The dangers of reading the fake government org chart instead of the real government org chart

The problem with getting distracted and waiting several days to write about a story is that by the time you get around to it, the narrative you had in mind may have already been overtaken by events.

Athenios put me on to this story last week about how the conservative-led Greek government decided to abolish the national broadcaster. On fully four hours notice. Which is absolutely hilarious. Tired of a bunch of subsidised lefty whingers moaning about 'austerity'? Tired of paying money hand over fist for the privilege of such preening stupidity in the middle of the worst economic downturn your country has seen since the great depression? Think it's ludicrous to continue paying these nincompoops while pensions have been cut 40%?

Well, I would agree with you! Conservatives are often accused of having a ' go along to get along' tolerance of the ever expanding role of the state. When someone attempts a genuine rollback of some small part of the repulsive leviathan that is modern bureaucratic government, I cannot help but applaud. In addition, the move of shutting them down overnight, without any notice in advance, is surely a better plan than fighting for incremental cuts and waging month after month of the public relations equivalent of the battle of Dien Bien Phu. Machiavelli told you long ago that if pain is needed, better to bring it all at once:

Hence we may learn the lesson that on seizing a state, the usurper should make haste to inflict what injuries he must, at a stroke, that he may not have to renew them daily, but be enabled by their discontinuance to reassure men’s minds, and afterwards win them over by benefits. Whosoever, either through timidity or from following bad counsels, adopts a contrary course, must keep the sword always drawn, and can put no trust in his subjects, who suffering from continued and constantly renewed severities, will never yield him their confidence. Injuries, therefore, should be inflicted all at once, that their ill savour being less lasting may the less offend; whereas, benefits should be conferred little by little, that so they may be more fully relished.

If you strike at a king, strike to kill. So far so good, as of last Wednesday.

Unfortunately, kings do not always die so easily. How do you think they became King in the first place? I'm guessing that you, like me, probably imagined that you just turn off the damn power at the TV station, and that's that. It turns out that taking a public broadcaster off the air is not as straightforward as you might imagine. The first thing that happened is that the public broadcasters of the other European nations decided to continue broadcasting the now illegal Greek public TV from their own satellites. And I don't mean that François Hollande and Angela Merkel decided this. I mean that a bunch of EU public broadcasting bigwigs unilaterally decided to use taxpayer funded assets to intervene in the domestic disputes of a sovereign (ha!) nation. Strange, they don't talk about that kind of thing in civics class, do they?

Next, all the Greek journalists went on strike. As you do in Europe. Given they're not really inclined to work even at the best of times, it's not like they needed much encouragement. So now most Greeks aren't getting any perspective on the news except from ... you guessed it... Greek state TV, who continue to broadcast on the Internet, and now have dropped all pretense of neutrality and gone the full retard in terms of opposing the government. Where media leads, public opinion follows.

And in the most recent move, the courts come in to order the broadcaster be put back on the air. Thought you could shut down your own department eh? Wrong!

The net effect of this is that it's looking like this saga which started so quixotically may end up being the downfall of the conservative government. The main discussion now is about whether the government may be able to stave off the full scale collapse of their coalition if the prime minister resigns.

To begin with bluster and later take fright at the enemy's numbers, as the great Sun Tzu observed, shows a supreme lack of intelligence. The Government seemed to be of the naive opinion that the bureaucracy answers to the will of the elected representatives, and if their performance was sufficiently unsatisfactory, they could and should be fired, just like in any other company.

Joseph McCarthy thought the same thing. They were both wrong.

Postscript:

In a grimly hilarious sidenote, MSCI, the company who compile stockmarket indices for various countries, took the heretofore unprecedented step of downgrading the Greek market from 'developed' to 'emerging'. As MSCI noted:

Further,the MSCI Greece Index has not met the Developed Market criterion for size for the last two years. If it were not for an exception to the index maintenance methodology that requires the index to have at least two constituents, only one security would currently qualify for inclusion in the MSCI Greece Index.

Ooh, that's gotta burn.

The announcement is doubly comical for the absurd use of the euphemism 'emerging' in this context. As Athenios quipped, 'Emerging? More like submerging!'

The one ambivalently bright side of the NSA scandal(s)

The great Robert Fogel, sadly recently departed, noted in his discussion about slavery that the system was, for the most part, very efficient. One point he liked to emphasise is that people are so used to the notion of efficiency being applied to good ends that they don't consider the alternative possibility - efficiency as applied to evil in fact produces monstrous outcomes.

A similar tension exists in the way people understand the spy services. Whenever you see Hollywood depictions of the CIA (or just shadowy agents of some secret department, standing in for the CIA), 90-odd percent of the time they are displayed as having a sinister level of competence in their ability to pull off evil actions. They're everywhere, they see everything, and they can hunt you down. Of course, Jason Bourne wins in the end, but you're not left in any doubt that most of the time, the government gets its way.

This view eventually permeates a large amount of social thinking on the matter. Consider the 9/11 truthers - according to their claims, the government managed to organise a massive conspiracy to plant all sorts of explosives inside two skyscrapers, demolish them with people inside, make it look like planes were crashing into them on live television, and blame the Muslims. All while keeping this totally under wraps, except for the keen eyes of the producers of 'Loose Change'.

You could spend hours debating with these clowns about whether fire can actually melt steel, but it seems you might get much further by simply noting, 'Have you been to the DMV recently? What impression did that give you about the competence of the average government employee?'

