Sobering Thoughts

Comments on politics, the culture, economics, and sports by Paul Tuns. I am editor-in-chief of "The Interim," Canada's life and family newspaper, and author of "Jean Chretien: A Legacy of Scandal" (2004) and "The Dauphin: The Truth about Justin Trudeau" (2015). I am some combination of conservative/libertarian, standing athwart history yelling "bullshit!" You can follow me on Twitter (@ptuns).

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Monday, August 31, 2015
 
Not The Onion
From The Forward: "Visiting Auschwitz? Enjoy a Cool 'Mist' Shower." Lior Zaltzman reports, "Meir Bulka, 48, visited Auschwitz-Birkenau this Sunday and was surprised to see these showers, spraying mist at the overheated visitors." Surprised should be an under-statement.
Zaltzman reports:
Apparently the camp’s administration has no intention of removing the misters and, when probed about the resemblance to the gas chambers, they got all technical on the critiques, saying:
“The mist sprinkles do not look like showers and the fake showers installed by Germans inside some of the gas chambers were not used to deliver gas into them.”


 
2016 watch (Ben Carson WTF? edition)
It's just one poll -- and we shouldn't pay much attention to single polls -- but this is, unexpected: a Monmouth University poll in Iowa says Ben Carson and Donald Trump are tied in the state at 23%, followed by Carly Fiorina (10%), Ted Cruz (9%), Scott Walker (7%), Jeb Bush (5%), John Kasich (4%), Marco Rubio (4%), and Rand Paul (3%). As the MU press release noted, "The last two Iowa caucus victors, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, each garner 2% of the vote."
If there is a takeaway, it is that two people who have never been elected to public office before are combining for nearly half the vote in Iowa.


 
Illinois can't pay lottery winners
The Associated Press reports:
Without a state budget agreement two months into the new fiscal year, there’s no authority for the state comptroller to cut checks over $25,000. That means smaller winnings can be paid out, but not the larger lottery wins.
Susan Rick, who is putting off renovations because of delays in receiving her $250,000 winnings, told the Chicago Tribune, the state would "come take it, and they don’t care whether we have a roof over our head," if the situation were reversed.


 
Food Stamp Nation
Ed Feulner at The Signal: "In 2008, Fewer Than 30 Million Used Food Stamps. Now 46 Million Do." There are actually one million fewer Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program users in America compared to 2013, but the fact is when SNAP was made easier to qualify for, usage increased. Feulner explains:
Before the 2008 recession, 55 percent of SNAP households consisted of children and the elderly. Now, however, a slight majority of recipients are non-elderly, able-bodied adults. There has also been an uptick in the number of working-age, able-bodied adults on SNAP who are not working.
Why? What explains the climbing numbers of non-working, non-elderly, working-age SNAP recipients?
At least part of the reason can be traced to the waiving of work requirements for childless, able-bodied, working-age adults during the recession. Simply put, we’re not requiring those who are able to work to do so.


 
Progress!
Tech Insider's Gus Lubin provides highlights of economist Bradford DeLong's recent interview (multiple videos) with Trekonomics author Manu Saadia about "living in a post-scarcity world." Today there is an abundance of food and clothing, efficiently produced by many fewer laborers, so that even poor people live better than nobility two centuries ago. DeLong says that people in the future may behave more like the supposedly too-perfect characters in later iterations of Star Trek:
"What's so funny is, very often people criticize 'The Next Generation' and 'Deep Space Nine' because all the characters — they're not relatable. They're too perfect. They're too nice. They're too goody two shoes? They're intergalactic boy scouts. But, in fact, those traits are very consistent within a society where gift exchange — that type of cooperative behavior — is probably more rewarded than being a Ferengi."
We'll see. Still, it is progress that real-life human beings in the 21st century, like the characters in Star Trek with their replicator machine, "have solved scarcity."


 
Political nerd signs that summer is over
Don Peat tweets that committee meetings are taking place at Toronto city hall again.


 
(Dis)honorary degrees
Priceonomics looks at the practice of universities giving honorary degrees, mostly doctorates, to the likes of Pitbull, Ben Affleck, and Mike Tyson. These fake degrees are "an opportunity for colleges to build relationships with the rich, famous, and well-connected, in hopes of securing financial donations and cheap publicity." Oxford University began the practice of sucking up to the rich and powerful -- literally power, a bishop who was related to the king -- in 1478. Not surprisingly, Harvard leads the honorary degree parade. Priceonomics notes:
[T]hese specially-categorized degrees — which are technically classified as honoris causa, Latin for “for the sake of the honor” — are not “real” degrees, and as such, come with limitations. Most importantly, recipients are generally discouraged from referring to themselves as “doctor,” and awarding universities will often make this clear on their websites with some variation of the following phrase: "Honorary graduates may use the approved post-nominal letters. It is not customary, however, for recipients of an honorary doctorate to adopt the prefix 'Dr.'”
Benjamin Franklin, Maya Angelou, and software freedom activist Richard Stallman, all addressed (or address) themselves as Dr. or insist others do.


 
Ignoring history, Canadian Press tells us to watch what happens in Nova Scotia
Mike McDonald of Canadian Press "reports speculates:
Of the 11 federal ridings in Nova Scotia, pundits say the one to watch on election night will be Central Nova, the Conservative stronghold that is being relinquished by high-profile Justice Minister Peter MacKay.
The riding’s electoral fate will be under close scrutiny as the polls close across the Maritimes because it will offer an early glimpse of how voters have judged Stephen Harper’s nine years in power.
As goes Central Nova, so goes Canada?
It's true that we don't know if the riding is a Conservative riding or a MacKay riding (Peter or Elmer MacKay have won every general election in the riding since 1971 except in 1993).
But one riding seldom tells the tale of an election or foretells what will happen elsewhere.
That may be more true of Nova Scotia than elsewhere. In 1993 the Liberals won all 11 ridings in the province, but after budget cuts in the mid-1990s, they were wiped out in Nova Scotia with the NDP winning six seats and the Conservatives five (including Peter MacKay winning Central Nova). The Liberals also lost seats lost nine seats combined in Newfoundland and New Brunswick, as the Chretien-led Grits fell from 177 seats nation-wide in '93 to a bare majority of 155 four years later. Atlantic Canada represented almost the entirety of the Liberal loss of seats. Is that an "early glimpse"? No, it probably showed that one part of the country more than the rest of the country liked federal spending and, at the very least, was reacting to the government's Unemployment Insurance reforms. It was a glimpse into a region not an indication of a national trend.
In 1997, the Liberals gained in Quebec, making up for significant losses in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta (12 combined). In 2015, the federal Tories are looking for small gains in Quebec to potentially make up for some losses in Atlantic Canada.
Politics in each of the regions in Canada is unique, and Nova Scotia can no more tell us what will happen elsewhere on October 19 than, say, some random ridings in Edmonton or the Greater Toronto Area.


 
Is the coalition serious about battling the Islamic State
Bill Geertz at The Free Beacon reports:
Air Force Col. Patrick Ryder, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, said the coalition has conducted 19 airstrikes against training areas, the most recent on Aug. 5. The Central Command’s news release for that day, however, makes no reference to a training camp being struck in airstrikes. A July 30 release states that training areas were hit.
According to the Command’s website, a total of 6,419 airstrikes have been carried out over the past year, 3,991 in Iraq, and 2,428 Syria, indicating .3 percent of the airstrikes were carried out against training areas.
There are as many as 60 training camps and they produce thousands of new IS fighters each month. Why isn't more being done to disrupt this training?


 
2020 watch (Kanye West edition)
Apparently rapper Kanye West announced at the MTV Video Music Awards that he will run for president in 2020. Probably nothing more than a publicity stunt because Kanye's talent can't keep him relevant anymore in 2015.


 
Progress!
Bloomberg: "An Icelandic Company Is Building Mind-Controlled Bionic Limbs." Bloomberg reports:
The device is based a combination of mechanics and electronics - known as ‘mechatronics’. Very small sensors, which detect electrical impulses from the brain, are surgically placed in an amputee’s residual muscle tissue. These impulses are then picked up by a receiver in one of Össur's prosthetic limbs, such as the Symbionic Leg, allowing for an "instantaneous physical movement of the prosthesis."


