There are, Evidently, Some Things Money Can't Buy

Like brains for Tories and Liberals, f'r'instance.

Paul McKeever looked at the new Ontario "budget" yesterday:

REVENUES (Billions)

Income/Property Taxes:

* Personal Income Tax $25.2
* Corporations Tax: $12.3
* Employer Health Tax: $4.8
* Ontario Health Premium: $2.8
* TOTAL: $45.1

Retail Sales Tax (8%): $17.2
Gasoline and Fuel Taxes: $3.1
Other Taxes: $3.5

KEY EXPENSES (Billions):

Government Health Insurance Monopoly $40.4
Tax-funded, government-owned/operated schools: $13.1
Post-secondary education/training: $6.2
Welfare of various sorts: $11.8
“Other Programs”: $11.9
…oh yeah, we almost forgot “Justice”: $3.7

Allow me to be only the second snarky Objectivist on the internet, and add to that list:

*You, the taxpayer: a goddamn sucker.

Paul makes the important point that most of the budget, and all of the revenue from income taxes (and then some), goes to the two idiot brothers, education and socialized healthcare. If we were to end these daily excursions to failure, we could save Ontarians, collectively, over 45 billions dollars. $45 billion can buy a lot of cancer treatments and bachelor's degrees - or it can buy a lot of research into new drugs that make cancer treatment redundant. As Milton Friedman once said, "Nobody spends other people's money as carefully as he spends his own."

EDIT, 4:00PM: Clarified a few things.

Dallas's Red Light District

Via Instapundit, msnbc reports that Dallas is shutting down a number of their red light cameras because they aren't actually preventing people from running red lights.

Oh wait, that's not the problem; the problem is that the cameras are working:

The city said the cameras are failing to generate enough red-light-running fines to justify their costs.

Well, smack my ass and call me Stalin - it wasn't about saving the children. Well, fuck.

Dallas News elaborates:

That leaves Dallas government with a conundrum. Its red-light camera system has been an effective deterrent to motorists running red lights – some monitored intersections have experienced a more than 50 percent reduction. But decreased revenue from red light-running violations means significantly less revenue to maintain the camera program and otherwise fuel the city's general fund.

Of course, there's always this clever solution to the red-light problem: randomly shut down a few of the cameras for a while. Sure, they won't be there to catch the people who zip through busy intersections like a bat out of hell, but that's not the professed goal of red light cameras, is it? The claim was that they were necessary to make the roads safer for driver and pedestrian alike. And they've done that, evident in the Dallas News article quoted above. Now, logically, if it wasn't really the presence of red light cameras, but the threat of red light cameras that reduced running the lights, then people would be just as safe even if the cameras weren't on. If we kept the cameras operating on a random basis, joyriders wouldn't have time to adapt to which lights were safe and which were not.

It's the same effect seen with communities where concealed carry of guns is legal: criminals are convinced to ply their, err, trade with a little more discrimination, because anyone could be packing heat. Patrick Mullins wrote for Capitalism Magazine back in 2001 that:

Nondiscretionary concealed-carry permits deter crimes against persons because criminals -- fearing for their own lives -- don't know which potential victims in a right-to-carry state are armed and which are not. National polls suggest that there are as many as 3.6 million defensive uses of handguns by private citizens each year. There are no hard numbers available, because these incidents are rarely reported to the authorities and because 98% of them consist merely of brandishing the gun rather than discharging it. [John] Lott's landmark study now confirms the bountiful anecdotal evidence for deterrence.

...

Lott's conclusions shattered the conventional wisdom about the correlation of crime to gun ownership by responsible citizens.

"National crime rates have been falling at the same time as gun ownership has been rising. Likewise, states experiencing the greatest reductions in crime are also the ones with the fastest growing percentages of gun ownership."

"Allowing citizens to carry concealed handguns reduces violent crimes, and the reductions coincide very closely with the number of concealed-handgun permits issued. Mass shootings in public places are reduced when law-abiding citizens are allowed to carry concealed handguns."

Because someone else has chosen to equip himself with a tool for self-defense, everyone else in the community is just a little bit safer. Does it eliminate crime entirely? No, but neither do red light cameras.

But safety was never their primary concern anyway.