This is the default Shylock rule - when you're thinking about the government, assume it will be run by folks at the DMV. Can you trust the government to clean up after Katrina? Think the DMV. Is it likely that the next round of financial regulation will prevent the next housing crisis? Think the DMV. Can you create police SWAT teams all over the country in rinky dink places and not have them consistently raiding the wrong houses while looking for marijuana? Think the DMV.

But... what about the CIA? Surely, if competence exists anywhere, it must exist there, right? When it really counts, when the chips are down, these guys are the pros, and they wouldn't screw it up?

Except, you know, with the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The point of the DMV rule is not that it's always right. It's just that it tends to be a fairly good predictor of what's actually going to happen.

I wrote a while ago about the fact that before this latest news broke, you tended to read a lot of stories about Chinese hackers tooling on the US - hacking into Google, diverting all internet traffic to China, that kind of thing. You'd very rarely hear about any US operations - the only exceptions were cases like Stuxnet which accidentally got released into the wild. In other words, you'd hear about the good side of the program (the US is releasing a computer virus to screw up Iranian centrifuges for enriching uranium) at the same time as the bad (this wasn't meant to be in the papers, meaning the virus got found out).

When I didn't read anything about US Cyber operations, I applied the DMV principle and assumed that these clowns just didn't know what they were doing. But the alternative was always that they were so good at what they were doing that you never heard about it. Since, of course, you weren't meant to.

As it turns out, the NSA has been spying on Americans like J Edgar Hoover on a dirt-digging mission to cover up for his cross-dressing proclivities.

Say what you will about the ethics of these programs (and I tend to be considerably wary of them) - they don't seem incompetent. They seem scarily competent. They seem like The Bourne Identity, when in reality I was expecting a cross between Fawlty Towers and Yes Minister (except with everyone being like the Minister).

The bad news is that this the NSA seems to play extraordinarily fast and loose with the 4th amendment, and has enormous power to spy on American citizens in a way that would make the Founding Fathers spin in their graves faster than a virus-ridden Iranian centrifuge.

The good news is that for the fraction of the things the NSA does which are likely beneficial to the country (and even the most jaded skeptic would probably admit that this fraction is non-zero), they can hopefully apply the same level of competence.

And if you can actually get the privacy destroying parts of the NSA's work removed (which, sadly, you probably can't), this whole imbroglio might actually be good news.

In other words, the government may be negative NPV, but it's not pure evil. So jacking up competence will at least have some effects on the revenues side of the ledger.

A Call To Arms For Tax Accountants

Accountancy  always suffers the reputation for being boring and dreary. "We pore through arcane pages of tax law to find out how to slightly alter the deductions on some or other special purpose entity! What could be more thrilling?"

Okay, so the day-to-day business of accounting might not be fun. But the purpose of it can be made much more exciting - I help free citizens cheat the government out of ill-deserved tax revenues! Pro-tax-avoidance types are often fond of quoting Judge Learned Hand on this point:

"Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands."

This is good, as far as it goes. It has some resemblance, although imprecise, to the standard defence of capitalism - sure, this whole greed thing is bad, but capitalism channels it towards socially beneficial purposes. Here, the equivalent is that everyone tries to pay less tax, and so you don't need to feel bad about that.

In other words, your desire to keep your own money is widespread, so obey the law, but otherwise feel free to keep your own cash. Sound advice, but not exactly uplifting. You wouldn't want to be trying to inspire people to man the barricades with that. The big missing piece is an explanation for why exactly 'all do right' by avoiding taxes. Judge Hand never really tells us why that is.

What you really want, rather, is the tax avoidance equivalent of the Ayn Rand argument for capitalism, which phrased it as a morally correct system, rather than as a morally fraught but practically effective system. Rand's argument, which is relevant here too, is essentially that all interactions between men either happen by voluntary contract, as epitomised by money, or at the point of a gun. Thus capitalism is in fact a morally uplifting system, rewarding men's ingenuity for satisfying the desires of other men, and providing value in exchange for value.

And to get the tax-avoidance version of that, you need the great Lysander Spooner:

All political power, so called, rests practically upon this matter of money. Any number of scoundrels, having money enough to start with, can establish themselves as a "government"; because, with money, they can hire soldiers, and with soldiers extort more money; and also compel general obedience to their will. It is with government, as Caesar said it was in war, that money and soldiers mutually supported each other; that with money he could hire soldiers, and with soldiers extort money. So these villains, who call themselves governments, well understand that their power rests primarily upon money. With money they can hire soldiers, and with soldiers extort money. And, when their authority is denied, the first use they always make of money, is to hire soldiers to kill or subdue all who refuse them more money.

For this reason, whoever desires liberty, should understand these vital facts, viz.: 1. That every man who puts money into the hands of a "government" (so called), puts into its hands a sword which will be used against him, to extort more money from him, and also to keep him in subjection to its arbitrary will. 2. That those who will take his money, without his consent, in the first place, will use it for his further robbery and enslavement, if he presumes to resist their demands in the future. 3. That it is a perfect absurdity to suppose that any body of men would ever take a man's money without his consent, for any such object as they profess to take it for, viz., that of protecting him; for why should they wish to protect him, if he does not wish them to do so? To suppose that they would do so, is just as absurd as it would be to suppose that they would take his money without his consent, for the purpose of buying food or clothing for him, when he did not want it. 4. If a man wants "protection," he is competent to make his own bargains for it; and nobody has any occasion to rob him, in order to "protect" him against his will. 5. That the only security men can have for their political liberty, consists in their keeping their money in their own pockets, until they have assurances, perfectly satisfactory to themselves, that it will be used as they wish it to be used, for their benefit, and not for their injury. 6. That no government, so called, can reasonably be trusted for a moment, or reasonably be supposed to have honest purposes in view, any longer than it depends wholly upon voluntary support.

