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Title18335
Kim du Toit
March 28, 2008
6:00 AM EDT
As a White boy growing up in apartheid South Africa, one of the basic social tenets I learned was that Blacks were an inferior race.
It was an easy attitude to adopt, in those days and in that society: there were no Black politicians as such, because Blacks weren’t allowed to vote; there were no Black industry captains, because there were laws which prohibited Blacks from advancing up corporate ladders beyond a certain point; and we certainly didn’t have any Black neighbors in our town, not only because few if any Blacks could have afforded the house prices, but because the Group Areas Act forbade Blacks to live in “White” areas. The only Blacks we ever came into contact with were household servants, who were there to do our bidding.
And the State-controlled media (radio and Press; there was no TV) were careful to show Blacks in their worst possible light: when there were faction fights in the “Black townships” like Soweto, or tribal wars in the “homelands”, those were reported with great detail. Likewise, civil wars in sub-Saharan Africa and stories of Black misgovernment and corruption were given the same treatment, and the 1960s race riots in the United States and Britain were seized upon with glee—all grist for the apartheid mill, and all to show just one simple fact: Blacks were inferior, uncivilized, and incapable of understanding government or management of any kind.
It took two factors, and many years, to undo all that propaganda.
Education was the first factor.
The first seeds of doubt were planted when I was sent to a private boarding school, St. John’s College, which instilled in me and the other scholars not only a classical liberal education, but the seeds of modern-day liberal thought. Most important, however, was the inculcation of intellectual curiosity and skepticism. We were encouraged to approach everything with a spirit of inquiry—“Why?” and “Why not?” coupled with “Are you sure about that?” became our guiding principles.
In addition, we were exposed to educated Black men—for many of us, for the first time ever—in the form of Black clergymen from Britain, invited as “guest” speakers to deliver sermons and homilies from the pulpit in our chapel. For the first time, we heard Black men speak perfect English with British accents, and not the broken English and African accents of our own Blacks, the latter being so easy to mock and denigrate. And in our own Anglican Church, the Diocese of Johannesburg elected a Black man—a local Black man—as the Dean (later the Bishop) of the diocese, and Desmond Tutu became a fixture at St. John’s College, speaking not only from the pulpit, but from the speaker’s lectern at our social and sporting events.
The unspoken message was clear: if they have the opportunity, Blacks are just as capable of achievement as Whites.
As I started to read more widely, I came into contact with foreign magazines like Time, Newsweek and Financial Times, and started to read about Black achievement: in politics, in business, and in academia.
For the first time, I read about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who, it came as a surprise, was not a Communist sympathizer and agitator as he’d been painted by Afrikaner propaganda, but was instead a civil rights leader and a champion for not only Blacks, but for all non-white men.
It is impossible to describe the effect on a budding young opponent of apartheid of the words: “To be judged by the content of his character, and not by the color of his skin.”
After education came the second factor which changed me forever, and turned me into an implacable opponent of apartheid: television.
When television was finally introduced in South Africa in the early 1970s, it was controlled by the State, just like all the other media. But even under those circumstances, it was impossible to control all the content, and when people began smuggling in news shows from Britain and the United States (the video equivalent of the Soviet samizdat photocopies), the images became real, and not just abstractions in print.
In the heady days of the 1970s, where student protests were erupting all over the Western world, it was natural that the same started to occur in South Africa, except that we had no Vietnam War to protest. (our own version, the border wars against terrorist infiltration in Southwest Africa/Namibia, were a fact of everyday life, but the casualties were trivial by comparison to Vietnam, and it never became a burning social issue.)
What we could protest against, and did, was apartheid. We protested as much as we could—along with all the other apartheid-era laws, there was a law forbidding public protests except those allowed by the State—but we were young, and indestructible, and anti-authoritarian, and so we protested, peacefully.
And, for my impudence, I was arrested, briefly imprisoned and subsequently acquitted on a technicality, along with many other students. (I should point out that in the mass arrests of 1972, of the forty or so male students in our group of arrestees, almost half were St. John’s College alumni, so clearly the lessons had been well learned. Of course, not all had learned the same lessons: one of the men later turned out to have been an officer in the Security Police.)
It didn’t matter. For the next decade, I cheerfully ignored the apartheid laws as much as I could get away with: I employed people without the “proper papers”; promoted clerks to junior executives, and junior executives to managers; drove cheerfully through “Black-only” areas if the route was more direct than the circuitous one dictated by the law, and so on.
Never having been one to accept the diktat of authority and social mores in the first place, I found that apartheid was just one of the “sacred cows” to ignore, make fun of, or actively try to destroy.
I’ve never changed.
Nevertheless, in the early 1980s I decided to emigrate, because I could see that apartheid was doomed, and I thought that the post-apartheid era in South Africa was not one where I would want to raise a family—not because of the reality of a Black government, but because I thought that there was just too much hatred, and too many generations of oppression for the country to remain a safe place for someone with a White skin—even a White liberal like myself.
So I emigrated to the united States in the mid 1980s, and true to my irreverent nature, have ever since referred to my emigration as “The Great Wetback Episode of 1986”. (My justification: “If you think your back gets wet swimming across the Rio Grande River, try the Atlantic Ocean.")
So here I was, in the Land of the Free and among We The People; the land of the Constitution, Martin Luther King Jr., and the most egalitarian society on Earth, where a man could, finally, be judged by the content of his character, and not by the color of his skin.
As I so blithely told a South African friend, himself looking to emigrate here: “The central promise of the Declaration of Independence has been achieved: everyone can vote, everyone can say what they like, and with application, anyone can achieve whatever they want.”
Well, not quite.
It turned out that there was this thing called “the legacy of slavery”, and something else called “institutionalized racism”, which were instrumental in preventing Blacks from furthering their lot on life. The first made no sense, because slavery had ended in 1865; and the second made no sense, because there was a plethora of laws and regulations designed to prevent such nonsense from occurring. (I paid no attention to laws and regulations which tried to change people’s attitudes—from bitter experience in South Africa, I knew the hopelessness of trying to convert an entrenched bigot.)
