Mike Zintel

Nova Scotians are unpretentious and civil to the point of being quaint. People go out of their way to be agreeable; they listen sincerely to other points of view, express their own thoughtfully, and generally withhold or temper opinions with the potential to be hurtful. The place feels safe and friendly. It is a preferable culture to one of aggression, suspicion or indifference. Indeed it’s worth visiting just for this experience alone.

But there are undercurrents here too. The most obvious is that real conflict occurs passive-aggressively. Many people prefer this, as it tends to blunt the emotional discomfort of conflict and prevents some escalation of disputes. But it also results in a lot of confusion and misunderstanding. People talk in riddles and avoid resolution. There’s a driving behavior that is so common in Nova Scotia that it deserves a proper name. At the exact moment that you pull out to pass a car, the driver will accelerate by about 10 mph. They will hold the new speed until either you are beside them and obviously going to complete the pass, or until the passing lane ends. At this time, they will drop back to their previous speed. They don’t seem to want to drive as fast as you, nor do they want to endanger you – they just don’t want you to pass them. For no reason.

The show Trailer Park Boys capitalizes on this cultural confusion. The characters on the show are chronic law breakers, superficially without morals, and downright confrontational. They are an overreaction to the frustration of a low grade repressive culture. Yet they routinely look after each other in profoundly unselfish and personal ways.

Nova Scotians scoff at the notion that the culture is repressive, because there exists a class of petty bad behaviors that are tolerated or even encouraged. But ironically the range of acceptable ill behavior is in practice cleanly defined and narrow in its own way.

I don’t know which came first: the agreeable citizenry or the culture of rules. Nova Scotia is a place where there are lots of rules. Written rules. Written, and posted. And for the most part, people follow them. In some cases, like recycling, they seem to be proud to follow them even at considerable inconvenience. But in many cases, they just blindly follow them. Don’t walk here. Don’t eat food not purchased here. Don’t fill that gas can. Don’t idle your car. Don’t use pesticide. Don’t install you own propane lines. Don’t carry a Taser. Don’t open on Sunday. Don’t close on Sunday. Pay this fee. Take this course. Get an inspection. Where is your sticker? Stand in this line.

People are as quick to confront you with a tiny infraction as they are slow to offend you otherwise. And even people who express dissatisfaction with the overall freedom robbing effects of a rules culture are quick to support new rules when they impact only someone else. Of course there’s enforcement. Usually social pressure, an army of quasi authority figures – some not yet out of high school but with a nice hat. And an escalation will land you in jail for, with apologies to Bruce Springsteen, “disturbing the almighty peace”. But the usual enforcement is financial. Mandatory fees, insurance, combined with fines, the threat of property   seizure, direct wage and price control, denial of government income and denial of your means of employment or the means to employ others usually do the trick. The easiest way to deny freedom to a group save people from themselves is to control most of their livelihood.

The political class is thriving. Smart ambitious young people go to university to take Political Science, or the newer program, Environmental Science, hoping to land lifetime employment in the department of rules. The political ideology in Nova Scotia ranges from Conservative – the belief that the proper role of government is regulate and pick winners and losers in business, to Liberal where the proper role is to  is regulate and pick winners and losers in business, households and communities.

In practice of none of this seems ominous. Safety, fairness, the environment are all good reasons to make rules. Rules are thoughtfully made, in response to real issues. Well, usually. Two summers ago gas was becoming too expensive, so it quickly became illegal to change the price without notice and then only on special days. Nobody, anywhere, thought this would have any real effect. But nobody stopped it because once a rules culture sets in, people lose the means to impact the process. This is how freedom dies.

One stupid rule at a time.

Mike.

Once again I’m lucky enough to be back in Nova Scotia.

In the summer.

Here, the Conservatives (“Progressive Conservatives”, to be exact, in an oxymoronic way) just got booted and the New Democratic Party is in. When I left over twenty years ago, the NDP was the fringe party. Too liberal (in the modern, Western sense) for a proud liberal province in a proud liberal country. So I’ve been talking to people to understand what’s going on here.

The first thing I discover is that nobody really knows what the policy of NDP is. They might have become the most moderate, mature and cautious choice.  They might be to the left of Greenpeace. Nobody knows, and for the most part, nobody cares. The NDP, despite being in power now, are still the butt of jokes. Indeed the fact they got elected is a source of (I suspect – unfair) political humor.