Quite so.

Tomorrow, I'm off to my accountant to find out how to squeeze every possible deduction| out of my tax returns. Do your patriotic duty and take back every cent you can from the megatherion in Washington!

How the Sausage is Actually Made

One of things that Mencius Moldbug likes to emphasise is that most Western countries increasingly aren't democracies in a meaningful sense. Sure, we vote for politicians every couple of years. But the vast majority of the important decisions about what becomes law are made by civil servants - professional government officials who decide what's going to happen. Congress has decided that the job of governing is so vast that it will just palm it off to the secretary of the relevant department to figure out what to do. They in turn will palm it off to a bunch of junior guys, who may palm it off to some corporation or lobby group or NGO.

Don't believe me? Check out the 'Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act', a.k.a. 'Obamacare'. Do you know how many times the phrase 'The Secretary Shall' [promulgate regulations, develop standards, award grants, carry out a program, establish a formula...] appears in the act? Quick, see if you can guess.

It appears 883 times.

It's not even like the politicians are even going to any great lengths to hide how little involvement they have in lawmaking. Nancy Pelosi famously declared about the Obamacare Bill, in public, that '[W]e have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it'. Not only did she not know herself, she wasn't even afraid of admitting it. So why did she pass the Bill? Someone told her to pass the Bill, and she trusts them enough to just go along with the recommendation. Who wrote it? Who knows! Some combination of lobby groups, civil servants, NGOs, and God knows who else.

So far, the Secretary has issued over 12,000 pages of regulations elaborating on the law. And in case it wasn't clear, I'm pretty certain that the Secretary herself hasn't read and understood the intended (let alone actual) effects of all 12,000 pages of regulations. Again, who actually wrote them? Great question. Care to wager on the chance that you'll be able to get a straight answer to that question if you asked the Secretary, or Nancy Pelosi?

This isn't just a Democrat thing. Moldbug has a great example about some ridiculous Executive Order on 'Protection of Striped Bass and Red Drum Fish Populations'. Does anyone imagine Bush knew virtually anything about this subject before passing the order? The mere suggestion is laughable.

The idea that most of the important legislative choices are being made by a bunch of nobody government officials is so rarely discussed in the popular discourse that you suspect most people don't really believe it. Come on, how much power can some random bureaucrat in an obscure bit of the government have to affect my life?

As if to remind you, here comes the latest dreary outrage in government overreach in the name of corporate cronyism - as of last Saturday, it's now illegal to unlock your mobile phone in the USA so that you can use it on another carrier.

As a policy, this is yet one more example of restricting consumer freedom in the name of protecting big business. WHEC helpfully informs us that:

Officials say carriers rarely went after customers that unlocked their phones...

and that's a guarantee you can take to the bank!

...but instead targeted businesses that bought throw away phones, unlocked them and shipped them overseas.

 Which is a clear problem because... um... you see...

But that's not what's shocking here. The real kicker is the following:

In October 2012, the Librarian of Congress, who determines exemptions to a strict anti-hacking law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), decided that unlocking cellphones would no longer be allowed. But the librarian provided a 90-day window during which people could still buy a phone and unlock it. That window closes on Jan. 26.

 F***ing who? The Librarian of Congress? Who on earth is that? And why are they determining whether I can unlock my cellphone?

If there are any Shylock Holmes readers that can prove that they knew before last week that decisions on copyright were made by the Librarian of Congress, I will personally send them a cheque for $1000.

Who wrote this awful regulation? Who decided that we needed to make criminals out of people who want to use a local SIM card while travelling in Europe before their contract is up?

Beats me. Some flunkie in the US Copyright Office of the Librarian of Congress. And how did the person get the idea to do this? Presumably the phone companies donated to somebody important, and got this disgraceful back room deal.

If you still believe the fiction that laws are made by elected representatives, you may be wondering whom you complain to to get the Librarian of Congress replaced. Oh, the halcyon days of youthful naivete! Do you think the Cathedral cares one whit about your opinion?

Every now and then the public service will step sufficiently far out of line that politicians will occasionally overrule the decision. The public assumes that this means that the rest of the regulation has been given careful oversight and assented to. Care to wager over how many of those 12,000 pages have been scrutinised by any elected official ever, given Congress couldn't be bothered writing them in the first place?

And for the remaining 99.9% of regulations, some group of guys whose titles and positions will be meaningless to you are busily deciding how the power of the state will be administered.

At least in the EU the elites have essentially given up on the farce of pretending that any meaningful decisions will be decided by the popular will.

Here in the US, the charade continues a while longer.

None of this would have been a surprise to the great Robert Heinlein, who described it very memorably way back in 1961 in his book 'Stranger in a Strange Land':

IN THE VOLANT LAND OF LAPUTA, according to the journal of Lemuel Gulliver recounting his Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, no person of importance ever listened or spoke without the help of a servant, known as a "climenole" in Laputian-or "flapper" in rough English translation, as such a Servant's only duty was to flap the mouth and ears of his master with a dried bladder whenever, in the opinion of the servant, it was desirable for his master to speak or listen. Without the consent of his flapper it was impossible to gain the attention of any Laputian of the master class.