Sunday, August 30, 2015
 
2016 watch (Vice President Hulk Hogan edition)
The New York Daily News reports that former WWE heavyweight champion Hulk Hogan told TMZ Sports he would like to be Donald Trump's running mate. I doubt that Trump would choose someone like Hogan, not because of the racial comments he has made but because The Donald's ego wouldn't allow him to share the stage with someone as famous as Hogan.


 
Anti-drug PSAs that didn't quite work
Reason.com has two videos of the "10 Drug PSAs That Tried to Scare the Sh*t Out of Us (But Didn't)." Mr. T to Ninja Turtles to the Brain-on-Drugs egg, there is a lot of ineffective government propaganda.


 
Walls and tracking: how not to tackle terrorism
A pair of Republican presidential candidates are proposing to combat terrorism in America by fighting illegal immigration. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker says he is open to building a wall between the United States and Canada. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie says he wants to track illegal immigrants like FedEx tracks packages. It sounds tough on terrorism, but most terrorist activities in the United States (and Canada) are committed by citizens (born or legal immigrants). Walls and tracking sound tough, but they are not effective. They are expensive and inefficient big government projects. It is sad but predictable that Republicans are pandering to conservative voters with such unnecessary policies.


 
The lesson of Katrina
The Mercatus Center examined the post-Katrina rebuilding of New Orleans (video with Pete Boettke below) and it concludes there is a general need for "permissionless innovation" in society but especially in disaster zones.
Another Mercatus video featuring Steven Horwitz looks at the private sector's response to Hurricane Katrina (Walmart good, federal and state government bad). The skills of the private sector is what disaster areas need; as Horowtiz said "Walmart's great skill is inventory management." Walmart does supply management daily, FEMA does not manage disaster relief very often: which one is likely to be better prepared.


 
Two columns in one
John Robson has a column in the National Post on how he will vote Libertarian in the coming federal election. Robson favours "voting clean" in order to remain as close to his principles as possible and to possibly signal to the mainstream parties that he does not countenance their cynical and dishonest politics. Robson says:
Instead of holding your nose and picking a bad party to keep a wretched one out, refuse to be seduced or bullied into doing wrong on purpose. Support a hopeless fringe candidate in protest. Not because they can win, or should. But to declare loudly that you will neither be driven from the voting booth in disgust nor co-opted into voting for an option you know stinks.
You can also pointedly refuse your ballot. But don’t spoil it; they just chalk that up to incompetence.
I usually spoil my ballot, usually in imaginative ways that cannot be misconstrued as incompetence.
But the column also explains how one can be a libertarian on policy and conservative on metaphysics, which is fairly close to my own position. Robson says:
I’m metaphysically conservative because I believe man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward and there is no remedy for the human condition on this side of the grave. So those libertarians who think dramatically reducing government will usher in a new and radiant form of human existence strike me as the mirror image of socialists who think dramatically expanding it will do the same.
I also have significant differences with many libertarians on national security. Mind you, they couldn’t possibly run defence spending down further than Prime Minister Stephen Harper has. But I’m libertarian on most policy issues because conservatives who consider governments (both provincial and federal) that are as bloated and arrogant as ours to be compatible with anything they hold dear are out of their minds. And if they know, and don’t want to act, they’re in even worse condition.
Those who espouse a conservatism of prudence too often and too easily sink into timid immobility, even smug complacency, in the face of looming disaster. Now is never a good time, and then never comes. But is it genuine prudence to set an aging population on a collision course with Soviet-style health care? Starve defence in an increasingly disorderly world, while aspiring to a major global role? Praise families in every other press release while watching that institution disintegrate?


 
Vote Compass
I took CBC's Vote Compass quiz. Despite being libertarian on drugs, somehow being aligned with the Liberals on foreign policy, and agnostic on prisons and optimal rate number of immigrants, I'm just to the right of the federal Conservatives on both social and economic issues. One might quibble with how the parties are positioned on various positions, especially as it assumes that the party leaders are being honest (one should assume that Tom Mulcair and Justin Trudeau will probably govern slightly more on the left, that the Tories won't do anything to protect vulnerable people from euthanasia, but will likely run a deficit in the next year or so). Also, Elizabeth May gets a higher rating through the quiz than I would give her because I rate her as trustworthy (honest) and can't give a negative score on competence.


 
Fan falls to death at Braves-Yankees game
The Associated press reports that a man fell from the fourth level of Turner Field into the first level of seating in yesterday's game. He was transported to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead. He was the third person to fall to his death at Atlanta's Turner Field in the last eight years. There has been talk about erecting netting to protect fans from foul balls, and this latest tragedy in Atlanta will heighten this discussion, but there is little Organized Baseball or teams can do to prevent fans from falling from the top tiers of stadia.


 
Not The Onion
The Ottawa Citizen: "Ottawa South Tory candidate invites media, refuses interviews." That candidate is Conservative Dev Balkissoon. He deserves to be mocked. Ruthlessly.


 
The state and the undead don't mix
The Toronto Star reports that there was a mock funeral for the final Zombie Walk in Toronto. The annual event is no more, due, in part, to losing its $10,000 subsidy from provincial tourism agencies. That would be one good thing the Kathleen Wynne government has done.


 
2016 watch (Scott Walker edition)
John McCormack writes in the current Weekly Standard that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has had a terrible month and that while a case can be made that "when the dust settles he’ll be the candidate left standing who can unite a fractious party," there are also "signs of deeper trouble for Walker." McCormack says Walker's assumed appeal -- he works hard but isn't showy, suggesting he's a serious adult -- may not be working with voters, and that playing me-too following Donald Trump's lead isn't winning over anyone. McCormack also says Walker has been inconsistent and easily taken off message, especially on pro-life issues. McCormack has an impressive record of accomplishment, but, the author says, he needs to do a better job of explaining his agenda for America. It's not clear that Republican primary voters care about the specifics of policy or that Walker's vision for the country is significantly different than most of his Republican leadership opponents. It's still early, but with the super-crowded field Walker presumably needs to connect sooner rather than later.


 
2016 watch (deja vu edition)
Five months ahead of the Iowa caucus, a Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll has Hillary Clinton with a meager 37%-30% lead over Bernie Sanders among likely Democratic caucus-goers. The Wall Street Journal reports:
In the 2008 campaign, Mrs. Clinton was the frontrunner in Iowa for much of the contest, only to see her lead evaporate as then-Sen. Barack Obama stormed to a first-place finish.
The Des Moines Register story about the survey quoted J. Ann Selzer, pollster for the Iowa Poll, saying: “This feels like 2008 all over again.”


Saturday, August 29, 2015
 
David Miller takes jab at Justin Trudeau
Former Toronto mayor David Miller reviews Bob Rae's What’s Happened to Politics? in the pages of the Globe and Mail. Claiming Rae has a "deep knowledge of the major public-policy challenges of our time and a coherent philosophical approach," Miller writes, "It is hard not to see how much of a mistake the Liberal Party made by not electing him leader – intellectually, he would be a tough opponent for Harper, indeed." Miller is saying, at the very least, that Justin Trudeau isn't up to the job of challenging Stephen Harper on the campaign trail or presenting a sensible, credible progressive alternative to the governing Conservatives.


 
2016 watch (sour grapes edition)
The Wall Street Journal reports that former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley is complaining that the Democrat debates are "rigged" to Hillary Clinton's favour. He asked the Democratic National Committee: "Whose decree is this actually? Where did it come from? To what end and what purpose? What national or party interest does this decree serve?" His problem seems to be there are only four debates before the February 1 Iowa caucus. Some observers might say that considering the field -- O'Malley, Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and maybe Joe Biden -- four is too many. They could get interesting if Elizabeth Warren joins them, which appears very unlikely.


 
'How Many Federal Agencies Exist?'
Clyde Wayne Crews, vice president of policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, points out that various government sources give different numbers for the number of federal agencies:
Unified Agenda: 60
Administrative Conference of the United States: 115
FOIA.gov (at Department of Justice): 252
United States Government Manual: 316
Federal Register Index: 257
Regulations.gov: 89
As the Administrative Conference says, "there is no authoritative list of government agencies."
And, as Crews explains, this matters:
If nobody knows how many agencies exist whose decrees we must abide, that means we don’t know how many people work for the government (let alone contractors making a living from taxpayers) nor know how many rules there are. But even when we isolate a given, knowable agency, the rise of “regulatory dark matter” may make it hard to tell exactly what is and is not a rule.
(HT: Kerry Jackson of Investor's Business Daily)


 
CBC updates fixes a headline
Luc Lewandoski curtly comments on a Stephen Taylor tweet.
Quiz: The original CBC headline demonstrates A) economic illiteracy, B) anti-Conservative government bias, or C) gross incompetence?