But few are concerned. And few are hopeful. People have accepted that not much will change. For better or worse, the nanny state is no longer in the hands of elected officials. It functions via the enforcement of many tens of thousands of constantly growing and changing regulations. The state is run by career bureaucrats and supported by a profoundly liberal court. And business has long adapted to the redistribution of money and regulatory agencies that are at least as powerful as the market. Business always adapts.

And the nanny state won’t grow much, because it can’t. Taxes are already beyond the point of diminishing returns. Even the current and still popular environmental religion is showing signs of regulatory fatigue here.

Elections are viewed as a way to contain corruption via indirect terms limits, and a tool to give officials fair time at the trough.

This is the terminal state of nanny states. These things are much harder to unwind than to create. And the reason is that is harder to reduce public sector spending than to increase it.

The Democrats in America know this. They are trying to capitalize on the popularity of Obama, the power of a super majority and fear of economic collapse and any other crisis to quickly ratchet the state up.

 It might work.

Mike.

MEMORANDUM

TO: The Like Minded
FROM: NYT Management and  Key Stakeholders in Various Organizations of Significance
RE: The ’09 Agenda

Dear Progressives:

Congratulations on Job #1. Everyone pulled together on this and the results show.

It’s time to transition to memes that will have appropriate impact over the next 4 years. The following have been deemed to be of key importance:

Restore Credibility: In our enthusiasm to cover the historic story we may have overreached occasionally.  This is a good time to remind ourselves that as the newspaper of record, working with Key Stakeholders in Various Organizations of Significance, we have an obligation to set our strongly held bias aside and be seen as objective. The timing is good here, as this will like have little impact on Job #1. Again, congratulations.

Back Peddle: It was a historic time. An uplifting time. Almost a spiritual time. We feel it. We know you feel it. The people feel it, … er, where was I? Oh, yes, expectations are high. Very high. And as we know, change is hard. Very hard. The road will be long. And hard. There’s a story here. The long, hard, slow road to change.

The Historical Narrative: As we all know, the seeds of doom have been planted for a long eight years and the roots, trunks and leaves are strong. Indeed, some historians believe that the seeds may be as old as  1781. Change will be hard. And slow. As we travel down the long, hard, slow, road of change, it will be helpful to not lose sight of the “shackles of history” that dog us. There are many stories here, and a great deal of legwork has been done over the last eight years.

Keep The Hope Alive: It’s been a long eight years. We’ve suffered through imaginary terrorism, the disdain of European progressive elitists, artists and intellectuals,  wars, the systemic oppression of women and minorities, the debasement of science, authoritarian Christians, economic collapse and environmental disaster. Frankly people want Change. And we’ve done our part to document the stories that this anguish was as planned by that swaggering Texan fool [ see style guide, “Bias” –ed ] the outgoing administration. We will work closely with KSIVOOS to find stories that uplift. Stories of Hope. Stories of Change. Stories of Hope and Change, not Hate. Again, congratulations. Except in the appropriate context of the historical narrative (above), it’s time to de-emphasize things like waterboarding, gitmo, Iraq, Iran, Russia, North Korea, nuclear weapons. Since we have an obligation to report the straight facts, we feel there’s still some legroom on Gaza, AIDs and other diseases which have a disproportionate impact on women and minorities. There is no change on the standing guidance re Africa - paid advertising continues to put pressure on the space above the fold.

Understand the Marketplace: As you are probably aware, fewer and fewer people actually buy or read the NYT with each passing day. Research shows that people are being confused by a plethora of low quality “unaligned” reporting on the web, in addition to the juggernaut of AM talk radio. Be assured that we will work all angles on this one, with the full support of KSIVOOS.

Thanks, and again. Congratulations.

As an immigrant myself, I was keenly interested in Jennifer’s grade 8 Social Studies assignment, “Immigration Unit – Whose America Is It”.

Part of the assignment was to define the following terms, and provide “examples from your own experience, literature or the news that best pertains to immigration.”

I thought I’d take a crack at this.

Xenophobia n. fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign

One of the reasons that I found America so desirable as a place to immigrate to  is that,  unlike much of the world, including , at some time, Nazi Germany,  Rwanda, Zimbabwe and China, its values, laws and culture seem to discourage xenophobia. Indeed we are so divorced from actual xenophobia that, like Nazism, the word has lost real meaning and is used as slang to mean anything “bad” or “different”.