Gulliver's journal is usually regarded by Terrans as a pack of lies composed by a sour churchman. As may be, there can be no doubt that, at this time, the "flapper" system was widely used on the planet Earth and had been extended, refined, and multiplied until a Laputian would not have recognized it other than in spirit.

In an earlier, simpler day one prime duty of any Terran sovereign was to make himself publicly available on frequent occasions so that even the lowliest might come before him without any intermediary of any sort and demand judgment. Traces of this aspect of primitive sovereignty persisted on Earth long after kings became scarce and impotent. It continued to be the right of an Englishman to "Cry Harold!" although few knew it and none did it. Successful city political bosses held open court all through the twentieth century, leaving wide their office doors and listening to any gandy dancer or bindlestiff who came in.

The principle itself was never abolished, being embalmed in Articles I & IX of the Amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America-and therefore nominal law for many humans-even though the basic document had been almost superseded in actual practice by the Articles of World Federation.

But at the time the Federation Ship Champion returned to Terra from Mars, the "flapper system" had been expanding for more than a century and had reached a stage of great intricacy, with many persons employed solely in carrying out its rituals. The importance of a public personage could be estimated by the number of layers of flappers cutting him off from ready congress with the plebian mob. They were not called "flappers," but were known as executive assistants, private secretaries, secretaries to private secretaries, press secretaries, receptionists, appointment clerks, et cetera. In fact the titles could be anything-or (with some of the most puissant) no title at all, but they could all be identified as "flappers" by function: each one held arbitrary and concatenative veto over any attempted communication from the outside world to the Great Man who was the nominal superior of the flapper.

This web of intermediary officials surrounding every V.I.P. naturally caused to grow up a class of unofficials whose function it was to flap the ear of the Great Man without permission from the official flappers, doing so (usually) on social or pseudo-social occasions or (with the most successful) via back-door privileged access or unlisted telephone number. These unofficials usually had no formal titles but were called a variety of names: "golfing companion," "kitchen cabinet," "lobbyist," "elder statesman," "five-percenter," and so forth. They existed in benign Symbiosis with the official barricade of flappers, since it was recognized almost universally that the tighter the system the more need for a safety valve.

The most successful of the unofficials often grew webs of flappers of their own, until they were almost as hard to reach as the Great Man whose unofficial contacts they were . . . in which case secondary unofficials sprang up to circumvent the flappers of the primary unofficial. With a personage of foremost importance, such as the Secretary General of the World Federation of Free States, the maze of by-passes through unofficials would be as formidable as were the official phalanges of flappers surrounding a person merely very important.

So it was, so it is, so it will continue to be.

Statism

From LibertarianCitizen



Ha!

(via TJIC)

Reply Paid Arbitrage

What charities say on their reply-paid envelopes:

Your stamp on this envelope adds to your gift!

What charities should say on their reply-paid envelopes:

You could put a stamp on this envelope to save us money, but why not donate an extra 45 cents and let us pay the postage, since our charitable institution reply-paid rates are much lower than what you'd pay?

That way our charity gets more money, the post office gets less money, you get a bigger tax deduction, and the government gets less money to start foreign wars and hire meddling bureaucrats to make your life hard!

I guess the people that think hard about  how to arbitrage the government don't tend to end up in the charity fundraising business.

Postal reply arbitrage does have a somewhat checkered past, but I think it's now time to rehabilitate its reputation.

Why Does the Post Office Always Lose Money, Part 2

Why, that does sound convenient! And some people say that the government doesn't understand customer service.

Part 1 here.

What you should be doing

Every now and again, I find myself reading somebody else's writings, and I'm filled with the urge to yell out to everyone 'Stop reading my stuff, it's all junk anyway. Put down whatever you're doing and go read this guy instead, he's much better!"

This is one of those times.

I've said it before, but go read Mencius Moldbug. Right now. Go here. Start with the posts at the top (the 'How Richard Dawkins Got Pwned) posts which I linked to earlier, and work your way down. You'll find out, for instance:

-Why the complaints that the American revolution were founded on were largely nonsense (and why reasonable people should have supported the Loyalist position).

-How you might organise a system of government where the sovereign is a profit-making corporation, and why it might work a lot better than you'd think.

- The most interesting  13 paragraph summary of the last 300 years of world history that I've read. It reads nothing like the standard narrative at all - the events are the same, but the interpretations are probably unlike anything you've encountered.

These are just to whet your appetite - it's probably better to read them in order.

I don't agree with all of it - his views on Austrian economics seem unpersuasive, and I'm not sure that his patchwork theory of sovereign corporation-states wouldn't turn into tyranny in the hands of the wrong set of shareholders. The biggest weakness to the argument, I think, is that it doesn't explain how the massive scientific and industrial revolutions occurred over the same time span that the forms of government were (in his view) going to hell. I'm about halfway down the list of posts, and maybe he has an answer to that, but the conservative in me retains a nervousness that we might be throwing out the baby with the bathwater if it turns out that economic and scientific progress are more entwined with current forms of government than he seems to assume. I imagine Moldbug might retort that the Nazis and the Soviets were both pretty good at scientific advances as well, and there's no reason to assume that democracy has any special advantage in this area. But still - we're left with the big mystery of the scientific revolution, which needs some explaining before you ought (IMHO) start meddling with current forms of government.

