More than a covid's-worth of fiscal incontinence

"[W]hen the pandemic hit Ardern and Robertson had a decision to make. Respond in a fiscally prudent manner or borrow seventy billion, at least thirty of this was spent on non-pandemic frippery, and wrap themselves in a cloak of virtue while leaving an economic calamity to a future set of politicians. ...

"Ardern and Robertson used the pandemic to advance their own agenda ... [John] Key saw a crisis and, lacking an economic agenda or political philosophy, ran to the international money men to maintain the status quo rather than attempt meaningful reform.

"Given the content of the Covid Report the current government is right to highlight Robertson’s fiscal incontinence; pointing to the 70.4 billion total spend as a contrast with their own rectitude.

"Except. Well. ... [Nicola] Willis, who has managed to add over twenty billion new debt in her first two years in office, is projected to increase sovereign debt by more than Robertson achieved over the next five years.

"And this is without a pandemic, major earthquake or outbreak of foot and mouth. ...

"Imagine a company director who has seen revenue fall but maintains payroll by borrowing. Eventually the line of credit ends, staff lose their employment and the director is forced to sell the family home.

"That is our economic policy in one paragraph."

~ Damien Grant from his column 'John Key and Jacinda Ardern both turned to debt when disaster hit'

Testing

"After 8 billion doses (yes 8 BILLION, not a typo) Covid vaccines are at this point one of the most tested medical interventions in history and one of the safest ever."

~ Dr Neil Stone

"mRNA vaccines weren’t the problem. The virus was."

In the very first large study of long-term mortality by vaccination status—assessing the impact of COVID-19 mRNA vaccination among French adults aged 18 to 59—French scientists found there was "no increased risk of 4-year all-cause mortality in individuals aged 18 to 59 years vaccinated against COVID-19, further supporting the safety of the mRNA vaccines that are being widely used worldwide."

Their research with 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals found that "vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19, and no increased risk of all-cause mortality over a median follow-up of 45 months."  

This is the largest study of this kind in the world, and the results are significant. (There was a large Japanese study during the Omicron wave, which earlier vaccines had some trouble covering. This did see an increase in mortality in the over-70s which didn't discriminate towards vaccinated or non-vaccinated.). 

Blogger with the unfortunate name of Snarky Gherkin summarises the French results:

This study used real-world national health data... not surveys, not estimates, not “my cousin’s friend is a nurse on Rumble", not laminated placards of nocebo hysteria. 

They followed 22.7 million vaccinated adults and 5.9 million unvaccinated adults aged 18–59, median follow-up 45 months (nearly 4 years). 

They matched the groups on age, sex, region and over 41 health conditions (so it was adjusted for comorbidities). 

Then they looked at hard endpoints such as all-cause mortality, COVID-related mortality and long-term mortality trends.
The Findings...

• Vaccinated people had 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19.
• 25% lower risk of death from ANY cause.
• No increase in mortality for 4 years after vaccination.
• Results held even after excluding COVID deaths.

What this means... if vaccines were causing secret waves of heart attacks, cancers, turbo-autoimmune-disasters… we would absolutely see it here. 

Instead, vaccinated people (on average) lived longer. 

The authors did note that vaccinated groups had slightly more cardiometabolic issues,
yet still had better outcomes. (That’s the opposite of “healthier people bias.”) 

This is one of the strongest long-term safety signals ever conducted and released.
Link here, have a read. 

Summary: 

mRNA vaccines weren’t the problem.
The virus was.

Feel free to question the summer-upper. And/or read the full research.

FIVE YEARS AGO: Libertarian Debate Club: Virus Edition

This post from NOT PC back in 2021:

From two editions of Rob Tracinski's always excellent Letters:

If you want to get into Libertarian Debate Club with me, I will acknowledge that the government does have a proper role in a pandemic. Just as your right to swing your arms ends where your fist hits my nose, your right to liberty does not include the right to knowingly or negligently transmit a deadly disease to others. Above, I mentioned Typhoid Mary, who was involuntarily confined for 26 years because she refused to stop seeking work as a cook after being identified as an asymptomatic carrier of salmonella typhi. So government has its role in ensuring the humane quarantine of the infected.
    But that alone is not what’s going to get us through [to normal conditions], especially not at this point. What will get us through is innovation, which will be led by a dynamic private economy....
    The key word here is “normal.” As I explained, “normal” in this context is a metaphysical term. I cited what Ayn Rand had to say on this in writing about the “ethics of emergencies.”

By “normal” conditions I mean metaphysically normal, normal in the nature of things, and appropriate to human existence. Men can live on land, but not in water [i.e., a flood] or in a raging fire. Since men are not omnipotent, it is metaphysically possible for unforeseeable disasters to strike them, in which case their only task is to return to those conditions under which their lives can continue.

That is why it was so inappropriate for people to try to apply all the formulas and assumptions of our normal politics to the pandemic.
    But note the necessity of getting back to normal life as soon as possible. With vaccines now approved and being distributed ... we [can possibly] return to the metaphysics of normal life, and the only question is how soon ... it will happen. It will definitely take longer than we would like, and it will probably take longer than it has to.
    When it happens, and we finally get the all-clear on the pandemic, one consequence we will have to deal with is that the pandemic has made it more acceptable for us all to stick our noses into how other people live their lives, and some people will not want to give that up. In my overview of the political philosophy of the pandemic, I quoted British politician [Steve Baker] explaining his vote for lockdown measures but warning that it created a “dystopian society” that should not “endure one moment longer than is absolutely necessary.” I followed that with my own observation.