But I saw that not only did Whites buy into this nonsense, but Blacks did, too—only, in the case of the so-called Black “leadership”, the slavery and racism rationale was being cynically used to further their own power and careers rather than that of their race. Indeed, I saw examples (most notably in Chicago, where I was living at the time) where funding intended to improve Black neighborhoods was being blocked by the very Black leaders who represented that community (Gus Savage, call your office—to quote but one memorable example). Worse still, the funding was not being blocked so that the community should work to improve its own lot and circumstance (which would have made sense). The inescapable conclusion was that having an “underprivileged” and “deprived” electorate was in those politicians’ personal interest, so that their election campaign slogans of “Us Against The Man” could be maintained.
Worse still, I saw Black preachers (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and, lately, Jeremiah Wright) make speeches from the pulpit that were so palpably racist, so overtly hateful, and so shamelessly bigoted that any antonymic statements made by White preachers would have resulted in a public uproar and wholesale condemnation.
Let me take it a step further: not even Afrikaans preachers in the Dutch Reformed Church of my youth would have dared say the equivalent things about other races from their pulpits.
Instead, in our racially-sensitive America: nothing but a few resigned shrugs.
To someone for whom an entire way of thinking had been changed by Black preachers—the Oxford-educated guest speakers of my youth, Desmond Tutu, and Martin Luther King Jr.—this perversion of the pulpit, and the indifferent reaction, was shattering.
I had been trained as a statistician, and one of the expressions I’d learned was that when faced with a situation or problem of great complexity, the whole solution began with a small solution of a manageable problem. We called it, “getting a fingernail under the edge”.
Then a strange thing began to happen: I saw Blacks reaching positions of power, and saw corruption, mismanagement and arrogance appear—just as it had in Africa. And this was not just a few isolated examples, but everywhere. Detroit, Philadelphia, New York: it didn’t matter where, but find a place governed by Blacks, and you would find sickening corruption, cronyism, self-enrichment and misgovernment—just like in Africa.
At the end of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the animals look into the farmhouse and find the pigs playing poker with the humans, and find that there is no difference between the two groups.
So is it with Blacks, and Whites. It is truly a case where the yardstick for the public trust is not the color of their skin, but the content of their character.
Sadly, however, too many Blacks are cynically using the color of their skin to hide the content of their character, crying the racist wolf whenever anyone dares to scold them. (It is, of course, a tactic forever denied corrupt White politicians of the Spitzer-McGreevey sort, but that’s a side issue.)
More to the point is that when Blacks do get to positions of power and governance, their administrations, over time, begin to resemble the kleptocracies of Africa more than the law-governed societies of the West, and it takes a massive amount of work to unseat them, because they are often abetted by their own constituents, purely because of their race.
Which leads me to another interesting point about African governments: when yet another Black leader comes to power, promising open and fair elections, and soon becomes “Dictator For Life”, it’s the norm rather than the exception.
Hundreds of generations of life in Africa have been governed by maxims such as “survival of the strongest” and “to the winner go the spoils”. More than that, it is not only expected behavior of African leaders, it is also expected by the people whom they rule—and only when matters become intolerable do the oppressed people overthrow the dictator, and replace him with the new great hope for the future (who then becomes the next oppressive leader: Africa wins again).
Let me digress for a moment, to explain the “Africa Wins Again” cynicism.
I once wrote an essay called Let Africa Sink, which argued that sending aid money to Africa was a pointless exercise, and that the money served simply to enrich the kleptocrats—and there was ample proof to support the thesis. Of course, because I was talking about Africa, the essay was branded “racist”, when in fact it was nothing of the sort. (Had I written, “Don’t send aid because they’re Blacks”—well, that would have been racist, not to mention foolish.)
The essay was really an indictment of the entire concept of welfare—and particularly so when abundant evidence proved its worthlessness and waste.
The same is true whenever anyone talks about ending welfare in America, and making people responsible for their own welfare. Because Blacks are proportionately the largest beneficiaries of the welfare system, such initiatives are likewise branded racist.
In America, incidentally, we have proof that winding down the welfare entitlement works. When Bill Clinton (almost at gunpoint) was forced to sign welfare-limiting change into law, the lot of Blacks (and all other races on welfare) improved almost immediately, just as the law’s proponents had argued.
Nevertheless, to return to the main point, what we see when American cities and towns are governed by Blacks, and are mostly populated by Blacks, is a scenario closer to Africa than to America.
Detroit is a striking example.
The largest city in Michigan has been governed by Blacks for decades. “White flight” has only strengthened the Black voting power in the city, and it would take a brave (or foolish) prophet to think that any White politician has a chance of being elected Mayor of Detroit anytime soon.
One would think, therefore, that if Blacks are indeed equally capable of self-government, that Detroit would be no different from any other American city.
Instead, it has become clear that over time, Detroit has come to resemble Lagos, Nigeria more than it resembles, say, Pittsburgh or Indianapolis.
Whole areas of the city are “no-go” areas, under the control of warlords gang leaders, and at certain times of the year (like Halloween), the city is ungovernable, and is prone to looting and wholesale burning of buildings. This description could apply to both Lagos and Detroit equally, with only a few minor changes in terminology.
It could also apply, to almost the same degree, to Washington D.C.—another city with longtime Black government and a large Black voting bloc. And we’ve all seen the truth about New Orleans, since Hurricane Katrina.
What was told to me in my youth—that Blacks are incapable of governing themselves in the Western tradition—and that I dismissed as “racist” because of its source, is now becoming increasingly less unreasonable a position as more and more evidence of Black mis-governance presents itself, in more and more areas of America.
Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot that anyone can do about it. The “logical” conclusion of the thesis, even if 100% true, is that Blacks should not be “allowed” to govern—a proposition so vile as to be almost unspeakable, even if it were possible to implement such an odious initiative.
Many people reading this piece, however, would be quick to ascribe that conclusion to me, when in fact I have written nothing of the sort—and it’s the sole reason I mentioned it at all.