But that's all detail. The bottom line is that this is the most interesting stuff I've read in years.

Go read it now. Don't have time? Shut up, I don't care. Trust me on this, just do it right away.

Sons of Liberty

If one were forced to nominate a candidate for the "great libertarian song" (not 'greatest among a field of mediocrities', but great in an absolute sense), it's hard to beat Frank Turner's 'Sons of Liberty'

I find myself wondering how much Frank Turner and I would disagree on the solution to the problems facing England (and the West). Songs like 'Sons of Liberty' make me think that the distance might be small, but when you've also written songs called 'Thatcher f***ed the kids', part of my initial assessment is probably just projection.

But we assuredly agree on a number of the problems, and on what has been lost.

In terms of stirring opening lines, it's hard to beat these:

Once an honest man could go from sunrise to it's set
Without encountering agents of his state or government.

Quite right. It is nigh on impossible to imagine that today. You can only get something close by living somewhere incredibly rural.

Turner's assessment of how we ended up here has a lot to recommend too:

For centuries our forefathers have fought and often died,
to keep themselves unto themselves, to fight the rising tide.
And that if in the smallest battles we surrender to the state,
We enter in a darkness whence we never shall escape.

The democratic state always expands. This is the government analogue to 'The House Always Wins'. Sometimes, the expansion is jarring and immediate, like the New Deal. More often, it's slow and remorseless,  with every new regulation on food handling, bike helmets, child toy safety, maximum level of nitrate in water coming from the bore on your property, etc. etc. etc. Like a drone attack coming from everywhere, it's hard to fight them all off. The end result, as Turner describes, is that we acquiesce. 

But the song is only just starting to get interesting:

Wat Tyler led the people in 1381,
to meet the king at Smithfield
And issue this demand:
That Winchester's should be
the only law across the land,
The law of old King Alfred's time,
of free and honest men.

Are these not amongst the most remarkable lyrics in a pop/rock song that you've read in a long time?

First of all, to find anybody at all who even knows about the Peasants' Revolt, let alone has a firm opinion about it, let alone someone who is a popular musician... well, let's just say that's a lot of letting alone.

As for the virtues of King Alfred, on that Mr Turner and I agree. Holding technology and social development constant, I would much rather live under the system of government of monarchy under Alfred the Great than  democracy under David Cameron.

Democracy may tend to produce good governance (although even that is debatable), but democracy surely isn't the definition of good governance. If you can get the latter without the former, it's a boatload better than the former without the latter. The problem of monarchy, of course, is that Alfred the Great makes way for Ethelred the Unready.

But if you wanted a pithy summary of everything that's wrong with democracy in the 21st century, it's hard to beat this:

Because the people then they understood what we have since forgot:
That the government will only work for it's own benefit.

Preach it, Mr Turner!

The biggest mistake in politics is thinking that everything will be different if only your guys get elected. The reason to vote for conservative politicians is not that they'll be better administrators. Rather, it's the (probably vain) hope that they'll shrink the government, thus making it harder for you to be maladministered and expropriated.

The song ends with bold, but probably imprudent, advice:

So if ever a man should ask you for your business, or your name,
Tell him to go and f*** himself, tell his friends to do the same.
Because a man who'd trade his liberty for a safe and dreamless sleep
Doesn't deserve the both of them, and neither shall he keep

I presume he means when dealing with figures of authority, not that this advice should be taken to the limit:

Shylock: Hi Rob, how's it going?
Rob: Hi Shylock, pretty good. Shylock, I'd like you to meet my friend Tim.
Tim: Pleased to meet you. Sorry, what was your name again?
Shylock: Bah! Go f*** yourself, Tim. You too, Rob.

Seriously though, to the anarcho-capitalist, defiance of authority is a public good. It's beneficial to the public if the cops don't think they have absolute authority, but it's not necessarily personally advantageous to give Officer O'Rourke the middle finger during a traffic stop when he asks for your license.

Those at the less anarcho- end of the capitalist scale are reluctant to dispense the advice to scorn all vestiges of authority. So instead I'd rather end on the alternative rousing formulation of the chorus:

Stand up sons of liberty and fight for what you own!
Stand up sons of liberty and fight, fight for your homes!

Amen.

Alas, I fear that Mr Turner knows what I know - there are precious few sons of liberty still in England, and assuredly not enough to defend their collective homes. Think of it instead as a glorious defense of a lost cause, coupled with a tiny but vain hope that maybe all is not completely lost.

Great Moments in Government Compassion

In New York, Mayor Bloomberg has stood behind a policy to refuse private food donations to the homeless, on the basis that they might not meet the right nutritional requirements. That's right, you're living hard on the streets of New York, sleeping in doorways, begging for spare change, chugging mouthwash because it's the cheapest source of alcohol and hoping that you don't become the target for somebody's random violence. But according to Michael Bloomberg, the real threat to your life expectancy is the salt in that bagel you're being served. Problem solved!

Ace claims that this policy suggests that New York may not have a genuine problem with real poverty after all.

He may well be right, but I don't think you can conclude this from the story.

It seems entirely plausible to me that some pinhead from the food police would refuse donations even if people really were going hungry. This is in fact entirely consistent with the incentives of bureaucrats everywhere - the only thing that matters is following the rules, no matter how nonsensical.