In the previous edition, I quoted someone who compared our response to the pandemic to Germany in the 1940s. I think that’s the wrong comparison. It’s more like America in the 1940s. Then, too, we saw a vast expansion of government power—both legitimate wartime powers and many illegitimate ones. There were those who loved the mass regimentation, the central planning, the idea of everyone drafted by the state and taking orders, and who wondered why we couldn’t keep all of that in place and apply it to other favorite causes that were “the moral equivalent of war.”

What actually happened is that the moment the war was over, the American people were incredibly eagerto get back to normal life and sweep away all vestiges of wartime regimentation.

I hope and expect the same thing to happen again.

The goal of stopping this pandemic is to return to normal life: to what is metaphysically normal, to the normal activities and goals of human life, and to the normal scope and powers of government in a free society.

That is one of the things we will be looking for in the next year: not just the end of the pandemic, but the unwinding of the social and political measures conjured up to deal with it.

Hipkins "stands behind" his record. Several miles behind.

"Public testimony was a rare chance to reframe his legacy, acknowledge mistakes, and show he could own hard decisions.

"Instead, Labour leader Chris Hipkins took the safer short-term path, which may prove costlier in the long run. 

"His absence now defines the story his opponents will retell until polling day. 

"Hipkins will now have to convince voters he’s trustworthy without the benefit of having shown public transparency over his COVID record."

~ The Centrist from their post 'Hipkins’ COVID inquiry snub: Why it’s a PR disaster waiting to happen'

What happened to Quiet?

 

"All our quiet spaces are getting noisier.

“When did museums stop being quiet spaces?” complains a Reddito ....

"Some museums even encourage the din. They tell families to bring their children—and get as noisy as possible. ...

"I now miss ... shushing librarians. Libraries are no longer quiet places. They’re as noisy as the pub after a football match [at which the crowd are noisily exhorted to make noise whenever a game's pause might otherwise allow them to think]....

"People go to libraries to study and read—so it really ought to be a quiet place. ... Once inside, you had access to a sacred inner sanctum of knowledge and learning. Something like this is even better than the Batcave. ... 

[Now however] books are removed, and replaced with coffee bars and spaces for socializing. In case people don’t get the message, librarians now put up signs discouraging quiet study. ...

"But... if we lose libraries as the last public space for quiet reading and reflection, what can replace it? ...

"Why is this happening. ... a theory: 'This all got worse after the pandemic. People spent months in isolation, and when they returned to public spaces, they had forgotten the basic rules of polite behaviour in these communal settings.' 

"This rudeness feeds on itself. ... So violations of quiet spaces after the pandemic quickly escalate. And once we enter on this vicious cycle, the silence never returns."

 ~ Ted Goia from his post 'Why Are Quiet Spaces Disappearing

Seems fair

"Given that level of unprecedented upheaval and restriction on personal freedom – greater even than wartime – which people went along with because they believed it was for the greater good [sic], it is now far from unreasonable for New Zealanders to expect Ardern, Hipkins and Bloomfield to appear before the Royal Commission to explain their actions in a way that they would not and could not do at the time.
    "Only then will the Royal Commission be sufficiently informed to report on 'lessons to be learned from what happened'.” 

~ Peter Dunne from his untitled post [hat tip Home Paddock]

MAGA: "Empathy is out. Assholery is in."

How do you describe the rise of a creature like Trump. Jeffrey Tucker, Robert Bidinotto and Robert Tracinski tracked his early ascent— along with the parallel rise of the alt-right, which simply took the unthinking opposite side, however horrendous, of mainstream issues, without abandoning the collectivism that underpinned them. And the mainstream is still trying to explain MAGAts sufficiently deranged by Trump to follow him so blindly. Doug Muder identifies several "rifts" in American culture that he's lucked into exploiting.

Donald Trump, in my opinion, is not some history-altering mutant, like the Mule in Asimov’s 'Foundation' trilogy. I think of him as an opportunist who exploited rifts in American society and weak spots in American culture. He did not create those rifts and weak spots, and ... they will still be there waiting for their next exploiter. ...

The first rift he identifies is The Rift Between Working and Professional Classes, i.e., between "the people who shower after work and the people who shower before work."

All through Elon Musk’s political ascendancy, I kept wondering: How can working people possibly believe that the richest man in the world is on their side? Similarly, how can people who unload trucks or operate cash registers imagine that Donald Trump, who was born rich and probably never did a day of physical labor in his life, is their voice in government?

The answer to that question is simple: The people who shower after work have gotten so alienated from the people who shower before work that anyone who takes on “the educated elite” seems to be their ally. In the minds of many low-wage workers, the enemy is not the very rich, but rather the merely well-to-do — people with salaries and benefits and the ability to speak the language of bureaucracy and science.