Regarding Bill C-10: The Facebook Response

In the previous post, I talked about the difference between censorship and refusing to fund pornography, or other productions that one might find objectionable. I concluded that the government's job is not to provide enjoyment or entertainment, because, necessarily, people discriminate against that which they find repulsive: for example, I would never buy my neighborhood library 10 copies of "The Communist Manifesto," "Mein Kampf," or "Confessions of a Shopaholic;" but a government that was providing funding for such a library would face the Catch-22 of being accused of "censoring" the library if it did not provide funding, and supporting such vile ideologies as Fascism, Communism, and terrible-literary-tastes-ism if it did cough up the dough.

A Facebook group created to protest Bill C-10 complains:

* It is undemocratic: This controversial new provision to screen the content of productions in awarding tax credits was never debated in the House of Commons, because it was hidden away in a long, technical piece of legislation.

You know, John Milton said "When language in common use in any country becomes irregular and depraved, it is followed by their ruin and degradation." And I'm distressed to learn that that has happened to the word "democracy." Democracy describes a system of government in which majority rules - no more than that, and no less than that. There is no requirement that the participants in a democracy must know what they're doing, or even be capable of functioning at a low-level of intelligence. If our duly-elected representatives can't be bothered to read something, then they shouldn't be agreeing to pass it. There is no refuge in the excuse of ignorance: when I am handed a contract, I read the thing front-and-back, using a magnifying glass and that fluorescent spray that they use on CSI, just to be sure that there aren't any hidden clauses or fine-print restrictions that would have me inadvertently turning over my power of attorney. If I don't feel like doing that, then I don't sign the contract. So it should also be, I would hope, when you have been given the power to represent the wishes of thousands of people.

You aren't in high school anymore - you can't just eschew the reading of "Brave New World" and hope that the Coles Notes will get you through the exam.

Regarding Bill C-10

A shocking new bill has been passed:

A new bill that would give the federal Heritage Department the power to deny funding for films and TV shows it considers offensive is creating shock waves in the industry.

Changes now before the Senate to the Income Tax Act that would allow the federal government to cancel tax credits for projects thought to be offensive or not in the public interest. The amendments have already been passed in the House of Commons. (CBC)

David Cronenberg comments: "It sounds like something they do in Beijing... You have a panel of people working behind closed doors who are not monitored and they form their own layer of censorship."

The denial of funding or tax-cuts is not censorship. It is unfair, but only because my tax dollars shouldn't be supporting such exemplary programs as those that John Ivison describes in an article for the National Post:

...I'm outraged as a taxpayer. Telefilm Canada handed out $158-million last year, including to such productions as Sperm and The Masturbators. But while they or the other yet-to-be-released movies and shows may well prove to be the next Away from Her, Barbarian Invasions or Trudeau, all of which were award-winners and received substantial Telefilm funding, they are just as likely to be the next Web-dreams, Kink or G-Spot, titillating late-night fare designed almost exclusively to provoke hand-to-gland combat.

These three shows received substantial public funding over the years through Telefilm and the Canadian Television Fund. But why? Telefilm's mission is to foster productions that reflect Canadian society, with its linguistic duality and cultural diversity. Where's the Canadian distinctness in the G-Spot episode Sexorcist, where Gigi (Brigitte Bako), experiences a visit by a ghost that leaves her extremely "satisfied"? It's not that it's a bad show -- if it's on, I'll watch it because I'm Scottish and I know I'm paying for it. But the only connection to the Great White North is that Gigi is a struggling Canadian actress in Hollywood.

Why, indeed?

Part of the problem is that the broadcasters control where the Canadian Television Fund spends its $250-million. Not surprisingly, they direct funding toward shows they think will make them money. The new policy on tax suggests the government will, sooner or later, impose the same guidelines on Telefilm and CTF.

But that's not censorship. If the makers of Bliss or Webcam Girls want to continue to produce their shows -- or if they have a vacancy for a backscrubber -- then that's terrific. But they should do it without our tax dollars. As Pierre Trudeau so rightly said, there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.

The system by which "the arts" gets funding has been seriously flawed for some time. Naturally, I would prefer that the government simply stop funding all arts, no matter the content. If an artists wants to make something, they'll fund a way to make it; if the people want something, they'll find a way to get it. The good doesn't need the government to provide for it, only to protect it.

Calling the denial of a tax-cut to a production "censorship" means that you would have to also call refusing to buy a ticket to one of Cronenberg's latest "censorship." At the very least, it is mutilating the word, degenerating it to mean whatever you wish it to mean. Do they have censorship in Beijing, as Cronenberg says? Yup, they do. They also put you in jail for protesting the government's decisions. They also, reportedly, take organs out of prisoners for transplantation. This is not the kind of thing that Beijing would do - this is something Beijing would laugh at, giving it an inferiority complex.