The lesson to be drawn, I think, is less dramatic.
If the Detroits and New Orleanses of America do indeed resemble an African hellhole, I think it would be most prudent not to rescue them—in the same spirit in which the United States would be foolish to sink huge sums of money to “rescue”, for example, Lagos.
Certainly, the cries for federal aid money to “rebuild” the shattered inner cities should be resisted, until the cities themselves can prove to us all that they are capable of using the money wisely, honestly and as a foundation for their own efforts, rather than as the total underwriting thereof.
Of course, the race hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would see such an attitude as “evidence of racism”, when in fact it’s nothing of the kind.
It’s not being racist; it’s being realistic. Let me end this piece by giving an example of what I’m talking about.
In the early 17th century, the citizens of Amsterdam tired of being constantly flooded out, and built not only the canals, but the dikes and dams which made the city the center of the European commercial universe for centuries, and a port which flourishes to this day. They did it, moreover, without massive amounts of aid funds from the Dutch government, and with a population of fewer than 100,000 people.
I would like to see a similar plan for the reclamation of New Orleans, using only labor and resources drawn from the New Orleans population, and supported solely by the government of Louisiana. Federal funding should never exceed 15% of the total cost of the project. (The Port of New Orleans is of strategic importance to the country as a whole, and is therefore deserving of some federal funding—but only a small proportion of the total.)
If New Orleans should prove incapable of implementing such a plan, its government and population are clearly not worth support, and New Orleans should be dismissed as a basket case, and left to its own devices, to survive or fall into ruin.
I would like to think that the (largely-Black) citizens of New Orleans and its (Black-run) government could pull off such a feat; after all, the Dutch were able to pull off a similar one, against a far more implacable and constant enemy in the North Sea than for New Orleans, threatened only by the occasional hurricane from the Gulf or flood of the Mississippi River.
This is not some acid test for Blacks, nor should it be seen as such.
But I have come full circle. I have come from believing that Blacks could indeed govern themselves (despite all that propaganda), through being disillusioned by all the evidence since (Lagos, Detroit), to where I am now.
I believe that Blacks should be treated equally to Whites. I believe that a man should be judged by the content of his character, and not by the color of his skin.
I believe that for every race hustler like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, there are many more colorblind Blacks like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams.
But it cuts both ways.
If I am to believe that Blacks and their Black-majority government can rebuild a city by themselves, then I should likewise be able to castigate them for their failure without fear of being branded a racist.
I may have come full circle, but on this go-round, a healthy dose of realism has been added.
Title18335
Kim du Toit
March 28, 2008
6:00 AM EDT
I happened upon some Congressional hearings yesterday, and watched open-mouthed as this travesty occurred: Don’t blame us, oil industry chiefs told a skeptical Congress. Top executives of the country’s five biggest oil companies said Tuesday they know record fuel prices are hurting people, but they argued it’s not their fault and their huge profits are in line with other industries.
Appearing before a House committee, the executives were pressed to explain why they should continue to get billions of dollars in tax breaks when they made $123 billion last year and motorists are paying record gasoline prices at the pump.
I have often spoken about Big Oil and their role in the current oil price spiral—the Cliff Notes version being that unless the oil companies make decent profits in times of high demand, they have little left with which to invest in further exploration and/or refining capacity during leaner times. Moreover, of course, demand for oil is being driven by the rapidly-developing markets in China, India and other Asian countries.
All that is simple Business 101, and perhaps Congress should be forgiven for not understanding business—they are, of course, mostly socialist busybodies and nannies—but what got my goat was the sheer effrontery of Congress in grilling th oil executives in the first place.
One of the reasons that oil is more expensive is that the U.S. dollar has lost a large amount of its value against other countries over the past few years, and therefore it takes more dollars to buy the same amount of oil as hitherto.
There are many reasons for this fall of the dollar, and I don’t want to go into too much detail here. Suffice it to say, however, that a currency loses value for two major reasons: inflation (when government prints more money than it can cover) or loss of confidence in the country’s economy by domestic and foreign investors, who stop buying dollars (T-bills and other financial instruments) as a mark of that loss of confidence.
That loss of confidence, by the way, can be caused by the government of said country pursuing economic policies which are irresponsible or potentially ruinous.
That’s the ivory tower: here’s the mud ‘n blood.
Congress has been spending money like a drunken sailor during Fleet Week, and worse, creating future obligations (in the form of entitlements like expanded Medicare coverage) which savvy foreign investors look at, and think, ”Hmmm. I don’t think they’ll be able to meet those commitments.” So they buy fewer and fewer dollars, and the dollar becomes worth less and less.
So now, those same animals who have caused our dollar to weaken are treating oil companies like a bunch of criminals, threatening to “cap” profits and “rein in” the companies’ “greed”.
I expect the usual nonsense from economic morons and populists [some overlap] like Bill O’Reilly to follow—and it shouldn’t, because the crisis which faces us is almost completely of Congress’s making.
Worse still, their hypocrisy extends still further: because if they really wanted to cut the price of gasoline at the pumps and help consumers, they’d reduce the federal tax on gasoline—but to expect them to do that would be naïve in the extreme.
That would be advocating for government that which they would seek to impose on business, and we can’t have any of that.
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Afterthought: From the TaxProf comes this, so we can be absolutely sure of who, exactly, has profited most from the oil business: Since 1977, governments collected more than $1.34 trillion, after adjusting for inflation, in gasoline tax revenues—more than twice the amount of domestic profits earned by major U.S. oil companies during the same period.
And lest we forget, Congress just spends, it never invests or pays dividends.
Title18335
Kim du Toit
March 28, 2008
6:00 AM EDT
Let’s look at the Fourth Amendment, to refresh our memories: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
In light of the above, I wonder what the Founding Fathers would have thought about this situation: Intelligence centers run by states across the country have access to personal information about millions of Americans, including unlisted cell phone numbers, insurance claims, driver’s license photographs and credit reports, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post.
One center also has access to top-secret data systems at the CIA, the document shows, though it’s not clear what information those systems contain.