Actual billionaires like Musk or Trump or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg are so distant that it’s hard to feel personally threatened by them. But your brother-in-law the psychologist or your cousin who got an engineering degree — you know they look down on you. Whenever they deign to discuss national affairs with you at all, it’s in that parent-to-child you-don’t-really-understand tone of voice. And let’s not even mention your daughter who comes home from college with a social justice agenda. Everything you think is wrong, and she can’t even explain why without using long words you’ve never heard before. Somebody with a college degree is telling you what to do every minute of your day, and yet you’re supposed to be the one who has “privilege”.

The tension has been building for a long time, but it really boiled over for you during the pandemic. You couldn’t go to work, your kids couldn’t go to school, you couldn’t go to football games or even to church — and why exactly? Because “experts” like Anthony Fauci were “protecting” you from viruses too small to see. (They could see them, but you couldn’t. Nothing you could see interested anybody.) Then there were masks you had to wear and shots you had to get, but nobody could explain exactly what they did. Would they keep you from getting the disease or transmitting it to other people? Not exactly. If you questioned why you had to do all this, all they could do was trot out statistics and point to numbers. And if you’ve learned anything from your lifetime of experience dealing with educated people, it’s that they can make numbers say whatever they want. The “experts” speak maths and you don’t, so you just have to do what they say.

Can we say we haven't seen that same thing here? 

In his 2012 book 'The Twilight of the Elites,' Chris Hayes outlined the ways that the expert class has become self-serving. In theory, the expert class is comprised of winners in a competitive meritocracy. But in practice, educated professionals have found ways to tip the balance in their children’s favor. Also, the experts did not do a good job running the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, and they failed to foresee the economic crisis of 2008. When they did notice it, they responded badly: Bankers got bailed out while many ordinary people lost their homes. ... 

On the public-trust side, people have been too willing to believe conspiracy theories about perfectly legitimate things like the Covid vaccine [and to applaud the appointment of an anti-vaccine loony to the job of Health Secretary]. Trump’s slashing of funding for science and research is a long-term disaster for America, and his war against top universities like Harvard and Columbia destroys one of the major advantages the US has on the rest of the world. But many cheer when revenge is taken on the so-called experts they think look down on them.

There are many genuine reasons to mistrust the people we see so frequently wheeled out by media and government as so-called experts. But you'd be a fool to abandon trust in genuine expertise—or to place that trust instead in know-nothing figureheads like a Trump or a Bannon or (closer to home) to a Winston, Tamaki or the like. 

The next rift he identifies however opens up in this era of Post-Truth Politics. Muder calls it Truth Decay, that realisation that in the marketplace of ideas, truth no longer matters. Post-modernism has won. The mainstream media's peddling opinion has betrayed their prior responsibility to just report the facts — both science and media have been corrupted by government money — and now reality is biting back in the form of a loss of public trust.

And now too many public figures neither know nor care. About anything. And certainly not about facts. Only a short while ago a Libertarian presidential candidate with unusually decent momentum was drummed out of the campaign by not knowing "What's Aleppo?" No, a Republican senator can confuse “gazpacho” with “Gestapo” and no-one blinks an eye.

Along with the lost of trust in experts and the inability of American society to agree on a basic set of facts, we are plagued by a loss of depth in our public discussions. It’s not just that Americans don’t know or understand things, it’s that they’ve lost the sense that there are things to know or understand. College professors report that students don’t know how to read entire books any more. And we all have run into people who think they are experts on a complex subject (like climate change or MRNA vaccines) because they watched a YouTube video.

Levels of superficiality that once would have gotten someone drummed out of politics — [like a Defence Secretary's inability to answer a straight question, or the Attorney General's ignorance of the separation of powers, or the president's complete incomprehension of the Constitution he had sworn only weeks before to defend and protect] — are now everyday events.

So the MAGAts have captured the low ground. For now. They've become the swamp. But in the absence of any coherent programme, all they have is pissing off their opponents. Making liberals cry. Essentially, at the end of the rot, what we are left with is this: Empathy is out. Assholery is in. Basically, when the rubber of MAGAt policies hit the road, they're intended to hit someone. "The cruelty is the point. MAGA means never having to say you’re sorry. If people you don’t like are made poorer, weaker, or sicker — well, good! Nothing tastes sweeter than liberal tears."

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.

And that was all just Trump's first term! It's already got much worse.

It’s hard to look at any list of recent Trump administration actions without concluding that these people are trying to be assholes. It’s not an accident. It’s not a side effect of something else. The assholery is the point.

In the absence of anything else of positive substance, that's really all there is.

"Announcing the winner of the children’s book awards. ... Jacinda Ardern’s new memoir"

"Announcing the winner of the children’s book awards. Much of Jacinda Ardern’s new memoir reads like an experiment in Young Adult literature—the heartwarming story of a Mormon who lost her faith but held onto her values, and even now continues her lifelong mission of knocking on doors to spread the message that love and a left-wing vote conquers all....

"'A Different Kind of Power' is ... aimed at a particular kind of young, liberal, educated American idiot eager to drink the Kool-Aid that Ardern goes around dispensing in her various meaningless roles in the US as an ambassador of kindness. Be vulnerable, she advises throughout 'A Different Kind of Power.' Be sensitive. Above all, be kind. I remember the first time I heard her articulate this sort of thing when she tried it on at a rather dismal Labour Party event in the Grey Lynn RSA in about 2011. Labour were in opposition, lost and afraid; Ardern was a list MP, optimistic and possibly insane. 'I’ve been thinking about a politics based on love,' she said, and even the party faithful looked at her like she was mad. She was an artist ahead of her time. ...