Assimilation n. the process of adapting to a new place and people by learning, understanding, respecting their values and customs and incorporating them into daily life so as to be better able to communicate

The American assimilation process was slow and subtle for me, consisting mostly of people treating me with respect and dignity, exhibiting the personal characteristics of optimism, honesty, hard work and faith, and extending me the honor of inviting me into their houses and institutions.

Pluralism n. a condition in which numerous distinct ethnic, religious, or cultural groups are present and tolerated within a society

A unique quality of American cultural and legal respect for individual liberty is the side effect that pluralism is achieved without the polarizing effect of European style legislated multiculturalism.

Alienation n. emotional isolation or dissociation

It wasn’t until mandated diversity training that I personally experienced the feeling of alienation that was all too common during many hours of liberal socialist propaganda that I experienced growing up in Canada.

The Canadian elite are all buzzing about some newly gathered  census data. Childless couples, married and unmarried homosexuals and poor fatherless children are showing very positive growth. 25 years of tireless work denigrating married working fathers, deemed to be the root of all social problems, is finally paying off with some diversity in family structures. There are even some modestly encouraging signs that even more diverse family structures are emerging.

In other non-news, Stats Canada web sites report that Canadian birth rates appear to have stabilized at around 10 per 1000, after falling steadily for about 25 years. Canadians continue their selfless work of saving the planet, but not themselves, from certain doom .

Meanwhile, this week in America, science has proven that liberals are smarter than conservatives.

Indeed.

Mike.

Ps Does anyone, anyone at all, have any idea how I can lose this “Random Acts” dude that I somehow accepted as my spaces friend?  

I’m no lawyer, but I had been under the impression that discrimination on the basis of race (or gender) was not only wrong, but illegal.

I think it’s easy to see how the text of I-200, which passed with 58% of the vote, might lead me to believe this:

AN ACT Relating to prohibiting government entities from discriminating or granting preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin; and adding new sections to chapter 49.60 RCW.

Apparently this needed some clarification by the Supreme Court of the United States. I’m no lawyer, but I think it just got more illegal to discriminate on the basis of race.

The local press, who seem to be in favor of racial discrimination, has 3 storylines in response to this.  

1. It’s barely newsworthy. The Seattle School Board used race as a “tiebreaker”. In exceptional cases. No worries.
2. The School Board is deeply committed to racial discrimination. The fact that it is illegal is a technicality that can be managed by committees of experts and lawyers. No worries.
3. It’s a crisis. Clear evidence that a significant number of Americans plan a return to slavery. The only way we can ensure Martin Luther King’s hope that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character is to institutionalize discrimination on the basis of race.

 I'm no journalist, but the irony of combining all three storylines in the same article seems to escape the authors.

 Mike.

There was a tragic accident in Kenmore this week. I heard on the news that fault has not yet been determined. I presume that committees of experts will determine fault in due time. I doubt the analysis will go much like this:

This conditions leading to this accident were engineered by committees of experts. The intersection at 73^rd and Bothell Way has one of those 12 seconds green / 3 minutes red lights that make perfect sense  in a spreadsheet called “hourly vehicle capacity”.  In the real world, these things lead to a lot of dangerous driving behavior.

Sadly, I suspect that this light isn’t very good from a capacity perspective since 10 of the 12 seconds is used getting the flow started. Perhaps the spreadsheet needed an “average speed during green” row, which would have said ½ mph.

I moved into the into the slightly sleepy, friendly, open and natural neighborhood of Kenmore 12 years ago. Immediately after the move, I read that Kenmore had been designated as “high growth”, or some such thing, by a committee of experts. Frankly, I don’t know what the “Growth Management Act” is. I presume it is the result of committees of experts who make trade offs for the common good.

I do know that over the last 12 years, the air quality has become poorer and most of the trees have become apartments. The roads have not changed in the sense of being improved. They are perpetually being dug  up.

The accident involved a fatal mix of heavy construction equipment, very dense traffic, one or more bad drivers, pedestrians and a  short light. Exactly the situation created committees of experts.

A few years ago, when the number of light changes I had to wait through, and the number of cars turning illegally on red grew from 1 to 4, I presumed that the Kenmore Police, who have an office within eyesight of the intersection, would  grow tired of waiting, and then influence the appropriate committees of experts to get it resolved.