Dozens of the organizations known as fusion centers were created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to identify potential threats and improve the way information is shared. The centers use law enforcement analysts and sophisticated computer systems to compile, or fuse, disparate tips and clues and pass along the refined information to other agencies. They are expected to play important roles in national information-sharing networks that link local, state and federal authorities and enable them to automatically sift their storehouses of records for patterns and clues.
Though officials have publicly discussed the fusion centers’ importance to national security, they have generally declined to elaborate on the centers’ activities. But a document that lists resources used by the fusion centers shows how a dozen of the organizations in the northeastern United States rely far more on access to commercial and government databases than had previously been disclosed.
Let me start by making some general principles understood. - “Papers", as defined in the Fourth Amendment, are not just actual paper records kept in one’s house; they are the documents, whether paper or electronic, which are the records of our transactions with business and government, and our correspondence with other people.
- “Unreasonable searches” has come to exclude the casual scanning of databases for “items of interest”, and for which no warrant (under existing law) is necessary.
Ask yourself these questions: - Would the citizens of post-Revolutionary America have allowed banks and other financial institutions to share on a continuous basis the contents of a person’s file of affairs with each other, without the express permission of the person involved?
- Would Congress have had the gall to pass a law in, say, 1800 which required that banks and other financial institutions share the contents of a person’s file of affairs with government agents, or allow government agents to peruse those files at will, and without a warrant?
The answers to both the above, of course, are “no” and “of course not”—and yet that is precisely the situation in which we live today.
For most of my working life, I have been a data professional: compiling, designing and analyzing reports; designing data systems which enable close scrutiny of data; and creating data collection methods, physical and electronic, which enable all the above. As such, I understand the depth and complexity of this activity as well as anyone alive—and I understand the dangers and pitfalls contained therein better than most.
For the most part, too, I have been dismissive of many of the fears communicated to me about the collection of individuals’ data—in no small part because I worked in the supermarket business, where an individual’s purchases are generally of absolutely no concern to anyone save a few marketing professionals—but even so, I have always been super-protective of the privacy of individuals’ data. Even when threatened with subpoenas to “prove” that a mother spent $x on groceries (in divorce proceedings, to establish a “reasonable” amount of support or alimony), I’ve refused to comply except with the express permission of the consumer concerned. Even if that person gave the permission, I would also make sure that I protected any data which might prove embarrassing or harmful, such as the purchase of condoms by a wife, even though the husband may have had a vasectomy.
See how ugly this kind of thing can get?
Now apply this kind of sensitivity to, for example, credit information or credit card purchases, and you’ll see where this is headed.
Here’s the problem. Before the digitization of information, scanning of data files was arduous, time-consuming and prone to error. Indeed, the very enormity of the task was its own safeguard against casual or random searches. Now, of course, we have digital data, electronic storage and search engines which can comb huge databases for anything, with extreme accuracy and at lightning speed.
Worse yet, it’s impossible to prevent anyone with access to query these databases and it’s not feasible to require a separate search warrant for each query, for example, so “blanket” permission is generally granted, if such permission is even required by law.
In one of my earlier posts entitled No Data, No Oppression, I noted approvingly the attitude of John Cowperthwaite, then-governor of Hong Kong: Cowperthwaite explained that he resisted requests to provide any [data facts], lest they be used as ammunition by those who wanted more government intervention.
...and my subsequent comment was: “In other words, the more data you give the government, the greater the likelihood that the data will, at some point, be used by the government, and not necessarily to your advantage.”
The modern problem is that we’re not giving the government any data. Commercial institutions are collecting information about our private lives, and through these monstrous “fusion centers”, they’re sharing it with government as a de facto function—no warrants, no permissions, no restrictions of any kind.
Worse still, we all know that during wartime and in extremis, the government can operate in an extra-Constitutional manner—and reasonable people do not argue the point, because as the man said, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. But implicit in that permission is that the measures are temporary, and must be repealed when the crisis has passed.
I see no signs that this sharing and mining of data is anything but a permanent situation. This is particularly true when we realize that the “wars” under which these powers are being amassed are, by admission of government, open-ended: the War on Drugs will never end, and the War on Terror unlikely to do so.
As someone who has pioneered the use of search algorithms, and who still owns a couple of trademarks and patented procedures in the field, I have to tell you, I feel somewhat like a biochemist who discovered a miracle pesticide which would end crop blight, and then discovered that the pesticide was being used by the State to gas and exterminate people.
I am by nature an optimistic person, and I try always to look for the best outcomes—but I have to tell you, I do not feel that way in this situation. Worse still, I don’t have an answer to the problem, either. The information genie is out of the bottle, our papers and effects are open to anyone who shows an interest, and warrants are no longer required for the State to poke into the deepest and most intimate details of our lives.
I don’t know how we can get this back. In the name of “anti-terrorist activity”, we have lost our privacy, not just to government (which is bad enough) but to anybody.
There is no line in the sand that we can draw and say, ”Thus far and no further” because the State, with the oh-so willing compliance of private industry, has created for itself a giant blower which can just blow away not only the line, but the sand itself.
I have no answers, only hopelessness and despair.
Title18335
Kim du Toit
March 28, 2008
6:00 AM EDT
Quoth Senator Ding Dong: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama will push on Friday for passage of a bill to put the huge pay packages of some U.S. corporate executives under greater scrutiny.
The Illinois senator has introduced “say-on-pay” legislation that would give investors more of a voice in setting executive compensation packages.
“We’ve seen what happens when CEOs are paid for doing a job no matter how bad a job they’re doing. We can’t afford to postpone reform any longer,” Obama said in prepared remarks for delivery later on Friday.
“That’s why Washington needs to act immediately to pass this legislation.”
I know that this is driven by class envy—that “the bosses” need to be “reined in”—and we should all therefore castigate this moron wannabe-president for his political philosophy.
But that’s not the point. This is.