Withholding tax credits only counts as censorship if you also consider the theater patron with discriminating taste to also be engaging in censorship when he doesn't buy a ticket to your performance. As has been repeated, ad nauseum, elsewhere, the right to free expression is not the right to an audience. Simply because you have a half-baked, poorly-considered idea for a TV series does not obligate the CBC to fund your notion, or to provide it with air-time. There are plenty of places on the internet that will happily host your mediocrity. If you can't convince anyone with money to fund your artistic endeavor, or convince those able of giving loans that enough people will want to watch your masterpiece that you will be able to pay them back, then your idea, for all intents and purposes, is worthless.

The free market always has been, and always will be, the best arbiter of the worthiness of ideas. Any program which does not provide the giving organization with a method of "discrimination," so that they can decide which projects get funded and which do not, will not survive for long. When people are left to their own devices, they decide which projects are worthy of funding by buying tickets to movies, comedy shows, and plays; by tuning in on their televisions; by visiting the websites. The quickest way to ensure that the Canadian public is not forced to pay for something that it objects to is simply not to presume to act on behalf of the Canadian public. There is no better steward for my choices than me.

I expect no government hand-out or tax-break from my artistic endeavors. As I sit in my apartment, tapping out my first novel unremittingly, I search out no government grants, no special privileges that I have not earned with regards to my work. Sure, I get a GST credit every now and then, but that's not related to my writing in any way. If the public likes my writing, then they, on an individual basis, will determine if I am worth supporting - no government agency will take over their decision-making processes, their value judgement, and decide for them. Like all values, the individual must decide which will help him to survive, and which will kill him. A man on deserted island in the Pacific Ocean must rely on his own reason to determine which of the island's fruit will poison him, and how to take the salty sea water and make it drinkable. There aren't any government bureaucrats to come along and tell him, as decided by majority vote, what he will do for food, or how to build a shelter. There is no replacement for individual judgement.

Anything you can do, the government can do worse

To quote Ronald Reagan, as I regard the concept that businesses will face no consequences if they act irresponsibly, and we thusly require a benevolent government to take care of us: "if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?" Essential tax-payer sponsored incompetents once again proved that the government is as human and fallible as everyone else is in the case of the "largest beef recall" in the history of the United States.

From USAToday:

LOS ANGELES — The U.S. Department of Agriculture has suspended at least two federal meat inspectors following the largest beef recall in the nation's history, a union head said Friday.

...

The USDA recalled 143 million pounds of beef from the Chino slaughterhouse on Feb. 17. The recall came after the Humane Society of the United States released undercover video showing plant workers trying to get so-called "downer" cows — sick or crippled animals — to stand by shoving and dragging them with forklifts, zapping them with electric prods and aiming water hoses at their faces and noses.

...

The recall launched a series of congressional hearings and close scrutiny of the USDA's meat and poultry inspection system. The agency has an average national vacancy rate of 10% and has said it is short about 500 inspectors.

That recall was recounted and commented on by Mike's Eyes, as it happened. He argued that not only are the regulatory organizations unnecessary, as they prove to be just as prone to error and apathy as the businesses themselves, but are actually counter-productive to the cause of consumer safety:

I'm not going to argue the pros and cons of this particular case. My point is that many people will use this incident as evidence to support the idea that we need regulatory agencies like the USDA to keep us safe. I say just the opposite is true. We would be much safer in an unregulated economy where the commodity of safety is provided by the market. In point of fact, the USDA did not protect the consumer in this case. It happened despite the regulatory agencies, despite the fact that a USDA inspector was there for a few hours every day. Why did regulators fail? Because they are not self-interested, they have nothing to gain by doing a great job and nothing to lose by doing a poor one. In a laissez-faire economy, producers would have everything to lose from a bad reputation and everything to gain from a good one.

And don't forget that, even if regulations somehow bypassed reality and somehow became helpful, they would still be inherently immoral: they violate the individual rights of consumers to make their own decisions about which companies they will support with the mighty vote of their paycheques. As Mike elaborates:

They represent the starting of the use of force against producers and consumers by 1. destroying the need of consumers to focus on the reputations of businesses and 2. by encouraging producers to be concerned with following certain rules rather than following reality as dictated by the market.