They take a shortcut through the Park and Ride so as to avoid the intersection entirely.

The common good works in mysterious ways.

Mike.

Given the hypothetical task of capturing a free country without a civil war, I was thinking about how I might approach the problem.

Something for Nothing

First, I would borrow and print a lot of money. I would use this money to create new government jobs. I would send a message to the public sector unions that strikes would be rewarded and I would engage the intellectual community to talk about the role of public sector unions as one of setting a low water mark for private sector unions.

I would create many new government departments, each devoted to handing out some of the newly borrowed and printed cash. I would hand out cash to the poor, to business, to farmers and to the old. I would make sure that between direct public sector employment and various welfare programs, a large percentage of the population became dependant on my cash.

Before the cash ran out, I would offer free health care (for the children) and old age pensions to everyone. At the same time, I would make it illegal to accept payment for heath care. I would engage the intellectual community to talk about this from an economy of scale economic perspective (and downplay the central planning angle). I would also encourage them to invent a thought framework, grammar and dialog to position the general replacement of individual freedom with regulation in terms of collective fairness. Something like “social justice”.

Thought Control

I would spend some cash on the intellectuals in form of university (for the children) and think tank funding. I would use the funding influence to encourage political science research that demonstrated that my desired economic and social policies were derived using science as opposed to simply being invented out of whole cloth.

I would establish a government office whose sole agenda was to fuse my economic and social agenda with patriotism.

I would establish a government media organization whose sole agenda was to use the output of my intellectuals to counter argue any potential news that might call into question the morality or effectiveness of my plan.

I would continue to hold elections, confident that I control so much of the economy that I can frighten a majority into reelecting me, even if they oppose me in general. After each new win, I would speak of civility and cooperation, and I would hand out some cash to the losers.

Paying for It

As the cash ran low, I would cancel the military. Presumably the intellectuals haven’t found any use for it anyway.

Managing the Private Sector

I would use powerful government bureaucracies like customs, safety and standards to effectively control the market. I would then create winners and losers at will.

I would nationalize key industries like energy and transportation, either overtly or indirectly via taxation and regulation.

As needed, I would use some cash for corporate welfare in the form of job creation programs to keep the unemployment and welfare rate below a socially disastrous level.

Paying for It

Taxes will have to up. Way up.

Lambs to the Slaughter

I would disarm the population. Assuming the plan was going well up to this point, I wouldn’t actually be that concerned with armed revolt. But I would understand that a general sense of powerlessness and freedom from individual responsibility would work in my favor over time.

Keeping It Going

As taxes approached the limit of 100%, inflation precluded running the presses, and people began to want their borrowed money back, I would turn toward regulation as the primary vehicle of control. I would create a climate, using my control of the media, where every tragedy generated outrage requiring me to do something (for the children) to prevent it in the future.

The Golden Goose

Just as the cash was running out, the population aging and shrinking at the same time, the immigrants proving to be stubbornly independent, the heath care system creaking, business innovation declining, unfunded future liabilities exploding, Alberta and Quebec giving me the digit, I’d embrace the new religion of global warming. First, I would retune the intellectual and thought control systems away from progressive socialism and toward environmentalism. I would then generate a sense of guilt and fear to justify sweeping regulation. I would blame any subsequence economic damage, including the damage that I created in the preceding 40 years on saving the planet (for the children).

It might work.

Mike.

Assume that the population of Nova Scotia is 1 million.

Assume that the government forces retailers to replace 250,000, 100 watt incandescent bulbs with florescent bulbs.

At any given moment, assuming they are all on, 25,000 KW is consumed by the current lights.

Government data shows that the average temperature of Nova Scotia hits a high of 65 F in the months of July and Aug. Estimate that for 24 hours in each of July and August, no buildings are being heated (or air conditioned - which I assume is relatively uncommon in Nova Scotia). For the remainder of the year, buildings are being heated to bring them to 70 F. This means that the total number of “non-heating” hours (the only time the bulb change has any effect; see Feeling Good) is 1400 (60 x 24).

The total number of kWh used during the “non-heating” hours used by all these bulbs is 36 million. Assuming that 75% of this can be saved with more efficient bulbs, 27 million kWh would be saved yearly.