Lest we forget, the CEO “class” of 2001 - 2007 oversaw the continuation of one of the greatest economic booms in U.S. history, a boom which continued despite the dragging costs of a massive war effort and the debilitating effect of the greatest onslaught on our home soil since Pearl Harbor.
Rather than trying to “rein in” CEO pay, therefore, we should be striving to keep the wheels turning in the same direction.
And yes, I know, there are all those stories of CEOs who were in essence rewarded for failure—getting massive bonuses and salaries despite their companies’ poor financial performance—but that number was completely overshadowed by the number of companies which thrived and prospered, and delivered massive dividends to the shareholders.
I am completely against Senator Ding Dong’s idea that “shareholders” should have a say in executive compensation. If I may be blunt, for a change: shareholders don’t know diddly about compensation, or the market in which the company has to compete, or how much money it takes to attract someone with the skills and experience to manage a corporation. Worse than that, shareholders are a skittish bunch, and because they’re driven by the quarterly cycle, are less likely to adopt a proper long-term strategy, and more likely to pull the plug (most often prematurely) at the first sign of trouble, or if gains are not immediately apparent.
I hate to beat this drum time and time again, but I need to say it once more: there are probably fewer than 300 top-flight CEOs available in the market to manage the Fortune 500 (note the delta)—and the compensation packages of CEOs takes that into account.
Even more telling is that a huge amount of the CEO talent is dispersed outside the Fortune 500, in startup companies and emerging markets—where by definition good results are even more elusive than in the “maintenance” environment of the major corporations, and talent is even more in demand.
Of course, to doctrinaire socialists like Ding Dong and moronic populists like, oh, Bill O’Reilly, there is always anecdotal fodder to trumpet about “results-driven” compensation—as though the market would not already have employed such a tool if it had been a proven success.
The plain fact is that CEOs are disproportionately rewarded because a.) it’s a buyer’s market because of the scarcity of talent and b.) because there’s no guarantee of success in capitalism, so corporations’ boards try to stack the deck in their own favor by buying the best talent available.
Unknown is the fact that if a company does poorly under a particular CEO’s management is how much worse it might have done under a lesser individual, one not as well-compensated as the original choice.
It’s the market, folks, and the more we leave it to its own devices, and the more we are able to keep it out of the grasp of know-nothing politicians and (even worse) proponents of failed economic systems (those would be socialism and communism), the better off we’ll all be, in the long run.
Title18335
Kim du Toit
March 28, 2008
6:00 AM EDT
We all know that Britain has a terrible problem with their young people: massive alcoholism, rocketing teen pregnancies, feral violence and terrifying criminal activity. The answer, one would think, is for these kids to get jobs—the way that young and idle hands have been constrained from causing mischief for centuries.
Well, yes: until government sticks its hairy paw into the business to address with a jackhammer a largely-minuscule nail protruding from the platform of society. Let Tim Worstall point out the obvious stupidity: Thousands of shops, restaurants and cafés will be forced to register their staff with a new child protection agency and have their criminal records checked if they employ children for weekend or summer holiday work.
Any staff responsible for supervising children under 16 will have to be vetted. The measure is in the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act, which was passed in 2006. It was originally intended to screen teachers, nursery staff and youth workers more effectively by requiring them to register with a new quango, the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA), but ministers have decided to extend its scope to businesses.
And who pays for this Orwellian-sounding agency? Why, the businesses, of course. The ISA will conduct enhanced checks through the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) and give individuals – at a cost of £64 each – a “seal of approval” for working with children. The measure also covers work experience.
This is what happens, incidentally, when your guiding mantra in government is “It’s for The Children”, a mantra which superficially sounds so reasonable—who can be against protecting children?—but which au fond enables government to stick its fat nose into places where it has no business doing so.
And at a profit (to government) in the form of a whole new “income” stream: The group has also discovered that the Government’s estimated cost for setting up and running the ISA for the first five years has grown from £91.6 million to £246 million as its scope has increased.
Ugh.
But Kim, you say, that’s a cost, not a profit!
Tim applies his trusty calculator: £64 times 11 million people is, ermm, £720 million or so a year.
Wow. Half a billion pounds—a billion dollars—a year in “extra” revenue. Enough to make even Hillary Clinton sated.
Except, of course, for the glaringly-obvious fact (to all but government) that faced with this extra cost, businesses will just refuse to hire young adults anymore—I know that’s what I’d do—and so the ranks of the disaffected youth will just swell, leading to yet more alcoholism, teen pregnancies, violence and criminal activity.
Which will require still-more population-control measures and government intrusiveness, of course. And so the shackles of government continue to be tightened on the people.
From henceforth, every time a politician in this country says that some new law or regulation is “to protect children”, he should be put in the pillory for a week and pelted with rotten vegetables.
What do you mean, we don’t have pillories in the public square anymore?
I bet there are many in Britain who would vote for its reintroduction there.
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Kim du Toit
March 28, 2008
6:00 AM EDT
DDT = bad. Result: poor brown people die of disease. (No excerpt—we all know the results.)
Oil = bad; ethanol = good. Result: poor brown people die of starvation. We drive, they starve. The mass diversion of the North American grain harvest into ethanol plants for fuel is reaching its political and moral limits.
“The reality is that people are dying already,” said Jacques Diouf, of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). “Naturally people won’t be sitting dying of starvation, they will react,” he said.
The UN says it takes 232kg of corn to fill a 50-litre car tank with ethanol. That is enough to feed a child for a year. Last week, the UN predicted “massacres” unless the biofuel policy is halted.
We are all part of this drama whether we fill up with petrol or ethanol. The substitution effect across global markets makes the two morally identical.
Mr Diouf says world grain stocks have fallen to a quarter-century low of 5m tonnes, rations for eight to 12 weeks. America - the world’s food superpower - will divert 18pc of its grain output for ethanol this year, chiefly to break dependency on oil imports. It has a 45pc biofuel target for corn by 2015.
Even the NYT weighs in with a doubtful look. (I should point out, by the way, that the last couple of paragaphs in the NYT article are arrant nonsense. Even if some of the starvation is caused by food shortages of non-biofuel grains like rice and wheat, the diversion of corn into ethanol means that there’s little left for relief supplies.)