 
An indication of why many of us question government's ability to do much competently
J.J. McCullough tweets: "You can always tell when a chart comes from the Canadian federal government because it will look like it was drawn with MS Paint '97." Being two decades behind the times on graphic design suggests that outcomes for larger projects might be sub-optimal.


Friday, August 28, 2015
 
Addition by subtraction (Ontario Progressive Conservative Party edition)
Christine Elliott resigned as MPP today. The two-time leadership contender and two-time loser hasn't been at Queen's Park since her defeat in May. It appears that the Widow Flaherty was only interested in electoral politics if she was leader of the party, indicating she isn't much of a team player. However, she was a leading Red Tory, so this is a welcome development for those who want a blue PC Party.


 
Who is Tom Mulcair
The CBC answers the top five Google search questions regarding the NDP leader Thomas Mulcair. Three observations.
First, Mulcair should never have been photographed dressed as an angry bird, complete with a beak in an inopportune spot, last Halloween. His wife probably shouldn't have dressed a witch. Perhaps we should congratulate the NDP leader for not being so political as to notice the potentially harmful effects of costume choice. But I'm surprised that this wasn't mocked more on social media.
Second, to the question of "what religion is Thomas Mulcair," the answer, it seems as with Justin Trudeau, is none at all. Both talk about being raised Catholic (especially Justin), but there is no indication they practice today. Mulcair claims attending Mass is optional, illustrating that he is indeed not Catholic. That is not a judgement (at least from me), just an observation.
Lastly, the question "Why is Harper not attacking Mulcair?" is less a question about Mulcair than Stephen Harper. It is not biographical, but strategic.
Anyway, after reading Strength of Conviction, Mulcair's autobiography/massive-campaign-lit-piece, I have a better of idea of how Mulcair wants to present himself and a handful of biographical tidbits, but I do not feel that I know Mulcair that much better than I did before opening its pages.


 
Cowen's Product Hunt chat
Tyler Cowen took part in a Product Hunt chat moderated by Ben Casnocha. Unsurprisingly, it begins profoundly: "People these days have lost the sense of information being scarce, and counterintuitively that makes it harder for them to develop profound thoughts." Cowen specializes in the profoundly pithy. Asked about people working longer hours, Cowen responds, "A lot of the alternative ways of spending time are overrated." If not profound, at least thought-provoking.
To long-time fans of Cowen, his hidden talent is no surprise: "my visual acuity is extreme, I can spot items in a collection very, very well, like finding a book on a shelf."
Cowen clarifies his statement on travel being a better way to learn than reading:
[W]ell, you have to go somewhere good and go with an open mind. But most places are good if you visit them in the right manner. Reading has strongly diminishing returns once you have, say, read half of Bloom's list in *The Western Canon* and achieved a reasonable understanding of some of the social sciences.
So reading is still better up to a point.
Cowen should explain that family vacations are not travelling. That said, we just returned from Detroit and I highly recommend Greenfield Village, which requires a full day of 9:30 am - 5 pm; enjoyable and instructive for all ages.
Cowen also answers typical questions about which four people he'd like to meet, which time in history he'd like to visit. He answers with provisos: assuming linguistic proficiency, assuming immunity from diseases. There are a few comments about how he has changed his thinking (probably wouldn't enter the overly bureaucratic academia today, no longer interested in retiring to Manhattan). Cowen describes himself as an outlier on taking public transit into account when assessing a city.
As Cowen would say, the chat is self-recommending.


 
Negative words are most associated with the Democratic, Republican front-runner
A Quinnipiac University Poll asked an open-ended question about the leading presidential contenders inquiring which is the "first word that comes to mind." Unprompted the three most common responses for Hillary Clinton are liar, dishonest, and untrustworthy. Also among the 12 most common responses: crook, untruthful, criminal, deceitful. The GOP front-runner, Donald Trump, doesn't fare much better with the top three responses being arrogant, blowhard, and idiot. The fifth most common response was clown. Amongst the top 15 responses were also crazy, asshole, and joke.
Despite these negative affiliations among most voters, Clinton and Trump lead their respective parties. Clinton is still the favoured candidate of 45% of Democrats, which is more than Bernie Sanders (22%) and Joe Biden (18%) combined. Trump polls at 28%, which is more than his next four challengers combined: Ben Carson (12%) and Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio who are all tied with 7%.
Dishonest and arrogant should describe 99% of all politicians, so perhaps these traits are harming Clinton and Trump all that much.
The poll should be disconcerting for Republicans. In various head-to-head match-ups, both Clinton and Biden lead their Republican opponents (Trump, Bush or Rubio). Interestingly, Biden does better in the general election scenarios than does Clinton.


Thursday, August 27, 2015
 
What I'm reading
1. Strength of Conviction by Tom Mulcair. Professional responsibilities require I read such books.
2. Money and Soccer: A Soccernomics Guide: Why Chievo Verona, Unterhaching, and Scunthorpe United Will Never Win the Champions League, Why Manchester City, Roma, and Paris St. Germain Can, and Why Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, and Manchester United Cannot Be Stopped by Stefan Szymanski. Tim Harford had a good column about Szymanski's book earlier this month.
3. The September/October edition of Foreign Affairs. It features essays looking at the legacy of Barack Obama's foreign policy and international influence, and the highlight is probably Diane Coyle's review of Six Capitals.
4. "Community Benefits Agreements," by Andrew Galley and "Anchor Institutions," by Nevena Dragicevic, a pair of new papers from the Mowat Centre.


 
The stock market
I'm on the road this week, but listening to the radio and watching TV news, there is a lot of talk about the "stock market correction." Analysts and journalists should avoid the term in the first days of extreme fluctuations. Sometimes big movements (downwards) are nothing more than a sign of tumult rather than a correction. Just saying.


 
NDP vows to balanced budget despite economic downturn, lower revenues
NDP leader Thomas Mulcair says if he forms government, he will balance the budget. He doesn't say how, vowing a fully costed program before the election, but the Liberals are trying to fill in the blank for voters. Grit MP Chrystia Freeland says, "his only path to a balanced budget so quickly is massive cuts and backing away from the NDP’s spending promises." Or, one presumes, massive tax increases? Does this difference, as perceived by Freeland, put enough space between the two parties to prevent them from working together to prevent a plurality-winning Tory party from governing?


 
Syriza's break-up
The Wall Street Journal reports that 25 members of Syriza's far-left, going under the name of the Left Platform faction and led by former energy minister Panagiotis Lafazanis, that opposed the government agreeing to austerity measures to win a bailout earlier this summer, has formed a new party, Popular Unity. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras had a colourful reaction: 'What makes me sad is the attempt by the inner enemy to become the main enemy." Meanwhile, the so-called Group of 53 (within Syriza), which includes Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos, may not seek re-election. If Tsipras thought the last eight months was tough ...


 
Progress
Donald Boudreaux in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review on how comfortable -- and historically unusual -- middle class life over the past few decades:
First of all, I live during the age of anesthesiology. Just the thought of enduring even minor surgery without the blessing of anesthesia is horrifying. I have never had to suffer that thought. Also, I was tended to by a scientifically trained surgeon. I enjoy a far better chance of being cured than I would have enjoyed even if I were the world's richest man prior to the 20th century.
In my 57 years on this Earth, I've not once suffered the fear of starvation. Prior to the industrial age, not many people outside of the ruling class could have made that boast.
Also, I've always slept under a hard roof in a house with hard floors — which are far superior to the vermin-infested thatched roofs and dirt floors that the vast majority of my and your ancestors were accustomed to.
The column continues with the many blessings that the average person today enjoys that his ancestors a century or so ago did not: convenient land and air travel, literacy, low child-mortality rates, maintaining a full set of teeth, and so on.