This translates into an annual saving of approximately 42 million lbs of CO2 (27M x 1.55), or approximately 42 lbs / person.

In gasoline terms, this would be a savings of 2.16 gals per person per year (19.4 lbs / gal).

If the bulbs were aleready being turned off for 12 hours / day the net gasoline saving per person drops to 1 gal per year.

This should just about offset the extra energy used to manufacture and ship the new bulbs and support the needed bulb police (assuming the public sector unions don't allow the recycle police in Kings Co. to also levy bulb fines).

Perhaps mandatory incandescent bulb recycling will be the next big issue in super green Nova Scotia. A small tax on the new bulbs would easily pay for it.

Mike.

According to Newsweek:

 There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production– with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.

…    To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”

   A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.

April 28, 1975.

http://www.igreens.org.uk/world_is_cooling.htm

Perhaps the hype-o-meter (http://mikezintel.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!D3612E978A2BDE2B!140.entry) would show a cycle, not unlike IPCC temperature graphs prior to the removal of Some Inconvenient Data.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/11/05/nosplit/nwarm05.xml

My predication here is that once the hype-o-meter peeks, the media is going to flip the story into "the data was manipulated, science fails, etc etc".

Unfortunately, lots of freedoms (see previous entry) will have been sacrificed by then.

The news will miss this story.

Mike. 

Newton’s second law teaches us that replacing incandescent with florescent bulbs saves you exactly no energy, assuming a building is being heated to a temperature higher than the outdoor temperature. In fact, it doesn’t make an iota of difference if you replaced all incandescent bulbs with plasma TVs. Almost all energy in a building quickly degenerates into heat.  

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy

 Nova Scotia, as I remember it , is pretty cold.

 Perhaps a course in physics ought be required to obtain a political science degree.

 http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2007/02/28/ns-lightbulb.html

 Mike.

A recurring dialog these days, both in the press and in my personal life, concerns the question “is America ready for a women president?”

The general answer, from many folks I know, seems to be no.

Frankly this surprises me. My daughter is growing up in world where the notion that women are fundamentally incapable of achieving anything, discouraged or precluded from trying, or operating in a system biased against them is completely foreign to her. In public school, she is surrounded by teachers and administrators who are chronically concerned about girls’ self-image and roles models. At home, her parents neither reinforce nor condemn any particular career or family aspirations she might have and encourage her to try everything to find her passion.

The same cannot be said of my mother’s generation.

It occurred to me that that I’ve been misunderstanding the conversation. What is really being discussed is not equal opportunity or open mindedness in America but the implication that women who aspire to leadership are, by nature, more likely to be philosophically inclined toward the growth of the nanny state at the expense of freedom. I’m going to ignore the track record of my own state of WA, and choose not to believe this. I know lots of men who feel bad that America still trails the more enlightened societies of Europe and Canada.

Margaret Thatcher was a women.

It has occurred to me that if my job was to devise a strategy to get a pro-nanny state/anti freedom women elected to the presidency, this is what I would do:

I would try to create a block of single issue women voters where the issue is the anger.  When it was convenient, I would use the argument that women and men are, at birth, interchangeable blank slates. Any differences they might exhibit in life are therefore entirely the result of conditioning. I would then inventory a set of issues where there seems to be a wealth/power/happiness/whatever imbalance and blame it on the perpetual  unseen but ever powerful patriarchy.  If the inventory was too small, I would invent issues out of whole cloth.

I would then try to create a block of utopian nanny state voters by  emphasizing the fundamental differences between women and men. I would try to create the feeling and belief, via subtle indoctrination and propaganda, that much of  the violence and suffering in the world is a result of men being politically “in charge” and being fundamentally violent.  This is a potentially large voter block, in that the argument is believable to both men and women.

Finally, I would appeal to a combination of guilt and chivalry of the remaining men that women have not yet accomplished “enough”, and that the best way to for them to help is to elect a nanny state women.

It might work.

Mike.

I had intended to grumble about the electricity being off for 8 days. But I'm so happy that it's back on in time for Christmas that I want to thank the people who fixed it.

The folks who were running this interesting machine across the road were able to operate it continuously for the entire time.

Indeed, every day for the last 6 weeks.

Go private sector.

This construction was approved by the local city council, who are following through on their planning strategy entitled "Sardines for Kenmore".

Go public sector.

Mike.