In an ordinary business, employees tend to be given some discretion in their choices to solve customer problems. This is because a private company has to leave customers satisfied or it goes out of business. As a result, it makes sense for management to encourage employees to have some initiative, in order to deal with unexpected problems that arise so that the customer goes away happy.

But the government never has this problem. No matter how pissed off you are when you leave the DMV, this doesn't affect the DMV's viability, or the paycheques of its employees. Because there's no profit, it's hard to measure if the organisation is doing better, or the contribution of individual employees. It is however easy to measure if you happened to break a particular rule. If in doubt, follow the rule. The end result is this kind of lunacy. If you allow the food to be given to the homeless and you gain nothing, but run the risk of some other bureaucrat punishing you. If you refuse the food, the homeless suffer, but nobody will blame you personally for following the rules. In the extreme case where an article gets written, it doesn't mention the individual who made the decision - the problem is just with the rule.

Individual government workers have no incentive to look at the larger perspective. Hopefully that's what their superiors are meant to do. Unfortunately, Mayor Bloomberg has a long history of monomaniacal pursuit of browbeating people into eating healthier. As Mark Steyn noted:

That’s the very model of a can-do technocrat in the age of Big Government: He can regulate the salt out of your cheeseburger but he can’t regulate it on to Seventh Avenue.

But even if he weren't the certified nitwit that he is, Mayor Bloomberg would have a hard time undoing every stupid, hidebound, butt-covering, slave-to-the-rulebook decision being made by New York City officials. It's a game of whack-a-mole that he'll inevitably lose no matter how hard he tries, let alone when he's instead wearing his mole cheerleader outfit.

The bureacrat initially follows the rules mindlessly because that is what his incentives dictate. Cognitive dissonance being what it is, the bureaucrat doesn't want to admit that he's following stupid policies that hurt people only because that's what the rules say - that would make him a coward and a pinhead.

As a result, it's easier for him to convince himself that the rules are in fact just, that the application of the rules is the actual end in itself, and that the world works better if he leaves the judgment calls to somebody else and follows the rules, no matter how bad the immediate impact.

And thus the stupidity gets internalised. Even if that means turning away food for the homeless.

The scorpion bites the frog because that is its nature.

Update: As if to prove the point, here's a story about a council sending a main to prison for not properly putting up siding on his home.

Classic!

You have to be both a chemist and skeptic of government policy (which I know applies to at least GS, and possibly others) to enjoy this one , but it's comedy gold - how to synthesise pseudoephedrine from N-methylamphetamine, from the Journal of Apocryphal Chemistry, Feb. 2012:

Pseudoephedrine, active ingredient of Sudafed®, has long been the most popular nasal decongestant in the United States due to its effectiveness and relatively mild side effects [1].  In recent years it has become increasingly difficult to obtain psuedoephedine in many states because of its use as a precursor for the illegal drug N-methylamphetamine (also known under various names including crystal meth, meth, ice, etc.)[1,2].  While in the past many stores were able to sell pseudoephedrine, new laws in the United States have restricted sales to pharmacies, with the medicine kept behind the counter.  The pharmacies require signatures and examination of government issued ID in order to purchase pseudoephedrine.  Because the hours of availability of such pharmacies are often limited, it would be of great interest to have a simple synthesis of pseudoephedrine from reagents which can be more readily procured.

A quick search of several neighborhoods of the United States revealed that while pseudoephedrine is difficult to obtain, N-methylamphetamine can be procured at almost any time on short notice and in quantities sufficient for synthesis of useful amounts of the desired material.  Moreover, according to government maintained statistics, Nmethylmphetamine is becoming an increasingly attractive starting material for pseudoephedrine, as the availability of Nmethylmphetamine has remained high while prices have dropped and purity has increased [2].  We present here a convenient series of transformations using reagents which can be found in most well stocked organic chemistry laboratories to produce psuedoephedrine from N-methylamphetamine.  

 Ha!

(via jwz)

File this under 'unpersuasive'

To put it mildly.

Robert Frank wrote an op-ed claiming that there was an arms race in thanksgiving store opening hours which, of course, needed regulation. Tyler Cowen wrote about it, and Frank sent Cowen an email with some additional details. Included was the following anecdote about the recent allowing of Sunday trading hours in liquor stores in New York State :

I had a recent conversation about this issue with a friend in Ithaca who owns a wine store. Traditionally, New York State wine merchants were not allowed to do business on Sundays. But last year that restriction was repealed, and I asked my friend how the change had affected him.

His overall sales were about the same, he told me. The change had thus been a clear negative from his perspective, since it meant that he and his wife were no longer able to spend Sundays together with their children. The upside was that customers who lacked the foresight to shop in advance for their Sunday wine needs could now be accommodated. If we’re willing to discount the cost of an inconvenience suffered by those who could easily have avoided it, the costs in this case seem clearly to outweigh the benefits.

You don't say! If you're willing to discount the main cost of a given action, the benefits will frequently outweigh the costs. Feel free to try this with a range of meddling economic proposals:

-If you're willing to discount the millions in unrecoverable funds, the benefits of the government guarantee of Solyndra seem to clearly outweigh the costs.

-If you're willing to discount the cost of reduced competition and higher prices, the benefits of mandatory licensing of interior decorators clearly outweigh the costs.

 etc.

