I admit that this system won't take anyone to Mars, but NASA's attempt to build a space system that will do both the moon and Mars will cost a fortune and probably will be technologically obsolete by the time they really decide to plan for a Mars trip.

So for 313.5M we could send astronauts to the moon.  Hey, why not add in a couple of extra Falcon flights just for redundancy.  It's still just a fraction of NASA's 16 billion dollar budget for one year, and NASA needs nearly ten years of budget to get anyone into space.

Of course there is the big question: will Musk actually get the Falcon off the ground?  Musk told us at the International Space Development Conference that he's heard the fastest way to become a space development millionaire is to start out as a space development billionaire.  He's taking one hell of a chance with his money and he knows it.  That's very big balls.

I wish him the best with Falcon.  If Obama wins it may be the only way Americans are going back to the moon.

Mike Downtown

The Real Reason Toronto Needs a Clean Up Day

For the latter half of the Twentieth century, Toronto was known as a clean city.  Torontonians were proud of Peter Ustinov's observation that Toronto was like a little New York run by the Swiss.

But as anyone who lives downtown can tell you, the city desperately needs cleaning.  When Mayor David Miller didn't initially get his new taxes, one of his emergency spending cuts slashed a late fall street cleaning and reduced the collection from garbage cans in public parks from once a week to every two weeks.  Indeed, in some parks garbage bins were removed for the winter.

Miller's response to the spring mess is to rally the people into a communal clean up: one this Friday April 11th called the Twenty Minute Makeover and another, the Community Clean Up Day, on Saturday the 12th.

But don't hope that the clean up day will help, because it's purpose isn't to clean up the city: it's purpose is to make it your fault that the city is dirty.

Miller loves to tap the deep well of guilt that people feel about the environment, and this is a masterpiece.  If the city isn't clean after Friday and Saturday, Miller can shrug and blame the people.  It's all the fault of the lazy citizens who didn't do their part, not David Miller.

Of course, people did their part when they paid their taxes.  That's how it worked in the twentieth century, but that's not how it works now.

Welcome to Toronto, the slightly shabby.