I was fortunate this year to spend most of the summer in Canada. While there, I reflected on the differences between Canadians and Americans. I concluded that there are two.

First, Canadians spend time reflecting on the differences between Canadians and Americans.

The general storyline in Canada is a celebration of the essential selflessness of the people reflected in a government running an objective portfolio of compassionate domestic and foreign policies. There’s some truth to this, although it’s not clear what came first, the liberal government or the liberal people. Over the last 40 years the liberal establishment in Canada has used vast sums of taxpayer dollars to weave the liberal agenda seamlessly into Canadian patriotism. The true genius of this has been to create a climate of contempt toward patriotism in America while promoting it domestically.

Americans do not spend time reflecting on the differences between Canadians and Americans. For Canadians, this is further evidence that Americans are indeed unsophisticated and selfish. Americans, on the other hand, view this as…

Americans do not spend time reflecting on the differences between Canadians and Americans.

The second difference is that Canadians, on the whole, feel more guilt than Americans.

Reflect on that irony for a moment.

Among other things, Canadians feel guilty about throwing away plastic, buying gasoline, being healthy and not being poor. They have a large government apparatus to replace guilt with high taxes and lots of rules. It’s not clear which came first, the guilt or the large government apparatus. Actually, I don’t know if they really feel guilt, only that the government uses guilt to advance their agenda (to have a large government apparatus, primarily), and that it works.

When I first came to America, I expected to encounter a large, chronic underclass of hopeless, helpless poor. I had been taught that this was always the inevitable consequence of not having a large government apparatus to correct poverty. What I actually found was that while the idle poor were better off in Canada, where they would receive money and houses for free, the working poor were both more affluent and curiously optimistic about the future. It took me a while to figure out that a large and healthy economy, free from excessive taxes and regulation had the side effect of creating jobs, opportunity, and making a very large number of increasingly higher quality good and services available at increasingly lower prices. And that these things were good for the poor.

As any reader of this blog knows, people wanting to restrict freedom generally don’t use the language of creating a large government apparatus to further restrict freedom. The general storyline is one of America’s unique failures to protect a group of the oppressed or unfortunate against some other presumably privileged group. You can generally take it as a given that when guilt and negative comparisons to other countries are combined, some freedom is in the balance.

I just finished reading an article in the Seattle paper entitled Motherhood Movement Picking up Momentum. The basic plot is one of America’s unique failure to protect a group of oppressed or unfortunate against some other privileged group. It includes a reference to a study from Harvard (!) that concludes that that the United States is one of only four countries among 168 studied by Harvard researchers that doesn't have paid leave for new mothers and that mothers fare far better in other industrial nations.

Who could be against motherhood? Or apple pie for that matter.

But this isn’t really about motherhood. Like public child care, it’s about restricting choice. It works like this: a large government apparatus collects taxes. It then spends those taxes on your behalf. In the context of child care, higher taxes compel more parents into the work force, where they are unable to provide direct care. Fortunately care can be provided by a large government apparatus, which they are financially compelled to use.

While I wouldn’t argue with the facts of the Harvard (!) study, I find the notion that America is not close to the top in terms of a great place to be a mother, father or a child just doesn’t pass the common sense test. By global standards it’s safe, clean, modern, rich and free. That’s certainly been my experience and I’m grateful.

Mike.

Perhaps such a thing exists: a Global Warming Hype-O-Meter. I envision this as a graph of the key indicators of disaster, plotted over time. Interesting indicators might be the predicted rate of temperature rise, glacier melt and ocean rise, the year when the irreversible knee in the curve will occur and the magnitude of predicted climate and species impact.

I haven’t looked at the data, but it feels to me like we’re in about year four of a bidding war for the most extreme predications.

The reason such a meter is important is that it definitely appears that greenhouse gases are increasing and the earth is warming. The industrial trajectory of China and India over the next 10 years likely means the rate of rise of these gas will increase. There might be a serious environmental problem brewing.

The problem is that  without the meter to tell you when the hype is on the decline, the information you can get about global warming just isn’t serious. The current collection of anti-capitalists, big government intellectuals and back to nature types have a really bad track record for correctly predicting the next human induced environmental catastrophe (see: “mass starvation”, “ice age”, “energy crisis”). The only thing they consistently agree on is that some freedoms need to be sacrificed, now, to save the planet at some point in the future.