Wednesday, August 26, 2015
 
Balanced budgets are not on the agenda after the federal election
Justin Trudeau says he will not scale back spending because the sluggish economy will need Ottawa to prime it. Who believes Justin was going to cut spending? The headline point is that Trudeau is the first (and only leader) to admit that the federal government budget will not be balanced next year. Queue Twitter snark from Tories. Economist Mike Moffat writes in Canadian Business that all leaders should answer questions about how they will deal with revenue shortfalls, and he's right. Again, Twitter-Tories will point to Moffat's role as an economic adviser to Trudeau, but the Ivey Business School professor is correct to point out that Ottawa's fiscal situation is different than when the parties rolled out policy in the Spring (the Conservative budget, the Trudeau economic plan, the NDP's various promises), so perhaps they should explain their priorities, or why they disagree with the assessment that revenues will be lower than previously estimated. Moffat writes:
Of course, we could avoid deficit if the party in power (whichever one it will be) raised taxes or slashed spending. But each of our major parties are promising to move in the opposite direction, promising a combination of tax cuts and new spending. We should demand our party leaders to tell us how far they are willing to go in order to balance the budget, what combination of tax increases and spending cuts they would be willing to make to get us there, and that they consider whether it is even economically sensible to try to balance the books in a time of economic weakness.
Trudeau has only answered the latter (that he does not consider it sensible to balance the books at this time), but won't talk about re-priortizing spending or tax plans. Thomas Mulcair and Stephen Harper have yet to provide any answers to Moffat's serious questions. Harper simply says voters should want him back at 24 Sussex because the country needs his steady hand. The Prime Minister should prove it by acknowledging the economic tumult's effects on a Conservative government's ability to deliver a balanced budget.


 
Fix federal fetal tissue law
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Scott Gottlieb, an investor and adviser to life science companies, about fetal tissue research and the need for a new law:
Those laws, passed more than two decades ago, were meant to ensure clear separation between the act of abortion and the procurement of tissue for research. The provisions originated from the 1988 “Fetal Tissue Transplantation Panel,” appointed by President Ronald Reagan and charged with deciding in the first instance whether it was appropriate to use fetal tissue for clinical research. The question gained prominence that year after the National Institutes of Health sought to fund a study to test whether implanted fetal tissue could reverse the effects of Parkinson’s disease. These clinical experiments eventually did go forward, and largely failed ...
With a few straightforward changes, the law can be toughened to achieve its original purpose, with little consequence to this research. The aim should be to achieve the objectives set out in 1988 — banning abortion providers from changing the conduct of the procedure as a way to “harvest” fetal tissue or seek reward from its procurement. Congress should also confine the use of fetal tissue to valid science that involves the study of the human body’s function or treatment of human disease.
The PP talking point is that their fetal harvesting is necessary for life-saving research to be achieved, but Gottlieb explains that fetal tissue is sub-optimal and there is little market for such stem cell sources.
Fix and enforce the law so abortionists stop altering their abortion procedures in order to maximize their ability to sell harvested tissue.


 
2016 watch (A real Democratic race is on edition)
President Barack Obama has given his Vice President his blessing to run (and challenge) Hillary Clinton. Should be fun.


 
2016 watch (New Hampshire edition)
A Public Policy Polling survey in the Granite State of GOP supporters finds that Donald Trump has as much support as the next four candidates combined: Trump 35%, John Kasich (11%), Carly Fiorina (10%), Jeb Bush (7%), and Scott Walker (7%).


Tuesday, August 25, 2015
 
What a great season of reading ahead
The first part of 2015 had few must-read books in the subjects about which I am most interested, but this is a fantastic fall for books Canadian politics/history, football, and economics. Some of them have already been released, including a few that weren't scheduled to be on bookstore shelves, or shipped from Amazon, until early September. Here is the list of books on the top of my reading list between now and early November:
Canadian history
Escape from the Staple Trap: Canadian Political Economy after Left Nationalism by Paul Kellogg
Donald Creighton: A Life in History by Donald Wright
The Big Blue Machine: How Tory Campaign Backrooms Changed Canadian Politics Forever by J. Patrick Boyer
Canadian politics
Dalton McGuinty: Making a Difference by Dalton McGuinty
Stephen Harper by John Ibbitson
What Is Government Good At?: A Canadian Answer by Donald J. Savoie
Football
Color of Sundays, The: The Secret Strategy That Built the Steelers Dynasty by Andrew Conte
Cheating Is Encouraged: A Hard-Nosed History of the 1970s Raiders by Mike Siani
Founding 49ers The Dark Days before the Dynasty by Dave Newhouse
Economics
Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science by Dani Rodrik
Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller
Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective by Thomas Sowell
Others
A Disgrace to the Profession: The World's Scientists - in their own words - on Michael E Mann, his Hockey Stick and their Damage to Science: Volume One edited by Mark Steyn
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner
Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World’s Superpowers by Simon Winchester
Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll by Peter Guralnick
The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf
This list doesn't even include books that should be read, but about which I'm not terribly excited: The Changing Voice of the Anti-Abortion Movement: The Rise of "Pro-Woman" Rhetoric in Canada and the United States by Paul Saurette and What's Happened to Politics? by Bob Rae.


 
This is to the Conservatives' advantage
CTV: "Major parties locked in virtual tie." Polls are going to probably say that for a while. I've stated why I don't think the polls are incorrect (Tories still generally do well among older voters, they might not be reaching "new Canadians," and there is reason to doubt the whether the polls accurately represent the voting public). I buy into the idea that Stephen Harper wants to diminish the Liberals to irrelevancy, but the better the Liberals do (up to a ceiling of about 30%), the better the Conservatives do. According to Nanos, the numbers are: Conservatives 30.1%, Liberals 29.9%, NDP 29.1%. These numbers probably mean the Tories get at least 140 seats.


 
2016 watch (George Pataki edition)
The question when it comes to George Pataki's run for the GOP presidential nomination is: why? Gods of the Copybook Headings answers:
Pataki's 1994 upset victory over liberal lion Mario Cuomo had less to do with his own stellar virtues than with a remarkable series of well timed endorsements. US Senator Al D'Amato, recently elected New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and shock-jock Howard Stern all plunked for Pataki. It seems likely that an animosity toward Cuomo - rather than an admiration for the former mayor of Peekskill - was the deciding factor.
Once in power Pataki earned a modest record as a fiscal conservative. Otherwise he drifted steadily to the Left. The New York Times praised his health care reforms. Bloomberg heralded his staunched environmentalism. He is also openly pro-choice. It's not a bad record really. The odd thing is that George Pataki insists on running as a Republican.
Did we mention he was governor during 9/11? I think we did.
In short Pataki is the answer to a question that no one is asking in 2016. Between his leaden humour - the GOP “only has 147 candidates, so I decided to run.” - and his negative charisma field the campaign has encountered a mixture of bewilderment and low grade mirth. Like hearing about the farewell tour of a band you vaguely remember the same thought repeats itself: Why bother?
The official rationale is that the former governor is "electable". This assumes that the electorate of America in 2016 resembles the electorate of New York state in the 1990s.


 
2016 watch (Ted Cruz edition)
Ben Domenech and Allah Pundit think that Ted Cruz is now the GOP front-runner. Allah Pundit explains:
So the three “electable” guys in the race seem unelectable while Trump’s candidacy, which started off looking like a stunt, turns increasingly serious. The expected “Bush vs. Not Bush” campaign appears, for the moment, to be a “Trump vs. Not Trump” contest instead. If you’re in the “Not Trump” camp, who’s left realistically except Ted Cruz? His right-wing competition, i.e. Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal, seems to be going nowhere. He’s raised far more money than anyone expected he would, so he’s likely to be competitive deep into next spring at least. He’s well positioned in Iowa, South Carolina, and the “SEC primary” thanks to his evangelical cred. And as the staunchest conservative in the top tier, he’s a natural draw for righties who dislike Trump because they believe (correctly) that he’s a phony conservative.
Seems plausible, and yet I'm still dubious. Donald Trump may have awakened the silent plurality. But his shtick could be stale by early 2016 when votes get cast. The GOP is still the next-in-line party so Jeb Bush, for all his problems (mostly his surname, but also the distrust of many self-consciously conservative Republican voters), will be in good shape as the race enters the caucus and primary season. And if Trump stumbles, the anti-Bush alternative is Scott Walker.


