The public has spoken, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has responded by cancelling the New York City Marathon amid a massive outcry. I, however, have a question, not merely for the mayor but for everyone whose reaction to the mayor’s previous announcement that the marathon would continue was one of visceral condemnation–why? What is the reason that the marathon needed to be cancelled? Who benefits from the cancellation? Not the runners, many of whom have spent a lot of money to come to the city only to find that the marathon has been cancelled. Not the New York economy, which takes in over $300 million each year as a result of the marathon. The people adversely effected by Hurricane Sandy, you say? How do they benefit? Everyone seems to assume that the cancellation is for the benefit of the victims, but I’m not seeing it. Don’t hang me just yet–I have reasons.
Tag: USA
Romney and Disaster Relief
In the wake of the recent hurricane, new attention is being paid to this clip from the primary debates in which Romney condemns federal funding for disaster relief:
While the hurricane has drawn attention to this quip, its intellectual value, positively or negatively, is independent of this particular situation and deserves to be judged on its own merits, and that is precisely what today’s post is all about–the merits of the notion that the federal government should do less.
The Daily Mail, Global Warming, and Disinformation
Recently, an article appeared in the British newspaper Daily Mail alleging that global warming stopped 16 years ago. Of course, my first instinct was to recall that this is the Daily Mail we’re talking about, and they’re not exactly reputable:
But leaving aside for the moment the Daily Mail‘s reputation for inaccuracy, let us examine the evidence they claim they have from the British Meteorological Office, discover if this is true or not, and the implications of that truth or lack thereof are.
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The Political Pitfalls of Pessimism and Optimism
In the United States, we are often exhorted to be optimistic, enthusiastic, and positive about our society and one another, criticising “constructively” or perhaps preferably not at all. The United States has a particularly optimistic political culture, one where you really can make your campaign slogan “hope”, “change”, or “yes we can” and get away with it. The United Kingdom is quite a different place–in Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron got into office with the slogan “we can’t go on like this”. There’s a “change” message in there somewhere, but it certainly isn’t phrased in hopeful terms. Today I’d like to have a closer look at the role optimism and pessimism play in the American and British political systems, respectively, discovering how both extremes can have a deleterious effect on government.
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Dragging Behind the Horse: Making States Bigger
Though history, states have been getting bigger. From tribes, we expanded to city-states, from city-states to feudal states, and from feudal states to the consolidated modern states of today. This process has never been easy, however. There has always been resistance to the expanding, consolidating state. The unifications of Germany and Italy required extensive military campaigning, the United States fought the civil war over the south’s resistance to a strong federal government, the French monarchs struggled to break the back of the nobility for generations, and the British struggled with rebellions from Scots, Welsh, and Irish. Yet, in the end, all of these countries unified and centralised, because it was economically necessary–as more territories became economically interlinked, the same economic laws needed to apply to larger swathes of territory. There was no other way to keep the medieval guilds in line, to achieve coordinated economic policies in the interests of the whole of society, rather than for one region against others, to reduce the need of every town and region to be self-sufficient in every economic category. The economy is the horse driving the cart of the enlarged state, but there are always people dragging behind the cart, and they’re usually the very sort of people behind setting up the previous, smaller state. But this is not merely an historical tale–states are getting bigger right now for economic reasons, impeded by people who are, once more, dragging behind the horse.
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Benjamin Studebaker 