"It’s an entertaining story. Weird little Mormon kid becomes world figure. ... Ardern never does things by halves, or even by wholes; a theme of 'A Different Kind of Power' is that she goes the extra distance, rabbits on, bangs the empathy drum through the streets of her book, all hear-ye hear-ye, a town crier literally crying her head off at the sorrows of the world but determined to face its evils with a sopping handkerchief and a set of wet slogans. It’s a very Jacinda Ardern book, as in true to her idea of herself."

~ Steve Braunas from his 'Jacinda, the first review'

UPDATE: A second review ...

"[T]he book wasn’t written with the New Zealand market in mind but for all those progressives in the Northern Hemisphere who exulted in Ardern’s considerable wins, such as her handling of the Christchurch Mosque shootings, the Whakaari/White Island disaster, her successful Covid-19 shut down of the country in 2020, and the political qualities of kindness she espouses.

"Ardern has always been the queen of identity politics. She turns her beliefs into full-blown convictions that you’re either onside with, or absolutely not. It’s revealing that issues outside of that, for example the broken promise to build 100,000 KiwiBuild properties, receive scant attention in her book. ... Ardern, a priestess of presenting just-enough information at the right time, seems to be sharing the PG-version of events. ...

"[P]olitics is a zero-sum game. You enjoy some success until, eventually, you lose. Covid-19 presented leaders around the world with a once-in-a-lifetime challenge–and in the first year it arrived on Aotearoa’s shores, Ardern shone. .... By and large the country’s population of just over five million rallied.... By the end of that year Labour had won more than 50 per cent of the vote in the October election, and the country was enjoying a summer of festivals and barbecues.

"Fast forward to just over a year later to February 2022 when Ardern’s zero-sum game reached its nadir. Because if 2020 was where she excelled, 2021 was the year where the mistakes piled up, layer upon layer upon layer.

"First the then-Government was too slow to order vaccines. Then it gave the Rapid Antigen Testing contract not to a provider with a track record but an outfit who didn’t even have one. By December 2021, Auckland had been in a different lockdown from the rest of the country for three months, and many, many Aucklanders were fed up. Not that Ardern mentions anything about this. ...

"But she does talk about her nadir – the Parliamentary Protests. ... She ... say[s] the occupation 'was about trust…. or more accurately mistrust.' That mistrust rose, biliously, from a fed-up nation. Less than a year later Ardern announced she was stepping down as Prime Minister and leaving politics. ...

It’s too early yet to assess Ardern’s political leadership skills except to note it was an administration of striking highs and lows. Her own book doesn’t attempt to make an assessment. It’s less a political memoir than another sprinkling of Jacinda fairy stardust to her adoring Greek Chorus of devotees. ... Ardern is their posterchild after all. ... 

"[E]xpect the virtue signalling to continue unabated."

~ Janet Wilson from her review 'Jacinda, by Janet Wilson'

"The question was posed, 'Why do people continue supporting Trump no matter what he does?'"

"The question was posed, 'Why do people continue supporting Trump no matter what he does?' A lady named Bev answered it this way:

“'You all don't get it. I live in Trump country, in the Ozarks in southern Missouri, one of the last places where the KKK still has a relatively strong established presence.

    "'They don't give a shit what he does. He's just something to rally around and hate liberals. That's it, period.
    "'He absolutely realises that and plays it up. They love it. He knows they love it.
    "'The fact that people act like it's anything other than that proves to them that liberals are idiots, all the more reason for high fives all around.
    "'If you keep getting caught up in 'why do they not realise this problem' and 'how can they still back Trump after this scandal,' then you do not understand what the underlying motivating factor of his support is. It's fuck liberals, that's pretty much it.
    "'Have you noticed he can do pretty much anything imaginable, and they'll explain some way that rationalises it that makes zero logical sense?
    "'Because they're not even keeping track of any coherent narrative, it's irrelevant. The only relevant thing is: fuck liberals.

    "'Trust me; I know firsthand what I'm talking about.
    "'That's why they just laugh at it all because you all don't even realise they truly don't give a fuck about whatever the conversation is about.
    "It's just a side-mission story that doesn't matter anyway.
    "'That's all just trivial details — the economy, health care, whatever.
    "'Fuck liberals. ...

    "'Look at the issue with not wearing the masks.
    "'I can tell you what that's about. It's about exposing fear. They're playing chicken with nature, and whoever flinches just moved down their internal pecking order, one step closer to being a liberal. ...

    "'They consider liberals to be weak people that are inferior, almost a different species, and the fact that liberals are so weak is why they have to unite in large numbers, which they find disgusting, but it's that disgust that is a true expression of their natural superiority.
    "'Go ahead and try to have a logical, rational conversation with them. Just keep in mind what I said here and be forewarned.”

~ post by Volodymyr Vlad Kunko

"Increased opposition to vaccines is a partial measure of how high a percentage this is."