So that’s two (and counting) initiatives caused by the Green movement which have, quite simply, caused people to die unnecessarily.
And they’re the ones who no doubt feel morally superior.
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Kim du Toit
March 28, 2008
6:00 AM EDT
U.S. Constitution, Article 4, Section 1: Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.
And then we have this: Americans with state-issued concealed weapons permits would be allowed to carry guns wherever they travel in the country under a bill introduced Monday by 3rd District Rep. John Boozman, R-Rogers.
The measure would eliminate a mishmash of concealed weapons regulations that vary from state to state, Boozman contends. All states would be forced to recognize concealed handgun permits from elsewhere.
Of course, the gun-haters and would-be confiscators are upset: Gun control advocates oppose the bill. They say that gun permit standards in some states are so weak that other jurisdictions deserve the right to refuse those license holders.
On its face, that seems quite reasonable—except that that position isn’t Constitutional.
The states may not decide “the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof”; only Congress can do that. In other words, if there’s a “minumum” or “acceptable” standard, then only Congress can establish that standard.
Note that if Congress were to adopt such a standard, and it was higher than the standards of, oh, Alaska or Vermont, it still wouldn’t affect how those states’ citizens carried guns in their own states, just in other states.
And because Congress has set no such standards (just as they haven’t set a national driving standard, for instance), the default is that there is no national standard, and the states’ standards must be accepted by other states.
I’m going to watch this one with interest, because the reaction to this bill, coupled with the upcoming Heller decision is going to make life extremely interesting in the near future.
The entire bill (H. R. 5782) is below the fold.
More
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Kim du Toit
March 28, 2008
6:00 AM EDT
Some time ago, I was reading a slew of comments from Democrats about how they were “the party of Jefferson”—which, like so many statements by Democrats, is technically accurate but factually far from the truth.
As Dean Barnett puts it: Shortly after the nation’s founding, the country was divided between Republicans led by Thomas Jefferson and Federalists led by John Adams. The Adams faction adamantly believed that men needed firm governance or else they would devolve into wickedness. The Jeffersonians had more faith in their countrymen. In the 21st century, this fundamental difference still makes itself manifest.
...except, of course, that today’s Democrat Party is closer in spirit to Adams’s Republicans—Nanny Government, after all, is there to protect us from ourselves.
So the Democrats are no longer the “party of Jefferson” (our third President would be appalled to see what has become of “his” party), and this canard should be refuted at every possible step.
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Kim du Toit
March 28, 2008
6:00 AM EDT
A little while ago, I expressed concern about government not only disseminating, but collecting more information about the populace than they not only needed, but deserved to collect.
Here’s the latest outrage from Britain: Government inspectors are to pry into the intimate details of more than 500,000 people a year, asking a series of probing questions about their sex lives and earnings.
Snooping officials will want to know about previous sexual partners, contraception, and how long couples lived together before marriage.
The 2,000-question survey from the Office for National Statistics will raise major concerns about privacy – especially as the data will be logged with the respondents’ names and addresses.
...
Civil servants claim the sensitive personal information will be made anonymous once it is processed at the department’s headquarters in Newport, South Wales – but that is not enough to satisfy privacy campaigners.
Doubts have also been raised about how useful the information will be, as people have a proven tendency to lie when quizzed about their sex lives.
Investigators conducting the new Integrated Household Survey – at a cost of more than £3.5million a year – will visit 200,000 homes at random each year and question each occupant – about 500,000 individuals altogether.
I know how I would respond to this outrage, but there’s no need to provide details about the invective I’d shower on the interviewer.
The most interesting line from the article, however, is this one: The Office for National Statistics (ONS) claims it needs the comprehensive annual poll to keep up with social trends that will help Whitehall mandarins formulate policy.
...which leads me to the most obvious question, which is: how exactly is this kind of information any business of government, and what gives them the right to formulate public policy based on it?
As far as I’m concerned, this questionnaire simply shows the British government’s most profound contempt for its citizens, but that’s nothing new.
I am reminded, as always, by my thoughts when I first looked at this issue: ”...the more data you give the government, the greater the likelihood that the data will, at some point, be used by the government, and not necessarily to your advantage.”
I don’t think that the U.S. government has the gall to try asking similar egregious questions in the future, but let’s bear this in mind in 2010, when the U.S. census takes place, and all sorts of areas will be probed in the “extended” questionnaire.
Name, address, number of people in the house: an enumeration required by the Constitution. That’s all the census demands, and that’s all they’re going to get from me in 2010.
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Kim du Toit
March 28, 2008
6:00 AM EDT
I enjoy Anatole Kaletsky’s economic articles, because he’s really, really smart. But sometimes, I think he’s a little too smart, because I think he missed the Big Picture here, even though he identified all the pointers. After looking at the big three changes which will affect the economy (the U.S. economy’s main driver will shift from real estate to exports and manufacturing; Western Europe’s economies will grind to a halt; and Asian economies will slow because of reduced exports to the West), Kaletsky points out: There is, however, another apparent consequence of the credit crunch that is less understood and is causing consternation and anxiety, especially in China and other developing countries. This is the upsurge in oil, food and commodity prices, many of which have almost doubled since the credit crunch began last August, even though the causal linkage between soaring commodity prices and a collapsing supply of credit remains obscure. If anything, the credit-induced slowdown in global economic growth and consumption since last August should have weakened demand for commodities and therefore pushed down prices. Yet the reality is that commodity prices have recently leapt higher every time the global banking system was hit by some new shock.
As a result, China and other emerging countries, which last year were preparing to boost domestic consumption to compensate for weaker exports to the US, are now more worried about inflation and are raising interest rates to try to slow their domestic growth. This is potentially a very dangerous development for the world economy, which increasingly relies on domestic demand from Asia, the Middle East and Russia. This unexpected policy tightening by emerging nations also explains why stock markets fell far harder in Asia than in America and Europe in the first quarter of this year.