 
Salad: it's not that good for you
Tamar Haspel in the Washington Post: "Why salad is so overrated." Why? Water. It's not that nutritious:
[O]rganic consultant Charles Benbrook ... and colleague Donald Davis developed a nutrient quality index — a way to rate foods based on how much of 27 nutrients they contain per 100 calories. Four of the five lowest-ranking foods (by serving size) are salad ingredients: cucumbers, radishes, lettuce and celery. (The fifth is eggplant.) ...
Salad fools dieters into making bad choices. Lots of what passes for salad in restaurants is just the same as the rest of the calorie-dense diabolically palatable food that’s making us fat, but with a few lettuce leaves tossed in. Next time you order a salad, engage in a little thought experiment: Picture the salad without the lettuce, cucumber and radish, which are nutritionally and calorically irrelevant. Is it a little pile of croutons and cheese, with a few carrot shavings and lots of ranch dressing?
Call something “salad,” and it immediately acquires what Pierre Chandon calls a “health halo.” Chandon, professor of marketing at INSEAD, an international business school in Fontainebleau, France, says that once people have the idea it’s good for them, they stop paying attention “to its actual nutritional content or, even worse, to its portion size.”
Lettuce is also wasted more than other food and (as part of the general category of "leafy veggie") a leading cause of foodborne illness.
So there is good reason you don't win friends with salad.


 
Wish I still watched wrestling
To see Jon Stewart get body slammed.


Monday, August 24, 2015
 
The Obama revolution
Former senator Phil Gramm in the Wall Street Journal on how President Barack Obama used vague laws to advance his agenda:
Having learned from previous progressive failures, President Obama embarked on a strategy of minimizing controversial details that could doom his legislative efforts. But no factor was more decisive than his unshakable determination not to let Congress, the courts, the Constitution or a failed presidency—as America has traditionally defined it—stand in his way.
Americans have always found progressivism appealing in the abstract, but they have revolted when they saw the details ...
In its major legislative successes, the Obama administration routinely proposed not program details but simply the structure that would be used to determine program details in the future. Unlike the Clinton administration’s ill-fated HillaryCare, which contained a detailed plan to control costs through Regional Healthcare Purchasing Cooperatives and strictly enforced penalties, ObamaCare established an independent payment advisory board to deal with rising costs. The 2009 stimulus package was unencumbered by a projects list like the one provided by the Clinton administration, which doomed the 1993 Clinton stimulus with ice-skating warming huts in Connecticut and alpine slides in Puerto Rico.
The Obama stimulus offered “transparency” in reporting on the projects funded but only after the money had been spent. Similarly the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial law defined almost nothing, including the basis for designating “systemically important financial institutions” that would be subject to onerous regulation, what bank “stress tests” tested, what an acceptable “living will” for a financial institution looked like or what the “Volcker rule” required ...
The Obama transformation was achieved by laws granting unparalleled discretionary power to the executive branch—but where the law gave no discretion Mr. Obama refused to abide by the law. Whether the law mandated action, such as income verification for ObamaCare, or inaction, such as immigration reform without congressional support, Mr. Obama willfully overrode the law.
I don't share Gramm's optimism that because Americans have "yet to buy into the Obama transformation," so they are eager to undo the policies enacted without real debate.


 
Obamacare is leading to the regulation of personal trainers
Most important excerpts from the Washington Post story are at Marginal Revolution. It begins with registration. But the Affordable Care Act will result in much more:
A variety of workplace wellness programs and preventive health-care initiatives called for in the law could soon translate into rivers of billable hours for those with credentials to keep American waistlines in check.
And that means the race is on to be eligible for those credentials.


 
Gunning for Trudeau's seat and the Liberal leader's future
The Globe and Mail reports:
The NDP is putting up a fight to oust Justin Trudeau in his riding of Papineau, buoyed by recent polls showing the party on a strong footing to keep a majority of its seats in Quebec and even make gains elsewhere in the province.
The party has called on self-styled “lefty commentator” Anne Lagacé Dowson to go up against Mr. Trudeau, hoping she can use her media profile to take down the Liberal Leader on his home turf in Montreal.
Mr. Trudeau won his seat by 4,000 votes in 2011, but the New Democrats are hoping that a weakened Bloc Québécois and the Liberal Party’s struggles in appealing to francophone voters in Quebec can lead to a breakthrough.
It was, in fact, closer than that when you take the redistributed results into account (about 3400). Trudeau wasn't leader in 2001 and Michael Ignatieff was a huge drag on the party, so perhaps the Liberals could do better. Before the election was called, I had the NDP at about a 20% chance of winning Papineau, and the NDP have been gaining in the province according to recent polls. It seems unlikely that Trudeau would lose his seat, though. While it would be fun to see Trudeau lose his own riding, won't it be more fun to watch what he does if the Liberals remain the distant third-place party (30-60 seats)? I return to the question I ask here regularly: how many seats do the Liberals have to win for Trudeau to stay? Of course, what the other parties do also matter. (A 140-seat NDP supported by a 50-seat Liberal caucus radically changes the calculations for leadership change -- or does it?) And most important, does the Dauphin want to serve another four years as leader of the irrelevant third-place party. If the NDP get their way, the choice will be made for Justin.


 
Excellent advice which will be ignored
David Frum to Justin Trudeau adviser Gerald Butts: "@gmbutts Kindly intentioned advice: you shouldn’t be on Twitter during an election. Self-indulgent and pointlessly risky. Thank me later." Butt replies: "Thanks for the advice, sir. Delivered in characteristically modest fashion."


 
Former Liberal candidate rightly mocks Harper's mania for tax credits
Adam Stirling tweeted, "There's really no point to getting out of bed in the morning unless government gives you a tax credit for it. Why bother otherwise?" And: "Today, our Government is proud to introduce the You Are Statistically More Likely To Be a Swing Voter We Need Tax Credit." In case you missed the story, if re-elected a Harper government "would make membership fees for [service] groups like the Kiwanis Club and the Royal Canadian Legion eligible for tax credits." Conservatives understand perverse incentives so here are two: this policy could encourage clubs to raise membership fees or for other clubs to change their missions to qualify for the tax credit.


 
'Delicious' food from around the world
Vox has the bullshitty titled "21 snacks that explain our delicious world." Some food sounds interesting or tasty. Other's have interesting stories (which is a totally different thing). And McDonald's banana pies in Brasil sound disgusting, but that's because I loathe bananas.


Sunday, August 23, 2015
 
Justin Trudeau's plan to decrease female employment
Justin Trudeau is proposing a more flexible parental leave:
An option that allows parents to receive their benefits in smaller blocks of time over a period of up to 18 months. For example, a single mother could receive benefits for six months, then return to work for six months while a relative provides child care, then go back on parental leave and receive benefits for another six months.
An option of taking a longer leave – up to 18 months when combined with maternity benefits – at a lower benefit level. This flexibility would also apply for families where two parents split the use of parental benefits.
This plans sounds good -- who doesn't like flexibility? -- but it would sounds like it could increase disruptions in the workplace: six months away, six months backs, six months away or 18 months away. Parental benefits sound great in theory but they are brutal for smaller firms.
Most parental leaves are by mothers, so this plan makes hiring women less attractive. Indeed, it makes hiring young adults who might have children less attractive.
Furthermore, for women on career tracks, repeated disruptions from the workforce are one cause of the wage gap between men and women, because they hurt their place on the seniority ladder and therefore promotions.


