The Gods of the Copybook Headings

Friday Night - Vivaldi

Economics and Democracy

Don't mix too well:

I first learned about farm price supports in the produce section of the grocery store. I was in kindergarten. My mother explained that price supports seemed to make fruits and vegetables more expensive but assured me that this conclusion was simplistic. If the supports went away, so many farms would go out of business that prices would soon be higher than ever. I accepted what she told me and felt a lingering sense that price competition is bad for buyer and seller alike.

This was one of my first memorable encounters with anti-market bias, a tendency to underestimate the economic benefits of the market mechanism. The public has severe doubts about how much it can count on profit-seeking business to produce socially beneficial outcomes. People focus on the motives of business and neglect the discipline imposed by competition. While economists admit that profit maximization plus market imperfections can yield bad results, noneconomists tend to view successful greed as socially harmful per se.

Scenes From the Imperial Capital

Trinity College, University of Toronto

Loyal She Began, Loyal She Remains

More popular than before:

Overall, the poll indicated some 51 per cent of Canucks want to maintain Canada’s links to the monarchy.

That is a six percentage point increase, up from 45 per cent of the population in support of keeping the Queen as head of state, when the survey’s results are compared to a similar poll conducted in 2009. The increase is mostly seen among those over the age of 35.

For an institution that is suppose to be fading into cultural and constitutional irrelevance, that's fairly impressive. Only about 24% of Quebec residents expressed similar support for the Crown. That would imply that a lot more than 51% of English Canadians want to retain the monarchy. In a country where no political party, and very few contentious political issues, can get anywhere near the half-mark in terms of popular support, that suggests a strong resilience for the monarchy in Canada.

More than a small measure of the credit for this change of fortunes goes to the ruling Conservative Party under Stephen Harper. Under a broad effort to re-establish traditional Canadian values, after decades of Jacobin tinkering, the federal Tories have strongly promoted the monarchy and military. Even before the engagement of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge this PR campaign was slowly yielding results. The media interest in the wedding was a powerful boost to a pre-existing trend.

The decline of the monarchy, from touch stone of Canadian identity to its presumed death a few years ago, was no accident. The popular narrative is that the monarchy is an outdated institution doomed to go the way of whalebone corsets and buggy whips. Why? Because such is progress. History has an endpoint and as we go along the way certain things gets jettisoned. Why some things and not others?

Because they said so.

While the monarchy is a non-partisan institution, its enemies come overwhelmingly from the Left. This is for the essential reason that the monarchy is traditional. It has a Royal Family, not a committee of self-anointed experts trained in post-modern newspeak. There is a clearly defined head of the family, the monarch. Marriage and child rearing are central to the monarchical narrative. Enormous pomp and ceremony goes into royal marriages, something very reactionary in an age where low commitment common law relationships are ubiquitous.

If there ever was an institution that eschewed the fluid and utilitarian nature of the modern world it is the monarchy. Even in their personal tastes the royals have a reactionary flare. The Queen loves horse racing. Prince Charles is renown for his advocacy of traditional architecture. Prince Phillip is a navy man to the core of his being. Virtually every male royal serves in the military at some point in their young adulthood, a very rare thing in these times. Prince Henry even parties like a young man, rather than spend his off hours as some politically correct schoolmarm.

For all the "dysfunction" the Royal Family has shown over the decades they are, recognizable, a human family complete with black sheep, wild children and a stern but loving matriarch. It is an arrangement as old as man himself. This annoys most on the Left. The narrative of the Left is of permanent revolution and adherence to abstract theories divorced from lived experience. Not much has changed since Burke identified the phenomenon more than two centuries ago.

There was once an honourable tradition of Left-leaning monarchism. The description socialist monarchist was not the oxymoron it is considered today in the English speaking world. For the Scandinavians the situation is, of course, quite different. This honourable tradition ended when the Left changed its nature. For generations the political Left was an alliance of Jacobin revolutionaries and kind hearted souls. 

The former dreamed of a legislated utopia. The latter simply wanted to help the sick and poor. As the welfare state has breed dependency and hopelessness, many of those compassionate souls are returning to private charity and the various churches. What remains of the Left is mostly revolutionary Jacobins. In their rationalistic, though not always rational, world view the monarchy is bad because it is irrational. Why? Because the rational is that which fits their world view.