I urge you to read the rest of the piece first, because, like all Kaletsky’s writing, it’s almost impossible to summarize, so concisely is it written.
It seems to me, however, that the commodities’ price increases (other than those driven by a spike in demand, like oil) are no different to the estwhile boom in real estate prices in the West.
The reason? Speculation.
An enormous driver in the price in anything is the influence of people and institutions who are betting on futures. In the case of real estate, it could even be middle-class folks, buying a little more than they can afford (hence the unhealthy trend of high-risk, errrr sub-prime loans). Mostly, however, the market is driven by people who are betting on gluts and shortages—gluts to sell short, and shortages to buy long.
In that regard, real estate is no different from commodities. In England, for example, real estate prices were driven sky-high by the bottleneck applied to development by the dreaded “planning permissions” (which are seldom granted in greenfield areas anymore). So a purchase of a house is almost a guaranteed investment, because of the artificial conditions against growth. If the planning permissions in England were as loose as in, say, north Texas, the market would be as soft as ours.
Similarly, if the Florida or California orange crops are threatened by frost, a late-arriving spring or other weather condition, people will short the market (buying now against an expected higher price later, when the shortage occurs).
Kaletsky is obsessed with finding “linkages” between real estate, commodities and their peripheral industries. The linkage is not a physical one—which is perhaps why he missed it—but a financial (ergo human) one.
The people and institutions who were investing/speculating in real estate have seen their opportunities dwindle and their risks increase as the credit bubble has burst and the crunch set in. (The real estate bubble had to burst, sooner or later—growth in home ownership past 60% can only be achieved, even in a wealthy nation like America, with lax credit standards, and even that market has its limits, as we’ve discovered.) Real estate had taken over from dotcoms as the Next Big Thing, and now commodities seem to have taken over from real estate.
The problem, for these speculators, is that no other immediate investment opportunity was available. Currency markets were and are still highly volatile: the U.S. dollar has fallen just about as far as it can against other currencies, and the Chinese yuan is being propped up by the most dubious accounting practices by the ChiCom government, which can only end in tears. And so, when in doubt, commodities could only be a safe bet, because regardless of all else, Maslow’s hierarchy demands that people gotta eat, drive their cars and heat their homes.
To the speculators, it was irrelevant that soaring grain prices (driven by allied climbs in transportation costs and still-surging demand in China and India) would cause problems in the food chain because aid groups could no longer afford to buy their handouts to poorer countries. The stupid, unnecessary diversion of grains to biofuels simply exacerbated the problem.
This is not a knock against speculators, by the way: speculation is an extraordinarily risky business, and for every success story like George Soros, there are literally thousands of people in the business who went from being millionaires to becoming paupers—sometimes in a matter of hours or days. More to the point: investment capital (the speculators’ bets) provide the cash for industries to grow, and pull economies with them.
Capitalism can be cruel business, but it works out far better for everyone in the long run. Capitalism rewards productivity, and punishes both inefficiencies and subsistence economies.
It’s difficult to explain to a Third World mother holding a starving baby in her arms why this is so (and no, this cannot be solved by Marxism or still more aid money), but in a hundred years’ time, or less, all societies will be better off in total, if the markets are allowed to work.
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Kim du Toit
March 28, 2008
6:00 AM EDT
So with Hillary Clinton winning the Pennsylvania Democrat primary in handy fashion last night, it looks as though we’re in for a battle to the bitter end between the forces of “traditional” leftism (Clinton) and “radical” socialism (Obama).
The interesting part for me is not that Clinton is going to try to win this thing by hook or by crook—we should expect no less from a Clinton—but that her side makes a very good strategic point.
While Obama’s followers are screaming about “number of delegates” and “popular majority” (unsurprising, for a bunch of socialists), the nagging fact for the Democrat Party is where Clinton has won: California, New York, and Massachusetts—no surprises there; they’re a lock for Democrats, typically—but also the “swing” states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and (most likely) Florida. No politician can hope to win a general election without at least two out of those last three, and Obama’s chances in those states are low to zip.
So the realpolitik question arises for the Democrats: do they want to field a candidate who can win, or one who satisfies the litmus tests of the party’s radical wing, but is almost certain to lose in a general election?
The idealists have it easy: it’s better to lose with integrity than to win by compromise.
The realists, on the other hand, think that change, even radical change, is only accomplished in increments, because (with one shining exception) Americans are uncomfortable with revolutions.
There’s a lesson to be learned here by conservatives, if Obama wins the nomination by popular acclaim and then rides triumphantly into a Mondale-style debacle.
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Kim du Toit
March 28, 2008
6:00 AM EDT
I was recently asked why I’ve been spending so much time on British politics and social issues over the past few months. There are really two answers to the question.
The first answer is that our domestic stuff here is pretty thin gruel. There’s a know-nothing stalemate in Congress, a do-nothing attitude at the White House, and frankly, the trench warfare in the Democrat primaries is as interesting to me as a John McCain bag of nothing stump speech. Frankly, I’m holding off on the American scene until something serious looks like happening.
The second answer to the question “Why Britain?” is simple, albeit ghastly: the wheels are starting to come off British society and government at an accelerating rate. The nation’s fabric, in other words and to add a metaphor, is unraveling. What’s happening is this: - Rampant, uncontrollable crime. The desperation of the police is seen by the way they eagerly snatch at “simple” crimes—such as speeding motorists, people who sell merchandise in Imperial rather than metric units, or the poor guy mistakenly arrested for stealing a TV from Tesco—even as they are completely powerless to do anything about the violent hooliganism, robbery and brutal murder which have arisen from decades of criminal-coddling (and more recently, lax immigration controls). And all this despite increased police powers, reduced civil rights for citizens, and massive surveillance capability.
- Ordinary British citizens are as oppressed as they have been at any time in history. This may not be completely accurate in fact—but ask a Brit how he feels about constant police surveillance, about government oversight seemingly of his every action, about rampant, unfriendly regulation and indifferent, petty or hostile bureaucrats, about the feeling of being a stranger in his own country… and I’m sure my Brit Readers could add several more. Better still, ask someone in government to explain why so many Brits are emigrating and/or moving their capital out of the country.