 
Top 10 Conservative novels
The Guardian's Kate Macdonald has a list of the "Top 10 conservative novels." The obvious choices are Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited and novels by Dorothy L Sayers and John Buchan. The most "recent" novel is Ian Fleming's Dr. No (1958). Tyler Cowen says, "A strange list, even as such lists go," and "an excessively English selection." But where is the Anthony Trollope? The realism of his Chronicles of Barsetshire make it essentially conservative. My list would consider something by Americans John Dos Passos (Midcentury) is his only good work of fiction after his political conversion, but there is a conservative reading of the U.S.A. Trilogy), Walker Percy (The Thanatos Syndrome or The Moviegoer), Allen Drury (Advise and Consent is an anti-communist masterpiece), Saul Bellow (Mr. Sammler’s Planet is the best of his most political books), and Peter DeVries (pick any satire). There are the southern lady writers Eudora Welty, Willa Cather, and Flannery O'Connor (although their best works are short stories). I haven't read James Gould Cozzens but many of the early National Review authors liked him. You could make the complaint that Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities is relentlessly political, but there are few novels as conservative as Wolfe's 1987 book. Taking a longer view, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Stephen Crane could make the list. Going beyond non-English speaking authors, Fyodor Dostoyevsky is an obvious pick, and Milan Kundera a less obvious one. An English novel (or cycle of novels) that should definitely be on the list is Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (the greatest work of fiction, period); likewise G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. These exclusions seem especially odd because Macdonald's parameters seem to be the Tory resistance to change in the first half of the 20th century. That qualification means that Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein novels wouldn't qualify (they are fiercely libertarian, rather than conservative). Other lists have included George Orwell's 1984 or Animal Farm, or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, but they weren't conservatives, either.
So my list of top 10 conservative novels by conservative writers in English, by tier:
Top tier: A Dance to the Music of Time (Powell), Brideshead Revisited (Waugh), The Man Who Was Thursday (Chesterton).
Second tier: Mr. Sammler’s Planet (Bellow), The Moviegoer (Percy), almost anything from the Wimsey and Vane canon from Sayers.
Third tier: The Mackerel Plaza (DeVries), The Bonfire of the Vanities (Wolfe), The Optimist's Daughter (Welty), Lindor and Adelaide, a moral tale (Edward Sayer, a 1791 anti-Jacobin novel by Edmund Burke's disciple).
But I could change my mind next week about what is included in the bottom tier other than DeVries or switch out Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome for The Moviegoer.
John Buchan wrote most of his fiction before he was Governor General of Canada. Stephen Leacock wrote short stories and essays, but not novels. Sadly, Canada is not represented on this list.


 
The maple syrup version of OPEC
At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok points to a New York Times story on the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers cartel, which reports:
When the federation suspects farmers are producing and selling outside the system, it posts guards on their properties. It seeks fines from producers and buyers who do not follow the rule. In the most extreme situations, it seizes production.
According to the Times, Quebec produces 70% of the world's maple syrup.


 
Legalizing pot and public opinion
The media loves to report on how public opinion is against the pot status quo, but they incorrectly lump the pro-legalization and pro-decriminalization crowds together. (I"m not sure how much the average person knows the difference between the two, but that's another matter.) A couple days ago, J.J. McCullough tweeted a important critique of this error:
Press often lumps those who favor legalizing and decriminalizing pot together to make a fake majority. Real majority? Opposes legalization.
And:
Here are the numbers: 35% want legalized, 33% want decriminalized, 15% want status quo, 12% want harsher. That’s 60% *against* legalizing.


Saturday, August 22, 2015
 
Important issues in the Canadian election
Margaret Atwood brings up the issue of Stephen Harper's hair. It is an awful column; she's an awful writer. The big story here is that her column appeared, disappeared, and then reappeared at the National Post website, apparently because someone had to edit it after it was posted. But as Rondi Adamson tweeted: "Fairly certain she is not in a position to mock anyone's hair."


 
2016 watch (Donald Trump edition)
The Cato Institute's David Boaz in the Guardian: "Donald Trump’s Eminent Domain Love Nearly Cost a Widow Her House." Boaz writes:
For more than 30 years Vera Coking lived in a three-story house just off the Boardwalk in Atlantic City. Donald Trump built his 22-story Trump Plaza next door. In the mid-1990s Trump wanted to build a limousine parking lot for the hotel, so he bought several nearby properties. But three owners, including the by then elderly and widowed Ms Coking, refused to sell ...
Trump turned to a government agency — the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (CRDA) — to take Coking’s property. CRDA offeredher $250,000 for the property — one-fourth of what another hotel builder had offered her a decade earlier. When she turned that down, the agency went into court to claim her property under eminent domain so that Trump could pave it and put up a parking lot.
Using the power of the state, through eminent doman, to further the business interests of the rich at the expense of regular folks is unconscionable.
Voters need to be told/reminded of this eminent domain story. Often.


 
Housing First
In his Reading this week, David Gratzer summarizes and comments on a new study on Housing First in Toronto, noting:
This is the second Reading in 2015 about Housing First – and no wonder. It’s exciting to watch this important public-policy experiment evolve. It’s also nice to see that so much important work is being done right here in Canada.
Housing First, for the uninitiated, is a program that postulates that people with addiction or mental health problems problems are better served by securing stable housing and then treatment for their addiction or mental health issues, turning on its head the conventional wisdom about solving addiction problems before addressing a patient's housing issues. As Gratzer says, "The main idea? Many problems of the homeless actually stem from the instability of their housing."
Gratzer notes:
At Home/Chez Soi is a Canadian initiative. Funded by the federal government and overseen by the Mental Health Commission of Canada, the project has studied Housing First efforts in five Canadian cities. The original budget was roughly $110 million ...
Is it money well spent? It seems so. The authors of the study state that Housing First-Intensive Case Management in Toronto:
[R]esulted in significant improvements in housing stability, probability of hospitalization, community functioning, and a reduction in number of days experiencing problems due to and money spent on alcohol use in an ethnically diverse sample of homeless individuals with mental illness living in a large urban metropolis.
Gratzer concludes:
It’s difficult not to feel enthusiastic. It seems that Housing First doesn’t just achieve stable housing for people – which is obviously great – but also helps address core issues, like alcohol misuse.
Gratzer wrote about Housing First in March, also. The Globe and Mail had a long story on Housing First in May.
For the first few years, most of the evidence on Housing First's successes in the United States barely rose above anecdotal, with local success stories gaining national fame. There is still scant research, but as Gratzer's reading this week shows, it is growing. I do worry about whether the program can be scaled successfully and am always cautious when any public policy becomes "fashionable," but the early evidence suggests that more communities should be experimenting with Housing First to begin addressing their homelessness, addiction, and mental health issues.


 
Four anniversary of Jack Layton's death
Here's what I wrote four years ago, two days following his death amongst the Laytongasm in the media.
How to think about Jack Layton
Jack Layton would have loved the media orgy going on in the wake of his death. He was a media whore. When journalists go on TV and call him Jack, that's a closeness born of hours chatting it up at every given opportunity, whether in the corridors of City Hall and foyer at Parliament or over drinks after work or at social functions were the paths of journalists and a certain type of politician cross. You cannot imagine a reporter talking about Stephen and probably not even about Bob, but to anyone with a camera or microphone, Jack was Jack. To his credit, Layton's love of the spotlight led to agree to be interviewed by unfriendly media. I was at Our Toronto Free Press in the late 1990s and I interviewed him about some youth who were squatting on private property and whose actions he was defending. I asked him about the condoms that were strewn on the floor of their trailers and tents and which some of the youth were sleeping on. He said it was very important for young people to have access to condoms, just as important as food. I sarcastically asked if the poor, dirty, malnourished teens who were illegally on other people's property could eat condoms or clean up with condoms and he huffed that "condoms are a human right." Such were Layton's priorities just 13 or 14 years ago. It takes a certain worldview to believe that condoms are as important to street youth as food and that they are, in fact, a human right.
The slobbering over Layton by the media was unseemly but not unexpected. The media loves him, as I noted above, because he has taken out the time to spend with them. But they also love his causes: fadish big government, social liberalism, environmentalism, and the host of left-liberal issues that animate the NDP and the left-wing of the Liberal Party. Long before gay rights were popular, Jack Layton was trying to convince the city of Toronto to offer full spousal benefits for gay employees. That was in 1986. And, he said, if the city wasn't going to do it, it should stop offering any spousal benefits. His proposal didn't succeed at first, but he tried again and again and eventually the city was at the vanguard of gay rights.
Campaign Life Coalition has video from the tumultuous days of pro-life rescues in front of the Morgentaler Clinic in Toronto in the 1980s. The footage shows Layton, then a city of Toronto alderman, directing police to make arrests (and the police doing so). At the time, freestanding abortion facilities like Morgentaler's were in contravention of criminal law. A city politician should not be ordering police to make politically motivated arrests and a city politician definitely should not be working with police to defend an outfit like Morgentaler's that was clearly violating the law. The fact that the Supreme Court would later throw out the Criminal Code provisions on abortions does not exonerate Layton's interference in a police matter.
It is mandatory that the obituaries acknowledge Layton's passion and persistence and indeed he had these traits in spades. But it must be noted to what use he put these qualities, namely policies that advanced a left-wing agenda: diminished freedom, the promotion of social envy through progressive taxation and he redistribution of wealth, radical environmentalism that disguises opposition to private enterprise as concern for the planet, support for abortion and other assaults on traditional values. Based on his actions and policies, he hated other people enjoying freedom. As city councilor, there was never a cause he didn't back that didn't diminish the liberty of Torontians, from recycling programs to indoor smoking bans. All that seems perfectly sensible today because Layton and his ilk won the argument but it is folly for us to forget that we, mere citizens, homeowners and entrepreneurs, are less free today because of his actions at City Hall. If the NDP won power in May, all Canadians would be poorer and have less freedom tomorrow. The popular word for Layton's policy preferences is "progressive" but that's just socialism in a nice dress and lipstick -- kinda like Jack's Asian masseuse.
Missing from the obits are any tidbits of criticism. The fact that he and his wife were making city councilor salaries and living in subsidized municipal housing while there were tens of thousands of poor people on waiting lists. The whole Asian massage parlour incident has been buried, even though reporters in Toronto suspect that the events reported by by Sun News in May ("soiled" towel and all) is just the tip of the iceberg of his sexual follies. Christie Blatchord mentioned it, but few others have: Layton was obsessed with politics. Even good stories about him -- how he met his wife and they spent their first Christmas making political signs -- focus on his obsession with politics. It is so damn unseemly. Those who continually seek political office, which is all he did in his adult life, are power-hungry. But you can't say that because he has the "common good" in mind. It is funny how socialist policies are always equated with the common good.
I guess I have to offer the usual lines about Layton's death being a tragedy. Of course it is. As a faithful Catholic I pray for the dead and that their families find some consolation. But just because Layton's death is a personal tragedy for those close to him does not mean we need to paint him as a saint without flaws and we shouldn't flinch from the truth about his political agenda. I guess I should say something nice about Layton so I'll acknowledge this: he did grow up in his time in federal politics, but as a 61-year-old, he certainly should have. But despite his emergence as a credible left-wing leader, we cannot deny his past.
Canadian politics was more lively because of Layton, but his policies were atrocious. Where he successfully implemented them, they do harm. Where he pushed for them, he has changed the political landscape for the worst. Our country is worse off because of politicians like Jack Layton and those traits that are so admirable were put to work for ends that shouldn't be celebrated.
May God have mercy on his soul and may humility and honesty rain upon future discussions of Jack Layton's legacy. Charity is great at times like this, but not at the expense of truth.