But there's an easier way to tell that this proposal doesn't make sense. What's so special about Sundays? Why not restrict Mondays as well? Or only allow trading one day a week? After all, if we're willing to discount the inconvenience suffered by those who could easily have avoided it, these would clearly make sense too!

Eventually, the Robert Franks of the world would look at this and say, yes, but there's a limit, customers need some convenience.

But this implicitly acknowledges that his argument, as phrased, is a crock. It's not that you can actually 'discount the cost of an inconvenience suffered by those who could easily have avoided it', but instead that Robert Frank thinks that the inconvenience they suffer is less valuable than the benefit to the liquor store owners.

To which I ask, how exactly are you arriving at that conclusion? Because it sounds a lot like you're just pulling that conclusion out of your @**, and you'd have no idea what the actual inconvenience to customers is, nor how many of them there are, nor how to value it.

Personally, I cannot fathom a theory of government that says if I want to open my store at 9am, 4pm or 2am to sell you a computer, a suit, or a bottle of whisky, why it is any business whatsoever of the government's. A government that is willing to intrude in this is willing to intrude in absolutely anything.

Man, Dog, TSA version

Dog bites man:

A Transportation Security Administration employee is accused of sexually assaulting a woman in Manassas.

*Yawn* That happens all the time.

Man bites dog:

Police said the victim reported that she and a friend were in the 10500 block of Winfield Loop in Manassas when the suspect approached them. The suspect flashed a badge and sexually assaulted the victim before fleeing on foot, police said.

Wait... this happened outside of an airport? Outrage!

That's just super!

Back during the debt ceiling debate, one of the key components of the compromise agreement between Democrats and Republicans was that a fabulous new "supercommittee" was to be formed to figure out how to reduce the deficit. No, not the Bowles-Simpson commission, which had been formed to investigate just that question and came to some quite reasonable-sounding conclusions, but a great new one! Made of the same quality politicians that steered the country right to the brink of voluntary default!

So how exactly is that working out? Well, here's the answer, according to The Hill:

It's a move that's been dismissed as a budget gimmick, but it's also one that could make the supercommittee's job a whole lot easier: counting the savings of withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The White House says $1.1 trillion will be saved by drawing down those troops from Afghanistan and making the U.S. presence in Iraq a civilian, not a military, one.

Given that the supercommittee must track down at least $1.2 trillion in cuts to avoid the triggering of automatic cuts, simply accounting for those savings would nearly get the panel there all by itself.

Yes, that's definitely the kind of tough political decisions that S&P was hankering after when they downgraded the US credit rating! I'm intrigued by the first sentence - is there anyone who wants to seriously take the counter-position that this is not, in fact, simply a budget gimmick? Anyone at all?

But not only that, apparently Democrats on the committee have already proposed that these miraculous 'savings' should now be spent on a second stimulus instead of used for deficit reduction. Yes, that's right! They found new funny money, and can't wait to spend it on real commitments! Which will, in the grand tradition of Washington, be advertised as one-off extraordinary spending, but somehow will make it into future budgets as the baseline of spending, from which any cuts will be demagogued as harsh and cruel.

Mark Steyn heaps well-deserved scorn on this whole exercise:

But, aside from that, in what sense are these “savings”? The Iraq war is ended – or, at any rate, “ended,” at least as far as U.S. participation in it is concerned. How then can congressional accountants claim to be able to measure “savings” in 2021 from a war that ended a decade earlier? And why stop there? Why not estimate around $2 trillion in savings by 2031? After all, that would free up even more money for a bigger stimulus package, wouldn’t it? And it wouldn’t cost us anything because it would all be “savings.”

Come to think of it, didn’t the Second World War end in 1945? Could we have the CBO score the estimated two-thirds of a century of “budget savings” we’ve saved since ending that war? We could use the money to fund free Master’s degrees in Complacency and Self-Esteem Studies for everyone, and that would totally stimulate the economy. The Spanish-American War ended 103 years ago, so imagine how much cash has already piled up! Like they say at Publishers’ Clearing House, you may already have won!

It is becoming clearer and clearer that the US deficit will not be seriously dealt with until the country is in the same position as Greece is now. And given how well that's working in Greece, that may well mean that it's not dealt with at all. Unless you count 'default and being frozen out of credit markets' as a form of dealing with the problem. Which it is, after a fashion.

Reality will eventually deal with unsustainable spending one way or another. As Herbert Stein noted, if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. But you ought to care which way it happens. A car can stop by slowly pulling up to a red light, or it can stop by colliding with a brick wall. At this stage, I'm betting on the latter.

Market-Clearing is Overrated

In Australia, today they voted in the Senate to pass a tax on carbon dioxide.

Now, there are some reasonable argument for having a world-wide price of carbon, assuming countries could somehow be arm-twisted into doing so.

There are bugger-all reasonable arguments for imposing carbon tax when very few other countries are doing so. All that will happen is that carbon-intensive industries will be exported overseas.

But (as Tim Blair notes) to add to the hilarity, the tax comes in at a specific amount - in this case $23 a tonne. The trouble is that the current carbon price in Europe is about half that. You can see the progress for yourselves.

But that's alright, we've got Climate Change Minister (yes, really, Australia actually has one of those) Greg Combet to point out the answer:

But Climate Change Minister Greg Combet is not convinced the difference demands a change in the local price, saying a few months ago the European cost was “there or thereabouts” of $23 a tonne.