As it stands now, a company will, like a sub-par student coddled by years of public education, maintain the bare minimum of standards in order to pass. He has no incentive to do any better. That little stamp of government approval is the same whether your company produces the finest cuts or dog food. The public have even less interest than the meat plants do in a company's reputation, and will simply rely upon that stamp as a "sign of quality."

Green With Envy

BC Budget Creates a Carbon Tax (The Globe and Mail)

What is it with the west coast? Whether it's BC or California, it's like these places are geographically predisposed to stupidity.

Yet More Proof of Chuck Norris' Strength

Chuck Norris can endorse Mike Huckabee while keeping a straight face. (AriArmstrong.com)

Holding Out For an Argument

Over at the Washington Post, Mike Wise just could not resist commenting, after his ardent research, on the Clemens/Steroid congressional hearing ("Untruth be Told" - ooh, cle-ver, Mike).

This is from the introductory paragraph:

the Texas-size audaciousness to think that his stature in society was big enough to get away with committing perjury.

So, if you were like me, a naïve reader thinking that the venerability of the Washington Post might lend it at least a whiff of credibility, you’d think that Mike Wise would attempt to prove his claim that Roger Clemens said something so audacious as to be unmistakable, something akin to “Only the little people pay taxes.”

Now, I do see some evidence of lying: Roger Clemens is supposedly an ignorant sap when everyone around him his taking steroid and HGH injections, left, right, and all over the place. But that’s not Wise’s claim: Wise claims that these lies show an obvious character flaw of a giant, arrogant ego. So, where’s Wise’s proof?

To put it simply: he has none. He tries to smuggle in a thesis, hoping that because his other points are solid, and because plenty of baseball fans already see Clemens as a jerk, you’ll forget that his evidence does not prove his claim.

Years ago, Clemens gave his essence away on, of all shows, "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous." He couldn't just renew his vows to his Debbie in a small civil ceremony before their children; no, Clemens had to co-opt Robin Leach and do it up big and right, at a resort in Hawaii.

So Wise’s condemnation comes entirely out of the fact that, oh-no-oh-golly-how-arrogant, Roger Clemens had the audacity to live within his means, to want to renew his vows to the love of his life in a place just slightly above the Mike-Wise-budget-Motel-6-Deal.

There’s a lot of invective, but not a lot of facts. Mike claims that Clemens has a huge ego, a you-can’t-believe-how-large ego, because he talks about his upbringing while being questioned on his of steroids. Well, someone get the goddamn psychologists in here, stat: someone being questioned about THEMSELVES is actually talking about THEMSELVES. Well, fuck, I ain’t never seen such self-obsession in all my life.

Now, I will admit: I haven’t seen ANY footage from these hearings, so I don’t know if Roger was actually “egotistical” or “back-pedalling.” But it seems to me that if you’re going to accuse a man of being something, or doing something, you should probably think far enough ahead to map out some actual evidence, or at the very least, implication, that YOUR words are relevant. I can sit here until I’m blue in the face talking about Mike Wise’s ignorance, arrogance, and contempt for anyone who makes a better living than a Washington Post editorial writer, but unless I back that up with a snippet of a fact or two, I’m not saying anything at all. I’m typing, and words are appearing on my laptop’s screen, but they aren’t actually saying anything; they are worthless.

In addition to the aforementioned, and quite irrelevant, remark about how Clemens had chosen to spend his second wedding (foregoing the Mike Wise Monastery Experience™), Mike sees fit to mention the political affiliation of his defenders and attackers: obviously, questioning the man bringing the charges up is an absolutely “ridiculous” suggestion (I’m surprised, and you’ll see why in a moment, that he didn’t manage to invoke the “McCarthy” incantation), one fit only for the stupid, witch-hunting puritans we call Republicans. You should note that he doesn’t actually call them “Republicans,” though – they are far more useful, loaded terms, for him to stick to them: “Red Staters.” They are not just his political adversaries, they are from those “deep south” states, those squalid wastelands where the citizens, red of neck and large of brow, head from industrial job to beer store while dragging their knuckles upon the dirt road. “Red Stater” describes an entire group of people; “Democrat” describes a specific political affiliation. The former is emotionally loaded with the image of adherence to an ideology, perhaps one that one is born into, such as religion or race – a common assumption made about the south and Republicans. If I might risk heading off on a tangent, it’s a bit like the terms “Ayn-Rander” and “Objectivist.” One just sounds much more irrational, doesn’t it? Even if there’s nothing in the term’s meaning that marks it as being worse than another, Mike Wise is going for rhetorical weight here, and the term “Red Staters” certainly suits that purpose.