 
2016 watch (Bernie Sanders edition)
The Wall Street Journal reports that Bernie Sanders has learned how to deal with pop-star popularity (for politics) with large crowds and fans requesting selfies with Vermont's Socialist senator. He can no longer travel in anonymity. At a time when voters and media are apparently infatuated with Donald Trump's "authentic" approach to politics, Sanders offers the real thing:
A Sanders rally, like the candidate, is atypical. There’s no patriotic or booming rock music to warm up the crowd, no motorcade, and no entourage. He arrives in a single car, and he takes the stage with little fanfare and “thank yous” for local elected officials.
It is difficult for an old man to run for president. His Occupy Wall Street message is both silly and dangerous. And, relatedly, he probably won't get the money to sustain the sort of campaign that he needs to win the Democratic nomination. But he is resonating with a large portion of the Democrat base, and he might pull the party leftward.


 
A campaign is not time to talk about issues
The CBC reports that Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall would like the leaders (and presumably media) to focus more on actual issues, especially the economy:
Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall wants to see federal party leaders focus more on the economy during the federal campaign than on the Mike Duffy trial.
"It's remarkable that we've heard as little as we have," Wall said in an interview airing Saturday on CBC Radio's The House.
Why talk about equalization and pipelines when there is the vital issues of stock photos in ads and Earl Cowan?


Friday, August 21, 2015
 
Because federal politics isn't crazy enough
Bloomberg reports that former Toronto mayor Rob Ford says his brother Doug Ford will run for the federal Conservative Party leadership if Stephen Harper steps down as leader following this election. Of course, Dougie said he would run for the leadership of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives, and then he didn't. Doug is a big talker, although at this point he is limiting himself to not ruling out the possibility of a jump to federal politics. If Doug brings his shit-show to Ottawa -- of which there is less than a 5% chance -- I hope Justin Trudeau does well enough to stick around. Doug Ford vs. Justin Trudeau could be fun.


 
Greece PM resigns, setting stage for political uncertainty (probably)
The Wall Street Journal reports:
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras resigned in a bid to trigger snap elections and return to power stronger, plunging his country into weeks of political paralysis just as it seemed to have scraped through a summer of fraught bailout talks and near-bankruptcy.
Mr. Tsipras’s gambit, announced in a short televised address late on Thursday, is expected to lead to his re-election in September, thanks to his popularity and the absence of strong challengers. But whether elections bolster his grip on Parliament, as he hopes, hinges on his ability to persuade Greeks that the €86 billion ($96 billion) bailout he negotiated with Europe is the only path out of the country’s long crisis.
Greece’s head of state, President Prokopis Pavlopoulos, was expected to accept Mr. Tsipras’s proposal to hold the vote on Sept. 20.
The election will effectively be a referendum on the 41-year-old Mr. Tsipras and his bailout agreement with the rest of the eurozone.
The Daily Telegraph reports:
New elections are likely to be held on September 20, so the country faces at least a month of acute uncertainty.
Under the terms of the bail-out, Athens is expected to carry out further reforms to cut its pension spending and revamp its tax laws in order to remain eligible for more cash in October.
These are hurdles that are unlikely to be met in the absence of a government, and there is a risk that the International Monetary Fund could withdraw from the rescue programme altogether.
So, as often occurs, political uncertainty will lead to further economic uncertainty.
To recap the year in Greek politics: In January Tsipras and his left-wing Syriza party won the general election on a platform of resisting austerity measures being imposed by foreign forces (the eurozone and IMF); in early July, at the urging of the Prime Minister, Greek voters rejected bailout terms that included the sort of austerity measures opposed by Tsipras; later in July the Tsipras government accepted a bailout with more severe austerity measures than he urged his Greek compatriots to oppose in the referendum weeks earlier; in August Tsipras resigns asking Greeks to pass judgement on how he's handled his seven-month ministry. The Financial Times reports that Tsipras has a 61% approval rating and that if an election were held today, his party would win 34% of the vote, which would mean another minority government. One political analyst the FT talked to, however, sees political stability in the near future:
“While the election is disruptive in the short term, the likelihood is that it will result in a coalition that is less dysfunctional than the one we have now, and better able to provide stability in implementing the reform programme,” said Nicolas Véron, senior fellow at Brussels-based think-tank Bruegel. “The current coalition has essentially collapsed anyway.”


 
2016 watch (Joe Biden edition)
The Wall Street Journal has a story titled, "A Joe Biden 2016 Bid May Draw Wayward Voters," but it is overall skeptical of Vice President Joe Biden's ability to get his candidacy off the ground:
“Joe would find that he would have pockets of support that would be enthusiastic,” said Kurt Meyer, who chairs the Democratic Party in three counties in northern Iowa. “But the organization and the fuel—largely money—has kind of already migrated elsewhere. I just think it would be very, very tough.”
David Axelrod, a former top political adviser to President Barack Obama, said Mr. Biden, who has been an “extraordinary partner” to the president, faces “a very big hill to climb. But I get why he is still looking hard at it, and I suspect, at this point, he may play it out for as long as he feels he can to see if the tectonic plates shift.”
What a Biden constituency would be if he runs is the key question, said Michael McKeon, a Chicago-based polling expert and president of McKeon & Associates. “He’s an old party guy. He’s a back slapper,” he said. “It’s a different game” now where social media and alternative forms of communication dominate. “You have to be able to communicate on all kinds of different levels.”
Of course, this only helps, also from the Journal: "Judge Pushes FBI to Look for Any Deleted Clinton Emails." I wish InTrade was still around to check what the wisdom of the crowds, rather than inside-the-beltway pundits thought.