During a conversation I had with my daughter about the differences between a monarchy, communism and democracy, she piped up and told me that she understood communism. She described an experience during the first day of school in grade 4. Apparently the teacher asked that all the students bring all of their pencils up to a central location in the classroom. Throughout the year, as people needed a new pencil, they should go to the jar and take one. We talked a little bit about why the teacher might do this, and about fairness to individuals Vs. fairness to a group and about the teacher’s power to command such a thing.

Then we talked about how she felt about this. She told me a story about how she and mommy had gone shopping for those pencils, and how much she liked them, and how she felt sad to give them up to the jar. Then she grumbled a little bit about some of the students’ level of pencil responsibly throughout the year and how she watched lots of pencils be destroyed or disappear.

I have no way to know the degree to which the pencil plan was simply a pragmatic approach to making sure there was no time lost in the teaching day due to forgetfulness as opposed to conscious or unconscious indoctrination.

I hope it was successful at the former, because I’m sure it failed at the latter.

Mike.

It’s not that often that you get a good clear look at the freedom destroying effects of the nanny state. There are two reasons for this. Freedom is destroyed slowly, via the continuous creation of rules, licenses, training, certifications, inspections, taxes and bureaucracies. But more importantly, this process is expert in selling itself in the language of fairness, compassion, protection, cooperation and problem solving.

Who could be against that?

In Canada, it’s generally pointless to comment on government waste. By the time the 10 year old federal gun registry was scrapped, the cost had ballooned from a budgeted  2 million to well over a billion ($1,000,000,000) dollars. A gun registry is a list of guns and owners. There are about 30 million people in Canada. If your agenda was to create a program with the explicit goal of spending lots of money for absolutely no results, it would be hard to top this.

Massive waste, even though it is broadly visible, doesn’t generate an outcry. Canada is funded by exporting natural resources. A curious quality of these industries is that they tend to create a few individuals and organizations with a continuous and massive inflow of wealth. It might be argued in this environment that high tax rates and the resultant government bureaucracies are responsible for the creation of a modern, peaceful and open state with a thriving middle class as opposed to say, a Saudi Arabia style monarchy. The net effect of this is that for the majority, government really does seem free. Clearly wasting other people money, especially the rich, is broadly supported.

I’m less convinced that there is broad support for the freedom destroying machine that is a side effect of government problem solving. Canada is one of 3 countries in the world, including North Korea and Cuba, where it is against the law to charge money for heath care. This program was in its infancy when I was a boy, and my first awareness of it was watching my grandfather, Dr. Paul Webster, lose his practice and his livelihood. The ophthalmologists were more politically savvy, and had successfully excluded optometrists from the new universal government funding for eye care. This of course, was described in the language of quality and equality, as opposed to simple greed.

Like most Canadians, for the next 20 years, I remained a huge supporter of nationalized health care. It struck me as barbaric that a country with as much wealth as Canada would allow anyone the indignity  and suffering of disease without heath care.

I still feel this way.

When the programs were put in place, I suspect the older generation didn’t have especially high expectations that death could be denied with science, and the bulk of the population was young and healthy. It wasn’t until I moved to America that a 6 week wait to see a doctor seemed in any way out of the ordinary.

You don’t hear much about problem solving from the heath care system in Canada these days. The folks in charge are primarily focused on the problem of keeping their high paying jobs and pensions while running a system that is basically doomed. They’re in a tough spot. The overall level of personal wealth in Canada has risen substantially as has the gap between the rich and the poor. Medical science has advanced and become more expensive. And the population has become older and sicker. Since trying to provide care at the level affordable to the rich would bankrupt the system, the government is in the business of rationing care to the entire population.  

Using some formula.

Developed by experts.

With life and death in the balance.

The current crisis is that, in defiance of the law, private care is simply setting up shop and betting that the government won’t want to be seen as being in the freedom destroying business by shutting them down. The government of British Colombia scored a recent victory against an illegal private clinic by agreeing to allow them to submit a bill to the province in exchange for not collecting money from patents. The government is not interested in taking some of the pressure off the public system by allowing private care because they know the importance of having everyone believe that 6 months for an MRI and 2 years for a new hip is normal.

Ironically, this freedom destroying action this is being described in terms of “choice”.  

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20061201/bc_clinic_061201/20061202?hub=Health

Mike.