"I’m going to have to write something in the near future about the big paradox of the pandemic years, which is that we produced a vaccine in record time that saved many millions of lives—the biggest demonstration in decades of the value of vaccines. Yet the result is that anti-vaccine sentiment has increased.
    "I think it’s a combination of three things. First, we are more culturally primed for anti-technology sentiment than we were when the polio vaccine was introduced in the 1950s. Second, thanks to vaccines, we are more culturally removed from the point at which infectious disease was a leading cause of death and a threat that continually loomed over human life, so we no longer appreciate what vaccines have saved us from. Third, a long period between major pandemics meant that nobody had to think about vaccines. They accepted them as a matter of course. But the pandemic suddenly required people to form an opinion about a new vaccine, and when people are required to think, a certain percentage of them will quite frankly be bad at it. Increased opposition to vaccines is a partial measure of how high a percentage this is.
    "At any rate, misplaced skepticism about vaccines has centred especially around the new technology of mRNA vaccines. But again, the paradox is that this targets a new technology that works. Specifically, mRNA vaccines offer tremendous speed and flexibility in creating new vaccines that shows enormous promise for treating things that could never be treated before.
    "In this case, it’s a vaccine for brain cancer...."

~ Robert Tracinski, from his post 'A Roundup of Good News: The Paradox of mRNA'

Predatory Bureaus and Sunset Commissions

WHEN GOVERNMENT SPENDING IS OUT OF control, it might seem odd to propose more spending.

When the place is already over-endowed with bureaucrats, it might seem just as puzzling for libertarians to propose another bureaucracy.

But some have. Here's two. And a related idea ...

The first is what economists John Baden and Rodney Fort called a "Predatory Bureau," whose mission is "to reduce the budgets of other agencies, with its ongoing income depending on its success."

We contend [they say] that elections fail to control government size and growth due to specific failures in the representative system. One major failure has been the concentrated focus of political activities within bureaucracies.

In other words, the bureaucratic system of governance tends to concentrate  real power in the hands of 'Sir Humphries,' whose motivation for their departments is not efficiency, but engorgement. This is not inevitable, however, say Baden and Fort. "Through the restructuring of incentives, i.e. by re-rigging the game, bureaucratic outcomes can be made to approach the elusive social optimal. This device has been named the Predatory Bureaucracy."

The literature on bureaucratic pathology is voluminous and growing rapidly. ... The bottom line of studies from each of these areas remains fairly consistent with the following: bureaucrats operate to increase their discretionary control over resources. In sum, they operate to expand their budget. ...
    [C]urrent institutional setting fails to provide those incentives requisite to successful efforts at budgetary reduction. Yet there are grounds for caucious optimism.... The fundamental issue is one of designing an institutional environment that will provide incentives to utilize information errosive to agency budgets.
    A predator is an animal (or occasionally a plant) that captures and extracts his sustenance from other     animals. Could this mode of existence be replicated and introduced in a bureaucratic environment to provide a negative feedback to the propensity for bureaucratic growth? Conceptually the answer is yes ...
[A]ssume that this agency is established with a one time appropriation that will carry it for two years only. ... Continual funding, and hence survival and growth, are dependent upon predation of other agencies budgetary requests ...

(A good principle there, that much bureaucracy and law should contain within it a mechanism for being self-extinguishing.)

The job of the Predatory Burueau is very simple: to claw in its own funding by pulling down funding from other more profligate budgets. If something particularly egregious and profligate is proposed by one bureau, it's the job of this one to oppose it by every means necessary. It's reward is its own continued existence.

How would it work? Let's say that, through its own efforts, our Bureau overturns a major policy proposal costing billions. 

First the Bureau receives one percent of the requested budgetary item. Second, the proposing agency ...  suffers a budget cut of one percent of the projects proposed operating costs from its operating budget. ... 

    The major advantage of this proposed system is that it counters the problem of legislation concentrating benefits while diffusing costs. Further, it builds into the appropriation process a spokesman for the public interest — more importantly, a spokesman who does good while doing well. In sum, by employing this system we rely upon self-interest to advance the public interest.

Sounds good, right? 

SO NOW, LET'S GO BACK to that thing about being self-extinguishing ....

That's incorporated into something called a Sunset Commission, something that was proposed in the US back in 2005 (and something that, of course, would face opposition by the Predatory Bureau).

Government programmes are the only sign of eternal life on Earth. Once they are created, they often attract large constituencies that are ready to complain loudly about their “essential” services should anyone try to reduce their funding or, worse, end them altogether…
    The Sunset Commission would review the effectiveness of each [government] programme. Programmes and agencies would automatically cease unless [the legislature] took specific action to continue them. [A] Results Commission would work to uncover duplication of services in government programmes, of which there are many.
    The need for these commissions should be evident when one considers that about one-third of the fiscal 2005 discretionary budget is unauthorised. Comprehensive reviews of spending might save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
    [Government] spending is out of control. It must be properly monitored by an entity that places the interests of those who earn the money over those who didn’t earn it and can spend it with little accountability.
    If taxpayers want to keep more of the money they earn, they must also work to become less dependent on a government check. We look to government too often and to ourselves not enough. When that dynamic reverses, our need of government will be reflected in less government. That will benefit the economy and the government more than additional revenue.

And like the Predatory Bureau, its income should be dependent on its success.

THAT PRINCIPLE OF BEING self-extinguishing should also be followed through with legislation. One of the very best things about the COVID legislation was the incorporation of a Sunset Clause.

Good, huh! (And I bet you a small sum you didn't know that was there, did you.) 