Thursday, August 20, 2015
 
The Dauphin reviewed
Russ Kuykendall reviews The Dauphin: The Truth about Justin Trudeau in the August Interim. An excerpt:
Tuns very helpfully aggregates the Younger Trudeau’s record on the middle class, economics, pipelines, the environment, cities, foreign affairs, terrorism, immigration, crime, guns, and drugs as well as those referenced, above. Pipelines? He’s for them, except when he isn’t – and his position on each of the various pipeline projects varies by venue or occasion. Environment? There’s one set of talking points for Alberta, and another for Quebec. Capitalism or soft socialism? Depends on whether or not he’s addressing a crowd of donors. Terrorism? Trudeau wavered when asked whether or not last October’s shooting at the National War Memorial and Parliament Hill qualified. Military intervention in Syria and Iraq to push back on ISIS? Equivocation. Tightening domestic security in the form of Bill C-51, this year? He was in favour only when it was clear that Quebeckers strongly support it.


 
Progress
The New York Times: "A Milestone in Africa: No Polio Cases in a Year." The Times reported last week:
The last African case of polio was detected in Somalia on Aug. 11, 2014, the final sign of an outbreak with its roots in Nigeria — the one country where the virus had never been eradicated, even temporarily. But the last case in Nigeria was recorded on July 24, 2014.
Africa has never gone so long without a case of polio. But in an indication of how nervous experts still are that the disease may resurge, even the announcement from the Global Polio Eradication Initiative was tentatively headlined “Is Africa Polio-Free?”
Globally, there was been tremendous progress over the past quarter century:
When the global polio eradication drive began in 1988, more than 350,000 children around the world were paralyzed by the virus each year. Last year, only 359 were.
(HT: IPA's Weekly Links at Chris Blattman's blog)


 
I'm getting real old
Beloit College's mindset list for the class of 2019. Some notable ones:
They have grown up treating Wi-Fi as an entitlement.
“No means no” has always been morphing, slowly, into “only yes means yes.”
They have avidly joined Harry Potter, Ron, and Hermione as they built their reading skills through all seven volumes.
These probably don't matter to them:
Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic have always been members of NATO.
Color photos have always adorned the front page of The New York Times.
I dropped a "coalition of the willing" reference this week on first-year university students and they didn't get it.
And would students headed into university this year give a shit about the front-page of the New York Times?
This list, we are told, is to help us adults understand the mindset of those entering university and college, but they seem more like nostalgia triggers for professors (and others) in the 40s.


 
Keep Gehry out of DC
George Will says it is a good thing that the Eisenhower memorial has not yet been built, eight years after its scheduled completion:
This saga of arrogance and celebrity worship began in 1999 when Congress created the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission (EMC). Sixteen years later, and eight years after the project’s 2007 scheduled completion, scores of millions have been squandered and there is no memorial and no immediate prospect of building one.
It is good news that the money has been wasted: The atrocious proposal has not become a permanent blight across from Independence Avenue’s Air and Space Museum at the foot of Capitol Hill. More good news: Congress has not appropriated a penny of the $68 million the EMC requested for construction in 2016, and private fundraising is too anemic to allow architect Frank Gehry to sprawl his preposterous memorial across four acres. Its footprint would be large enough to accommodate the Washington Monument and the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials, with room to spare for a monument to Gehry. Which is what the Eisenhower Memorial would be, with Ike, warrior and president, reduced to merely a pretext for Gehry’s flamboyance.
Gehry’s original proposal was for something so gargantuan it would block some views of the Capitol: There would be a statue of Eisenhower, but as a Kansas boy, and three 80-foot-tall metal “tapestries” depicting episodes from Eisenhower’s boyhood and military and political careers.
Gehry’s monstrosity has been tweaked and now is a tweaked monstrosity.
Gehry is 86, world famous, and impatient with philistines who note that his proposal is discordant with the Mall’s aesthetic. But Prometheus need not conform: “There are sorts of rules about architectural expression which have to fit into a certain channel. Screw that.” Perhaps it is the license of genius to talk like a lout: “In this world we are living in, 98 percent of everything that is built and designed today is pure s***.” Gehry has prospered during his ordeal at the hands of people with tastes less refined than his: His firm has pocketed $16 million so far from work on Ike’s nonexistent memorial.
Several panels of “experts” — about what? — have given their imprimatur to Gehry’s undertaking, perhaps in order to resuscitate the hope of getting him to apply his ennobling touch to the nation’s capital. Ten years ago, the Corcoran, Washington’s oldest private art gallery, abandoned plans for Gehry to build a new wing, a proposal also begun in 1999. It too came to naught, even though, for a while, visitors entering the Corcoran walked past what the Washington Post called a “celebratory video” titled “Mr. Gehry Goes to Washington.” Not yet; ideally, never.
Michael J. Lewis, a professor of art at Williams College, says that public monuments should be "legible" but that Gehry's architecture is not. It is self-indulgent, and thus a memorial to its creator rather than its ostensible subject. It is debatable whether Eisenhower deserves a monument in the U.S. capital. There is no debate whether Gehry deserves one.


 
What makes The Walking Dead great
Grantland's Andy Greenwald says of The Walking Dead:
The dead have never been a problem on The Walking Dead. It’s the living you really have to worry about.
Of course, that was kind of the point all along — it’s right there in the show’s double entendre of a title. In a perfect world, AMC’s flagship show would be as beloved for the psychological depth of its sentient characters as it is for the savage appetites of its extras. This never quite happened, though. Despite the truly Herculean efforts of the drama’s most recent (and most successful) showrunner,1 Scott M. Gimple, who has at least nodded in the direction of emotional development while coming up with new reasons for people to wander into abandoned pharmacies, The Walking Dead remains defined by its brainless antagonists. But let’s be honest: Nobody minds. It’s the highest-rated show on television, with a devotion among the advertiser-coveted 18-to-34-year-old demographic that HBO’s Michael Lombardo would literally devour AMC’s Joel Stillerman to achieve. As long as Gimple and his latex-whisperering producer, Greg Nicotero, keep the grisly kills coming, The Walking Dead’s characters can continue circling those same Georgia woods and/or the leaky drain of nihilism — you say tomato, etc. — and millions of fans will be perfectly satisfied.
Greenwald has made this point before and he is still wrong. (To be fair, he liked the first half of season five and the complexity Gimple brought to the characters.) Both the writers and the fans understand that it is the human characters that matter. We want to see how (or if) they rebuild civilization in a world that won't permit any lasting stability (and the stability that exists is either ephemeral or illusory). We want to understand the trade-offs that characters make between restoring some semblance of their former lives and the primal need to survive. Every character or group of characters (Terminus, the Woodbury elite, the Claimers, Father Gabriel, the inhabitants of the Alexandria Safe Zone) does what it needs to survive, and it usually isn't pretty. Rick Grimes and his group are at various stages of becoming what they have fought or fled and maintaining their humanity. Scott Gimple and his crew get that. At some level, most fans probably get that. Greg Nicotero's zombies are necessary: no zombie apocalypse, no moral quandaries for the characters. Some of the best shows have minimal zombie interactions; if some of the best scenes (but by no means all of them) feature zombies being killed by our heroes, that is a testament to both the incredible work of Nicotero and his team, and the need for viewers to understand the ever-present danger. Not sure how Greenwald misses these points. He says viewers are obsessed with the special effects and the zombies, but it is he that seems obsessed with these things.
Greenwald says of the spin-off series that begins this Sunday, "Despite the first word in its title, Fear the Walking Dead isn’t overly concerned with freaking us out. What it wants is for us to care." But we TWD viewers do care. The new setting (Los Angeles) and circumstances (the beginning of the zombie apocalypse) are exciting and not merely because it provides a new chance to focus on human characters, but because it provides another chance to focus on human characters.
People may come to The Walking Dead for the zombies, but they stay because of the people.


Wednesday, August 19, 2015
 
Trumponomics is old-fashioned, incorrect mercantilism
At Forbes.com, Tim Worstall reminds us that imports are a good thing:
[T]he reason that we make exports is because they’re the cost of getting what we really want, which is the imports. That’s where Johnny Foreigner does the work, uses Johnny Foreigners’ resources, and yet we get to consume and enjoy the produce of that work. That is, it’s the imports that make us richer.
To be fair to Donald Trump, most politicians and political reporters get this incorrect.
Worstall notes, specifically of Trump:
Trump is getting awfully confused about the economics of currency rates and relative values. He thinks that a declining currency makes a nation richer: not so, entirely the other way around. He also seems to think that changes in currency rates change the number of jobs in a country. Again, not so, they can change the type of jobs but not the number. And all of this is pretty much first year economics so we really would rather like a putative chief executive to get this.