To grasp the pettiness of the modern Jacobins recall the obsession, more than forty years ago, with the metric system and decimalisation. The measurement and currency systems of scores of countries were upended for the simple reason that dividing things by ten is supposedly more rational than diving them by twelve. It might be simpler to divide numbers by ten than by twelve, there is no way in which it is inherently more "rational" in some deep metaphysical sense. The denomination of all measuring systems is to some degree arbitrary. Saying that your arbitrary systems is more rational than someone else's arbitrary system is the height of self-delusion and conceit.

Yet it goes on. Into matters far less trivial than measuring systems. Into the building of cities, the rearing of children and the conducting of public policy. The pseudo-rational placed above and beyond the empirical and time tested. That something should be kept merely because it works, because it has proven useful and even valuable over the years is discounted. All things must fit into the plan. 

No plan, devised from scratch, would ever have made an octogenarian white woman the living embodiment of the state and symbol of the nation. When rationalistic planners plan they produce not human  realities but statistical aggregates. Inoffensive and unmemorable mediocrities. The apotheosis, if we may use that word, of this thinking can be seen in that most antiseptic and absurd of entities, the European Union. The House of Windsor gave us Elizabeth II. The EU has given us Herman Van Rompuy.

In promoting the monarchy the Harper Tories, for all their many faults, have rejected the irrational rationalism that has brought about the current European catastrophe. The tragedy is that this reassertion of Canadian identity should be thought of as "right-wing." What the monarchy represents transcends the momentary trivia of politics. A lesson most politicians are too myopic to understand.

Thursday Night - Miles and Coltrane

Victoria Online

The Telegraph:

The 141 volumes, made up of more than 43,000 pages, provide a first person account of her life from the age of 13 to just weeks before her death in 1901.

They also include many private sketches she made of her "dearest Albert", their children and other members of the world's elite during her 63-year reign.

The online resource, a collaboration between the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford and The Royal Archives, were previously only available by special appointment to Windsor Castle.

Scenes From the Imperial Capital

Queen's Park

Dans La Belle Province

Quebec is a distinct society:

The attack by Le Québécois was only the beginning. The next morning, a caricature in Le Devoir, a respected Quebec daily, showed me opening fortune cookies to decode the news. The sketch depicted me with buckteeth and Coke-bottle-bottom glasses, an echo of the anti-Japanese stereotypes of the Second World War. My race was irrelevant to my reporting. To my surprise, my eyes filled with tears.

It was Friday, the end of a horrible week. The Globe’s editor-in-chief summoned me to a meeting. Edward Greenspon was waiting in his office, a glassed-in box on the edge of the newsroom. Shakily, I took a seat across from him. Without preamble, he pushed a copy of my Dawson article across the table. He had circled the offending paragraphs with a black marker.

Jan Wong's crime was highlighting that a large swath of Quebec society is racist. This should not be surprising. At its core Quebec nationalism is an ethnic nationalism. They don't want to be independent because the ROC denies them liberty and justice. They want independence so that they don't have to consort with those who are not like them. It's a blood and soil nationalism that caused untold havoc in the last century.

Quebec's version is water downed. That does not make it anymore acceptable. Certainly not in Canada.

Kathy Shiadle has a running bit about how in modern Canada we need to have a "decoder ring" in order to know which minority has privileged status this week. Muslim trumps Jew. Black trumps white. It looks like Quebecois trumps Chinese. Most of you will recall when Warren Kinsella, his Liberal censor switch having been accidentally turned off, made an unfortunate remark about Chinese food. His apology was profuse and immediate. 

Le Devoir's sin was far worse. Not an off hand comment made for an online video, like Kinsella, but a blatantly racist editorial cartoon. Not a chance. She who tangles with the perpetually raw nerve of Quebec nationalism has little hope. Jean Charest and Stephen Harper both dutifully blasted Wong and the Globe and Mail. Had the Globe run a story highlighting the bigotry of Alberta red necks, nary a complaint would have been raised in the newsrooms of Toronto.