Every new law should have one. And why not?!  Imagine if that was at the head of all new legislation instead of clauses about the Treaty of Waitangi! Imagine if, instead of parliament spending all their time writing and ranting about new laws and regulation (when there are already so many goddamn pages cluttering up law libraries) they spent their time justifying to each other (and to us) the continuation of existing law!

So there's three viable proposals to savage the bureaucracy and its ever-growing bureaucracies, budgets and regulatory thickets — or that the very least to keep them pruned.

Go and tell the Minister for Regulation.

A question for libertarians in plague times

Here’s a simple hypothetical question I’ve yet to see libertarians address properly, and now's as good a time as any to ask it: What is the role of government in a time of actual plague?

Now, if you’re an anarchist, you can leave the chat now, since you don’t think there’s a role for government at all. That things will all just magically work out for the best when there’s a market for force. (Good luck to you on that one.)

No, I'm talking here to principled libertarians who aren’t primarily anti-government but pro-liberty. So I’m asking this of principled pro-liberty libertarians who support the idea that the proper role of government is the protection of citizens’ individual rights, that governments should be tied up constitutionally, and that such governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed. Let’s call it one such administration Government X. And I'm asking: What should our Government X do in a time of actual plague? 

Argue here if you like that a carrier of an infectious disease can in no way violate anyone else’s individual rights, in which case you’re either making a damn good argument for that position (and could apply it for example to HIV/AIDs as well), or you’re probably also leaving the chat at this point to join the anarchists.

But (to concretise the question for you), imagine Government X were in power when a plague slowly took over the country. To keep it somewhat concrete, imagine if you like that we’re in Elizabethan times, in London, when plagues would regularly ravage the place, and the Master of the Rolls would shut down the London theatres so the plague wouldn’t spread that way. Now you can say, as I would, that there shouldn't be a Master of Rolls. And you can argue, as historians have done, that his decision helped spread the plague even more widely because the theatre companies went on tour, taking plague rats with them. But do you say that our Elizabethan Government X wouldn’t at least have a conversation about theatre attendance, and make some decision about it? Perhaps, at least, to devise some objective rules by which if they're followed theatres and other places may stay open (remembering that the Elizabethans didn’t even know rats’ fleas were plague’s cause, and that those wanting to attend the theatres might themselves be eager to see evidence of some kind of protection; and that Elizabethan theatre insurance probably didn't cover damages from killing your audience.)

Let’s make the decision even more difficult for you. Imagine that it’s a serious plague; that it's often (but not always) fatal within a certain period of time; and that a patient infected with our plague generally doesn’t even know they have it for several days, during which time they are already terribly infectious to others. So, it’s a new plague about which even those whose advice you value know little yet (that’s ‘cos it’s new, and Elizabethan science advice wasn't always that great — they still recommended leeches, if you recall). But those two deadly observations about this new plague seem to be the emerging facts. 

This puts an even more complex complexion on things, doesn't it. If this were so, don’t you think our whole population would would be having a chat about it, not least our Elizabethan Government X? About how to deal with apparently uninfected folk infecting uninfected others, without infringing the rights of either? (And if you’re saying at this point that we should all be left "free" to be infected, then you’re probably about ready to leave the chat and buy a straitjacket.) 

It’s no good just saying about our Elizabethan Government X that “they have no role,” since clearly they do: if I have an infection that can prove fatal to you, and I insist on still visiting the theatres, there’s as much a role for government as there would be if I went to one wearing a suicide vest. (And you need to leave more than just the chat if you think there isn’t.) And Government X would have as much of a legitimate interest in this plague being spread from theatres as in a bareback brothel boasting a harem with full-blown HIV/AIDs. 

Now, you can insist (as I expect on past evidence many libertarians might) that “this isn’t really a plague” — except here we’ve already stipulated that it is. Or that our Elizabethan experts are wrong (which we’ve already agreed they might be). Or that the government is full of power-lusters who are just using the plague to advance their power — as many probably would, as they do in times of war as well, but this doesn’t devalue the very threat of this special plague we’ve imagined, and ignores that we’ve already agreed that we’re talking here of a principled Government X.

So, I ask you again: what is the proper role in such times of our principled Government X?

You tell me. 

Here's Monty Python:

"Getting post-Covid spending back to what Prime Minister Ardern had promised in the first Wellbeing Budget is hardly austerity."

"When Labour took office in 2017, Core Crown tax revenue was 27.5% of GDP. It is forecast to hit 29.1% of GDP in 2024 and 30% by 2028...

"Covid did not just increase government spending to deal with the pandemic. It also seems to have ratcheted in a very substantial increase in the overall size of government. In December, Treasury forecasted [the National-led] government's spending, as a fraction of overall economic activity, to be more than two-and-a half percentage points above Labour’s longer-term promise in 2019. ...  even though Ardern’s budget [then] was hardly austere. ...

    "Getting government spending back down to the longer-term proportions of GDP that Prime Minister Ardern’s wellbeing agenda had promised in 2019 hardly seems radical or austere. It would simply be a getting-back-to-normal after a crisis.
    "Getting core government spending down from Ardern’s promised 28.8% of GDP to the 27.7% of GDP that Bill English’s National-led government bequeathed to the incoming Labour government would not be radical either. It would be the normal partisan shifts in the relative size of government that come with changes in government.
    "Keeping these things straight matters....