Mike Wise would have had a passable editorial if he had just stuck to a semblance of the truth, and condemned Clemens for lying – maybe he could have even thrown in a splash of that good ol’ liberal hate for the great achiever. Instead, he attempted to open up his can of schadenfreude early, and in so doing, betrayed his true feelings: envy of - and contempt for - those greater than himself.

More:

Clemens hearing a waste? ( This one makes me wonder - if the entire point was to discourage kids from using performance-enhancing drugs, wouldn't it have been easier to ask Clemens whether he was using steroids, get him to say "no, my achievements were all natural," and get him to do a PSA or something? Grilling him in front of a congressional committee that invariably makes him look like a liar undermines your objective: not only has Roger Clemens taken drugs and become one of the best, and most highly paid, baseball players ever, but he's also seemed to have escaped the nasty side-effects they told us about in health class. I, quite frankly, see no downside to taking steroids if Roger Clemens has - they seem to have done exactly what my pusher told me they would do. Geez, "Mission Accomplished," guys. )

McNamee's lawyer predicts pardon for Clemens

You've Still Got Your Voice, We're Just Taking Our Megaphone Back

or, The Public Arts: Artists Working Off Grants Should Learn From Freelancers

There was a very short piece in the Toronto Star's Entertainment section on November 17 that spun off from a main article about the new edition of Life of Pi, a book I've never read, have no interest in, and wondered why it would need an illustrated edition.

Or, at least I think it had something to do with The Life of Pi, and it certainly wasn't some smart-alec "artiste" trying to say "conservatives are stupid."

In the meantime, [Yann] Martel [the author of Life of Pi] is persisting with his campaign to persuade Stephen Harper of the virtues of public funding of the arts. For more than half a year, Martel has sent the Prime Minister a literary classic in the mail every two weeks, beginning with Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and, most recently, Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke.

It got me thinking - what exactly does Martel think he's going to accomplish?

Was his master plan to get Harper to say "Wow! These books are great! I think I'll take money from the Canadian public in order to get more of them" ?

The answer to the "starving artist" problem is not the public fleecing of Canadians in order to finance the artists' projects. If an artist's work cannot attract popular support, than what benefit would forced patronage have for the people paying for it? If I don't think that a book is worth buying, forcing me to buy it isn't going to change my opinion of it. If I think a sculpture is particularly ugly, you cannot set it up in my front yard because you think I'm "uncultured."

Have you ever wondered why bad movies get made? It's because the producers, or the actors, or the directors, were able to convince the studios (or the people holding the purse-strings) that their idea had value. Have you ever wondered why sequels to bad movies get made? Because the first bad movie made money, which was an expression of the public's sense of value. Whether you agree the public should find value in yet another installment in the Rush Hour series or not is not the point.

Value is not an inherent quality - nothing is intrinsically valuable. To be valuable, something must be useful for some ends, something must have a purpose, no matter what that purpose is. It doesn't matter whether a forest is valued because it can be cut down to produce paper or because we enjoy the way it looks, the inescapable fact is that it doesn't have value until a human being places value on it. This is especially true of art - the more people that are willing to pay to see it, the greater its value. Hell, it can even have great value with only one supporter, so long as that supporter believes that it is worth more than everybody else does. For example, I thought the TV show The Lone Gunmen was of great value - unfortunately, Fox did not.

Let's look at a classic example, Star Trek: between its second and third seasons, the show hung on the edge of cancellation by CBS. It was only a great outcry from fans, an expression of value, that showed the network that Star Trek did indeed have more value than they originally thought. Star Trek was only kept on the air because the fans convinced the network that the series had value - in effect, they sold Star Trek to the executives, even better than the producers could.

And this is what our publically funded artists must learn to do, and quickly.

Stephen King, John Grisham, and freelance writers the world over have been using the technique of "selling it" for their entire careers. When you write a book and present it to an agent or a publishing company or the future readers of your work, you don't say "I worked really hard on this," you say: "This book will sell, and these are the reasons." Heck, Stephen King does not merely by putting his name on it: "I know you don't think I can write a non-fiction book about the Red Sox, but, hey - the Stephen King brand is hot right now."

If your writing's not earning you the money you need to live, you shouldn't be writing - likewise if you're any other kind of artist. You need to convince companies to give you the big advances, not rely on government to pay for your apprenticeship.