Quebec nationalism is the last acceptable white bigotry in Canada. No other white group may speak of the "purity" of their stock and be treated so lightly by the MSM. The ROC has largely moved away from such crude tribalism. Modern Quebec is not so bad as the old Qubec. Yet as so often in the past it lags behind English Canada. From the separation of church and state, to civil liberties and the literal and intellectual bankruptcy of socialism, French Canada seems to get the memo a few decades too late.

Such a process is delayed by the silence of English Canada. Our policy of appeasement toward Quebec has led to a diminution of freedom in the ROC, while retarding the development of Quebec itself. This is not simply a Trudeaupian phenomenon, Trudeau to his credit was largely appalled by the petty bigotry and draconianism of French Canada and sought to reform it. The appeasement of Quebecois nationalism dates back to before the founding of the country. From publicly funded Catholic Schools to the Padlock Law. Policies that flew against Canadian values, tolerated so as to not alienate Quebec.

Appeasement begets only greater appeasement. An expensive lesson we have yet to learn.

Wednesday Night - Satchmo

True Believer

A Fan of Mitt:

The cocoonlike machinery of the modern presidential campaign, with its bulletproof motorcades, private planes and handpicked audiences, has kept Mr. Romney largely insulated from the public’s raw reactions to his candidacy.

The same, however, cannot be said for his most fanatical supporter, a 69-year-old former life insurance salesman and an unabashedly anti-Obama Republican from Virginia.
For the past year, Mr. Wilson has devoted himself with the single-mindedness of a college-age groupie to following Mr. Romney around the country in decidedly conspicuous style: driving a pickup truck festooned with 27 giant Romney for President posters. (The largest are the size of a refrigerator.)

Scenes From the Imperial Capital

John Graves Simcoe, Queen's Park

Tommy Shores Up His Base

Crazy like a fox:

The phenomenon is dubbed the "Dutch Disease" in reference to the manufacturing decline that occurred in the Netherlands after a boom in natural gas exports in the 1970s.

The Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey suggests slightly more Canadians disagree than agree with Mulcair — 45 per cent compared to 41 per cent — although opinions varied across the country.

The telephone survey of just over 1,000 people was carried out between May 17 and 20 and has a margin of error of 3.1 per cent, 19 times out of 20.

Most people polled in oil-rich Alberta and the rest of the Prairies disagreed with the NDP leader, while those in Quebec and British Columbia were most likely to agree with him.

I don't know whether Thomas Mulcair believes the nonsense he spouts. I doubt it. He seems too intelligent and cunning a pol. We'll only really know when the memoirs come out. Not that he'll tell the truth of course. A lot, however, can be gleaned by how franky a politician lies. Just read Brian Mulroney's memoirs. Should you have a few spare months. My wrists still ache.

For any of you who doubted me when I said that Tommy was the biggest threat Stephen Harper has ever faced, this factoid should convince you. The Orange Wave is holding steady in Quebec:

But the NDP leader's assessment was most popular with Bloc Quebecois supporters. The survey suggests 64 per cent of Bloc supporters back his musings.

When the Leader of the Opposition is arguing for the kneecapping of the Alberta economy, it's a bit more than just "musing." In the halcyon days when the NDP was off in a corner in the House of Commons, an odd alliance of granola munching hippies and trade union power lusters, these sorts of wacky pseudo-economic pronouncements could be laughed away. The NDP said what? Oh, those crazy kids. Next they'll be rioting for free university tuition.

Oops.

The Prime Minister and the Cabinet have mostly ignored the opposition. More than this they've done the remarkable. They're governing. Pushing through needed reforms of the EI system. Tweaking the OAS eligibility cut off. You'd almost think that they were the government of the day. It's been so long, nearly a decade, since we've seen a majority government with a decisive leader I'd half-forgotten what it looked like. The constant political maneuvering of seven years of minority governments will not be missed.

Team Harper has put away the fluffy blue sweaters. Ministers are now well practiced in the Trudeau-style gallic shrug. The leader of the opposition is saying something juvenile? Really? Sorry, my Blackberry is vibrating again. What was that again? OK. Well, it's the sort of thing he would say. A few Question Period taunts comparing Mulcair to the Prime Minister of Greece and everyone will just move on.