"[D]ecades ago, economist Robert Higgs warned that post-crisis retrenchments may be wishful thinking.
    "Professor Higgs looked at American government spending over the Twentieth Century and found a worrying pattern. Every crisis brought a sharp increase in government spending to deal with the crisis. But, after the crisis, spending would only partially retrench before expanding even further during the next crisis.
    "And so, a one-way ratchet effect meant a continued increase in the size of government. A lot of ground can be covered over decades of two steps forward and one step back. ...
    "Getting post-Covid spending back to what Prime Minister Ardern had promised in the first Wellbeing Budget is hardly austerity. It should be the least that fiscal conservatives should expect."

~ Eric Crampton, from his op-ed 'Ratcheting up govt in a crisis goes just one way'

"The differences between how the two pandemics — HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 — were managed are probably quite instructive"

"Still, Dr Turville is acutely aware of the vitriol frequently directed at people who promote COVID safety.... This both puzzles and amuses him. ...
    "Then again, the differences between how the two pandemics — HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 — were managed ... are probably quite instructive, says Dr Turville. With HIV, experts and health ministers collectively built a strong public health strategy that they strove to protect from politics. 'When we look at COVID, it was political from the start and continues to be,' he says. We also now lack a 'mid to long-term plan to navigate us through' this next phase of COVID-19: 'Some argue that we are no longer in the emergency phase and need to gear down or simply stop,' he says. 'But should we stop, and if not, what do we gear down to as a longer-term plan?'..
    "'I think there's a lot of patting on the back at the moment — job well done. And that's nice, but I think it's somewhat job well done, there goes the rug,' he says. 'I think it's the apathy that's the concern. And I think it's coming top-down ... I just don't understand why, like we had with HIV, there can't be a mid-term strategy'."

~ from the article 'The COVID-safe strategies Australian scientists are using to protect themselves from the virus'

"New Zealand has administered 12 million doses, which would mean 12,000 vaccine-induced deaths. I see no room for that kind of mortality here."

"As everybody in this corner of the internet knows, a New Zealand Te Whatu Ora employee named Barry Young leaked four million vaccination records from New Zealand’s “pay per dose” vaccine programme to Steve Kirsch on 8 November. ...
    "A lively Twitter  debate has emerged about the significance of the data and their proper interpretation. 

* * * * 

"Further drama has visited the real world. Young, the leaker, was arrested on Sunday for “dishonestly accessing Te Whatu Ora databases.”...  This reaction cannot, in itself, be used to argue that there must be evidence of mass vaccine mortality in this dataset.... 

"I was fairly certain from the beginning that there would be nothing all that dramatic in these records, because the possibilities are bounded firmly by all-cause New Zealand mortality statistics. 

"Consider all-cause mortality in New Zealand for the past five years:

2018: 33,225 deaths
2019: 34,260 deaths
2020: 32,613 deaths
2021: 34,932 deaths
2022: 38,574 deaths

"2023 is not over yet, but 37,569 deaths have been counted there through the end of September. This is somewhat lower than the 38,052 deaths recorded by September 2022, so 2023 is on track to be a slightly better year.
    "New Zealand effectively shut itself off from the world in 2020 in an effort to stop Covid, and their measures inevitably stopped a lot of other viruses too. At great cost, they seem to have saved about 2,000 lives in the short term, accounting for the anomalously low death numbers in 2020. 

    "The elevated death numbers for 2022 – the year the pandemic reached New Zealand – are officially the fault of Covid, but some of them must simply represent a compensatory rise from the low point of 2020, because viruses tend to kill the very old and the very sick, and these people have to die sometime. 

    "In 2022 and 2023, I can see room for an absolute maximum of 8,000 excess deaths. Probably 2,000 of these are sick and frail people who would’ve died in 2020 had it been a normal year, and so we’re left with at most 6,000 deaths to divide between the arrival of Covid, the return of other viruses and the vaccines. This is remarkably close to the official Covid New Zealand death count, which is currently at 5,143.
    "It’s simple, then: How much room you think there is for direct vaccine mortality will depend on how much you dispute these official Covid death numbers. I propose that any more than 2,000 vaccine deaths is just not very plausible. Certainly, there is no way to make Kirsch’s estimated vaccine mortality rate of one death per 1,000 vaccinations work with these numbers. New Zealand has administered 12 million doses, which would mean 12,000 vaccine-induced deaths. I see no room for that kind of mortality here...."

~ Eugyppius, from his post 'The New Zealand Vaccination Records Leak: A New Analysis by William Briggs and Some Lesser Thoughts of My Own' 

Paranoid politics is not going away.

 

It's happened here and, as commentator Robert Tracinski describes below, it's happening over there. 

What do I mean? I mean the morphing of anti-Covid culture warriors into oddly conservative anti-everything zealots.

Tracinski outlines the trajectory.

Moms for Liberty, an activist organisation founded and led by conservative women, has emerged in the last two years to oppose, in the name of “parental rights,” what it sees as leftist indoctrination in public schools.
    There are worthwhile arguments to be had about contemporary gender ideology and about how to respond to the history and legacy of race in America— ... [and] there will be no shortage of controversial examples to be debated.
    But a thoughtful debate is not what Moms for Liberty has offered as its defining contribution. Instead, it has become the driving force behind a sweeping wave of book bans and politicised restrictions on teaching.
    It is a curious outcome for a group with such a libertarian-sounding name. How did Moms for Liberty come to be one of the nation’s chief censors? ...