“We’ve just got to take a bit of a longer term view of this,” he told ABC Radio

Hmm. Any particular reason you think that the current price is unrepresentative, but the old price is clearly accurate? Any reason at all? I mean, if you're willing to admit that the market is inefficient today, why is 'a few months ago' the gold standard for the halcyon days of price efficiency?

Don't hold your breath waiting for a good answer to that one. But even this is beside the point - efficient or not, the European price of carbon right now is a lot less than it will be in Australia. (Not to mention that the Chinese price is forecast to be $0 for quite some time now, with an R-Squared of about 100% on that regression). As long as there's going to be a price, it ought to be the market price. Unless you think the relevant market is the US and China, in which case we're back to the earlier Shylock regression.

In Australia, the price will be at $23 a tonne, which some days will be less than Europe, and other days will be more.

In other words, the price will definitely not be a market-clearing price. This gives Australian firms a fluctuating competitive position relative to Europe, and a permanent disadvantage relative to just about everywhere else. Heckuva Job, (Bob) Brownie!

One prediction I can make with some confidence - expect the market for Australian-produced Aluminium to start clearing very rapidly at an equilibrium quantity supplied of zero.

Why does the Post Office always lose money?

This hilarious story from the Consumerist provides a clue:

The Styrofoam cube enclosed in this envelope is being included by the sender to meet a United States Postal Service regulation. This regulation requires a first class letter or flat using the Delivery or Signature Confirmation service to become a parcel and that it "is in a box or, if not in a box, is more than 3/4 of an inch thick at its thickest point." The cube has no other purpose and may be disposed of upon opening this correspondence.

Alec Baldwin: They're just sitting out there, waiting to give you their money! Are you gonna take it? Are you man enough to take it?

United States Post Office Worker: No! Not unless their money is in an envelope at least 3/4 of an inch thick!

Alec Baldwin: *picks up set of steak knives, proceeds to stab Post Office worker in rage*

Save Water, Comrade! The Glorious People's Republic of Australia Demands Your Sacrifice!

Politicians are, for the most part, suspicious of decentralised controls of any sort. Instinctively they tend to reach for technocratic solutions to problems, where a bunch of smart people can come up with clever solutions to problems and then boss around the reluctant citizenry, for their own good of course.

One example that always amused me was the absurd way that Australian governments approached questions of water shortages. If you believe what the government tells you, Australia is permanently short of water.

Part of this shortage is due to deliberate government mismanagement of supply. Namely, they refuse to increase it by adding more dams. As Andrew Bolt has pointed out:

No, the real cause of our shortage has been as I’ve warned since 2001 - that Melbourne has added a million more people since we built our last big dam, the Thomson, and never bothered to find more water for the newcomers’ extra showers, toilets, washing and gardens.

So there's a lot of environmental hysteria that effectively makes it impossible to build another dam, the one technocratic solution that might actually solve the problem.

But let's forget about that, and just take the supply as being fixed. People keep using a lot of water, and the dam levels are getting low. How can we solve the problem?

If you're from an Australian state government, the answer is clear - we need a public advertising campaign hassling people to use less water. "Target Every Drop", we'll call it! Are you taking a 10 minute shower? Shame on you! You should feel guilty for enjoying that water for more than 4 minutes at a time! We'll guilt the plebs into better behaviour!

That's Plan A. To the astonishment of absolutely nobody, this plan seems to work as well as the laughable 'Whip Inflation Now' campaign of the seventies (memorably described by Alan Greenspan as 'unbelievably stupid').

Okay, so what's Plan B?

Forced water restrictions! Firstly you can only water two days a week in the early morning or late evening, and we'll encourage your neighbours to dob you in if you exceed this. Failing that, we'll restrict you to only using a hand-held hose! "Deadweight loss", you say? Never heard of it! It'll be good for the proles to get the exercise of walking back and forth. And if that doesn't work, we'll restrict them to using buckets!

I haven't seen the next step of restricting the public to water their gardens only using teaspoons, but surely it can't be far away.

As this happens, millions of dollars in property damage pile up as lawns and gardens turn brown and die. Never mind! We all must sacrifice!

Wait a second - here comes the pesky Australian Bureau of Statistics to point out that in New South Wales, agriculture comprises 46% of water use, while all households combined only account for 12%. Hmmm, so we could eliminate the households altogether and it might not save that much water?

Here's what's staggering about all this: at absolutely no point does it seem to occur to do the one thing that would really stop the problem of excess water use - raise the bloody price of water! They're growing rice in New South Wales, for crying out loud! Do you think this kind of economic activity makes the slightest bit of sense in a semi-arid climate with a market-clearing price for water? Of course not.

If there's one thing markets are really, really good at, it's solving shortages. If you just raise the price, people will save water all by themselves. You won't need to hector them. You won't need to make them waste hours watering their lawns with a thimble. You won't need to spend millions of dollars on advertising campaigns in order to not reduce water consumption.

And even better, they'll reduce consumption without you having to do anything or spend any money. They'll put in more water efficient plants. They'll take shorter showers. They'll replant their rice fields with wheat or something better suited to the climate. And a thousand other things that the bureaucrats never thought of.

And the ones that don't? Well, that's their way of telling you that they value the water at the market-clearing price. They really, truly are getting a lot of utility out of that 10 minute shower.

So here's the bottom line. I refuse to feel the slightest bit guilty about taking long showers as long as the water department are blowing taxpayer dollars on ridiculous ads. If you want people to use less water, raise the damn price.