- Sloppy, sycophantic media. The purpose of the media has always been to question authority. The problem is, when the vast majority of the Press are supporters of the ruling party’s philosophy, such questioning has been minor, and ineffectual. Precisely the same, by the way, is true of academia—and the detached viewing (and in some cases, active support) of the deterioration of the public interest by these two supposed “independent” pillars of a civilized society is going to go down as one of history’s most foul betrayals of the public trust.
- Loss of national identity. To an island nation once so proud of its identity, there has been a triple whammy:
- The loss of social identity, as the multiculti crowd have attempted to submerge British culture into some ghastly mixture of several, far lesser ones;
- A parallel attempt to submerge native-born Britons into a demographic minority (or less of a majority) by a feckless, irresponsible immigration policy; and finally,
- The loss of the social compact, which has simply been belittled, denigrated, sabotaged and destroyed by the simple (and erroneous) assumption that the compact’s maintenance belongs to the State, and not to the citizens thereof.
- Loss of national sovereignty. As more and more power has been devolved upward and outward, to a European parliament of unelected bureaucrats, Britain has become, quite clearly, a vassal state—and the recent plan to extinguish Britain and force its parts into some pan-European provinces is perhaps the final nail.
- The NuLabor Government has, quite clearly, run out of ideas and, almost as important, out of options. The answers to this crisis are not only nowhere to be found in NuLabor doctrine, but in antithetical public policy initiatives: lower personal taxes, less regulation, more individual freedom. Small wonder they are helpless, and flailing around like upended beetles. What remains for them? The final drive to extract as much as possible from an impossible situation.
That is why you have a development like this: ‘Useless’ green levy on drivers rakes in £4bn
By Robert Winnett, Deputy Political Editor
Last Updated: 8:03am BST 24/04/2008
The “green levy” on motorists announced in Alistair Darling’s first Budget will double car tax revenue to £4 billion but reduce vehicle emissions by less than one per cent, Treasury figures have showed.
Perhaps this betrays an innocence on the part of the headline writer, or a lack of cynicism. What it does betray is an appalling degree of cynicism on the part of the British government.
Of course the added tax was never going to reduce automobile usage. The tax was introduced to bring more revenue into a government treasury which sees a looming cataclysm of entitlement social spending and a bloated government payroll which will overwhelm tax revenues, and soon.
Expect many more like this in the near future. And do not expect government to have the best interests of the populace at heart. Faced with massive and skyrocketing alcoholism rates, the Blair government made the astounding decision to allow pubs to open 24/7—a move opposed even by publicans. The reason, of course, was simply so that the government could collect more sales- and excise taxes on increased consumption of alcohol.
Under ”cynicism” in the dictionary, the above two are just under the word.
Income tax rates may be increased, and all sorts of boutique taxes levied (such as the one on “expat” incomes), but the first is self-defeating (electoral calamity—the British version of our Stupid Party, the Tories, have a 20-point lead in the polls right now) and the second won’t contribute much: they never do (and indeed most often cost more money to collect than they generate).
What’s interesting is that anything the British Labour government does now (in accordance with their own policies, of course) is simply going to exacerbate the situation. Put metaphorically, the BritGov is facing an oncoming conflagration with cans of gasoline in hand, simply because their party doctrine insists that “anything wet will extinguish a fire”.
Imprisoned by policy, all the party apparatchiks can do is… more of the same. And when in doubt, stonewall. Check out this excellent performance by the Chief Secretary to the Treasury (a political appointee), in response to a simple question.
From a comment in this blog post: Labour is simply imploding, due in no small part to believing their own propaganda. They really thought the economic boom of the last decade was down to them, when all they had done was ride the crest of the wave during the good times. Stormy weather has now broken upon them and they have no port in which to shelter.
We all know where this leads.
The question, of course, is whether the Tories (I can’t bring myself to call them any-case “c” conservative) can offer the radical solutions the situation demands, or whether they’d just offer mild palliatives (which won’t work).
What the Brits need is a new Thatcher. What they’ll get is anyone’s guess.
If they can’t engineer a soft reversal --and believe me, compared to the alternatives, a “neo-Thatcherite” revolution would be the softest—then history will provide the answer, and it’s an answer the Brits are not going to enjoy; and worst of all, nothing in their society will have prepared them for it, either.
We’ve been down this road in Europe before—only this time, I’m of the opinion we should let these guys find their own way out of the mess they’ve created.
I just wish I could offer sanctuary to my English friends, so that they could escape the gathering storm.
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Kim du Toit
March 28, 2008
6:00 AM EDT
Al Fin talks about specialization, and why it’s a good thing in education and learning. We are all somewhat different in what we are good at, and in the ways that we become better within our strengths. But we need to push our “comfort zones” outward little by little, or we will become living fossils--incapable of change or growth. This is something one tends to see within particular intellectually inbred communities. The avoidance of challenge, the tendency to blame “the other” for all of one’s shortcomings. The need to demonise and scapegoat, because placing all blame outward relieves one from any need to face fear-inducing change.
Some things you can change. Within that constellation of changeable things inside and outside of you, lives a potential universe that would make a nice place to live. All of us need to develop the ability to explore the world of changeability at our own pace, in our own way.
This is why, incidentally, homeschooling done properly is so successful.
Good homeschoolers soon realize that replicating a classroom experience, either in the physical sense or in curriculum, is usually (in fact, mostly) counterproductive. It suffices to identify which method of learning best suits the child, and applying that method to all the subjects being taught.
It’s also why universities, for the most part, suck at instilling true learning—although, to their credit, some universities are trying to overcome the standardized ”professor droning at students” method in favor of a more varied approach. The problem, of course, is that this is extraordinarily difficult to do in the “mass education” environment in which most colleges are trapped.
I foresee a new kind of university: one which decentralizes its teaching, setting up a series of on- and off-campus centers, wherein students are grouped not by subject matter, but by learning style preference.
Interesting stuff.
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