Turns out it's in much the same way that NZ's 'Voices for Freedom' (anti-'globalist,' anti-mask, anti-vaccine, anti-trans, anti-science ... ) has always more about freedom from reality than any other kind, and more about keeping their anti-Covid ball rolling: "The origin of Moms for Liberty," explains Tracinski, "was not in the culture wars over race and gender but the Covid culture war." There you go, you see:

It began in Florida as a rebellion against rules requiring masks for public school students. ... It was the pandemic that provided Moms for Liberty with the opportunity to mobilise and radicalise conservative parents. Descovich explained, “If you miss this opportunity, when [parents] are really engaged … it’s going to be hard to engage them in the future.” When the debate shifted from masks to vaccines, Moms for Liberty appealed to anti-vaccine sentiment on the right. ...
    That’s the supposed meaning of “for liberty” in Moms for Liberty: the freedom to ignore mask and vaccine mandates. The group emerged from a combination of dogmatic rejection of any anti-pandemic measures and legitimate frustration with school closures, which in some areas dragged on for a year ...
    The anti-mask cause summoned a great deal of violent fury, but it was perhaps too small and temporary for a national movement that had ambitions to persist beyond the pandemic. Yet this issue established the kind of energy that has characterised Moms for Liberty ever since: an upwelling of anger, a distrust of experts, a volcanic hatred of “the establishment,” and a deep suspicion that the powers that be are out to destroy our way of life.

Sound familiar?

Paranoid politics is not going away.

"The COVID vaccines were a triumph of globalisation." [update 2]

"This week Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries that led to the development of mRNA vaccines used against COVID-19. Moderna and Pfizer‐​BioNTech produced those vaccines, saving millions of lives and helping to reopen the world. According to the Nobel Assembly, the awardees “contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.”
    "[Writing] in December of 2020 just as the vaccines were about to come online[, t]he COVID vaccines, Scott Lincicome rightly pointed out, were a triumph of globalisation.
    "The much‐​deserved Nobel Prize to Karikó and Weissman highlights that truth.
    "It was the flow of people, ideas, capital, goods and services that made it possible to discover and produce a vaccine in record time…
    "First, [this is a story] about immigrants. Karikó is Hungarian and went to work in Philadelphia ... Moderna’s co‐​founder and chairman of the board, meanwhile, is of Armenian descent, born in Lebanon and immigrated first to Canada and then to the United States. The company’s other executives, like those at Pfizer, hail from numerous countries.
    "Global capital markets also played a role by providing the massive funding needed ... The production and distribution of the vaccine required complex international collaboration in terms of logistics, shipping, storage, and supply chains ...
    "None of the above could have been accomplished by a preconceived government plan. The production and distribution of the vaccines really were a triumph of globalisation."

~ Ian Vásquez from his post 'A Nobel Prize for Globalisation'

UPDATE 1: Ian's original post flushed out more opponents of globalisation, and gives greater definition to what it is opponents means when they use the term. Here, for example, is a US Republican Congressman showing his ignorance:

Other responses are similarly revealing, i.e., confused, about what this term "globalisation" actually stands for in their heads:

It looks increasingly that for most people it's simply a floating label, defined by non-essentials. So instead of arguing about essentials, people end up arguing instead about what the label means to them.

Which is hardly the ideal basis either for communication, or clear thought.

UPDATE 2: To just add to the confusion, after Saturday's election ...

"In short New Zealand had better prepare for a significant socio-economic brain drain."

"So, what have I found this year? 

    "The first is that only a very tiny proportion [of uni students], from first year to third year, see any sort of future for themselves in New Zealand over the next five to ten years. It is not just, as some readers may wish to state, that these students wish to leave Christchurch. The fact is, they overwhelmingly want to leave New Zealand, citing housing, the cost of living and higher wages and more opportunities overseas as the central drivers. 

    "I have never encountered such a widespread and deep sense of despair and despondency across tertiary-educated young people as I have in the first six months of this year. The Covid years came close but there was still a residual hope that things could – or would – get better. This has collapsed. 

    "In short New Zealand had better prepare for a significant socio-economic brain drain."

~ sociology lecturer Mike Grimshaw, from his post 'No hope and no choice? Snap polls on New Zealand…'

"The anti-vaccine advocates have been proven wrong in every major claim they have made during the pandemic."

"The anti-vaccine advocates have been proven wrong in every major claim they have made during the pandemic. They claimed that the covid vaccines would lead to heart attacks, infertility, birth defects, and mass death. Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. But if you spend much time talking to these people online, which I don’t recommend, you will find that they are not merely undeterred but regard themselves as vindicated, and they have moved on to demanding 'accountability' from the 'establishment.'
    "And the 'free thinkers' of the [religious right and alt-right] are increasingly captive to this crackpot caucus... 'open-minded, [only] in the sense of being filled with cobwebs and tumbleweeds and offering no resistance to whatever stray breeze blows through ..."

~ Robert Tracinski, from his post 'The Jerry Springer Debating Society'