The next election is way out in the future. 2015 is another epoch. Many of the staffers in the PMO will be hitting puberty about that time. Lots of ground left to cover. Nice and easy does it.

This laid back approach to the socialist Götterdämmerung Tommy would like to rain down upon the West might work in the short-term. Treat the NDP leader like a crazed animal. Don't dignify the proceedings with anything more than a few nasty quips and keep showing Canadians that the Tories are the only responsible adults in federal politics. Yes that is damning by the faintest of praise.

Adults aren't suppose to spend beyond their means.

But a rather large number of Canadians adults do spend beyond their means, a fact that will become painfully apparent once Mark Carney decides to call off the party in the GTA and Vancouver condo markets. The number of people I know that treat their homes as ATMs is frightening. It's not that I hang out with hippies either. These people are business majors and they control their finances with less skill that the Portuguese cleaning ladies I knew growing up.

Why? Because money management is less about knowledge than character. Those Portuguese cleaning ladies are peasants. They grew up in real poverty, not the ersatz type that Canadian Leftists are constantly whining about. The default psychology of peasants is that everything is going to go horribly wrong tomorrow. The crops will fail. The Spanish will invade again. The government will steal everything they've spent a lifetime building. Paranoia and suspicion are a way of life.

The typical Portuguese immigrant to Canada has about four years of formal education. Much the same holds for Italian and Greeks who arrived here after the war. Pause to consider the different mental universes these people occupy compared to the juvenile delinquents that now rule Montreal and Quebec City. Spoiled brats who assume that ease and comfort is a divine right granted to them by their birth certificates.

The essential reason that southern Europe is broke is that the peasant mentality is dead. That's not entirely a bad thing. Creativity, innovation and risk taking are not hallmarks of the peasant world view. They'll certainly take risks and show remarkable improvisational skills, but mostly out of desperate necessity. Their goal is comfort. The European Union provided a great deal of comfort to Portugal and Greece. People accustomed to generations of brutal hardship were unprepared for the free stuff that flowed from the EU's cornucopia. They snapped. Their children even more so.

For wealthy nations like Canada, who took decades to climb from subsistence to wealth and did so without any foreign largess, populations had time to adapt. A work ethic was developed that combined the thrift of the peasant with the more optimistic outlook of the entrepreneur. It was a remarkably powerful combination that has allowed the English speaking peoples to dominate the last two centuries of history. It is a philosophy that has been steadily undermined by the welfare state.

Quebec is like Portugal in many ways, with the notable exception that Portuguese waiters could never hope to be as haughty and condescending as their Quebecois counterparts. Discredit where it is due. The Quebecois too were essentially peasants until the Quiet Revolution. Then the largess from a more advanced foreign country, the ROC, fell down upon them thanks to the rain gods Trudeau and Mulroney. They too snapped and are now firmly into the decadent phase of their decline. Comfortably numb as they approach the demographically induced end of French Canada.

Tommy has shrewdly decided to ride Quebec's leisurely descent into oblivion. The Quebecois are not so much economically illiterate as culturally numb. Saying that you shouldn't leave a colossal debt to your children is a moot point if you have no children. Like Louis XV is suppose to have said: Après moi, le déluge. That would be fine enough if the Quebecois were simply taking themselves down. A comfortable suicide for a once formidable and self reliant people. The problem, of course, is that we're stuck on the same ship.

And Tommy? A short-seller who might just win big. 

Tuesday Night - Bing

Fighting Form

Free again:

Lord Black: I mean Mulcair might have considered the fact that only a few weeks before, the Supreme Court of this country had decided unanimously that I had a7right to sue for libel to preserve my reputation. If I was, as he said, a British criminal, what reputation was I preserving?

Peter Mansbridge: So is that libelous language to you?

Lord Black: Well he has an immunity. If he, if he wants to – if he wants to allege that I engaged in improper attempts to influence public figures or civil servants in order to whitewash criminal behaviour, if he wants to divest himself of his parliamentary immunity and say that, it would certainly be my pleasure to sue him for defamation.

He is just out of prison and already threatening legal action against the leader of the NDP. How I have missed him.

Scenes From the Imperial Capital

Frost Building, Queen's Park Crescent