This is just a little too neat and tidy a resolution to the story of government incompetence in Providence mentioned in this space yesterday:
The construction company responsible for the closure of a Providence street lined with small businesses during one of the busiest shopping days of the year has been fined for working without a permit.
It’d be interesting to trace the history. I could see the city generally letting permits slip, except where it becomes a political liability.
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John DePetro caught a curious tweet from Rhode Island’s radical Congressman, Democrat David Cicilline:
These smash and grab retail crimes are outrageous! Retailers & small biz have suffered enough from pandemic. Shoppers shouldn’t be terrorized by these criminals. Thx. to police for all they’re doing!
John notes the contrast with Cicilline’s usual rhetoric and speculates:
Perhaps this could be a sign just how nervous democrats are about 2022 and how the Progressive tone of the party is causing panic. There is rumor a Progressive female candidate may challenge Cicilline in a Democrat primary.
I’m not sure Cicilline would react to a progressive primary challenger by moving to the political right, but his party has gone so far left that any moderation at all feels almost like a party switch.
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Difficult as it may be to believe, the general treasurer of Rhode Island, Democrat Seth Magaziner, proposes to address the inflation wrought by the policies of Democrat White House occupant, Joe Biden, by — get this — flooding the market with easy cash and imposing price controls.
Each of Magaziner’s suggestions can be debated on its own merits for goals having nothing to do with inflation, but packaging them together specifically so as to address rising prices suggests a person without even passing familiarity with economics and the workings of money. One way or another, inflation means too much money chasing too few services and products. Adding more money to that equation will only make inflation worse.
Buying gift cards for all families with income up to $125,000 per year (!!) would mean fewer people feel the need to conserve or adjust their appetites to reflect the real availability of food. Prices will go up, and the most disadvantaged people will have an even harder time meeting their needs.
The same is true of Magaziner’s targeted-pandering suggestion of suspending the sales tax during this holiday gift-giving month. At this point in our tax regime, decreasing the government’s take is always a good in itself, but reducing prices by eliminating a portion that has nothing to do with production won’t help with inflation. Retailers will tend to increase prices to match what consumers had proven they were willing to pay. This may send some signal to producers to increase their output, but are toys really an area of specific concern, here?
Magaziner’s third proposal — imposing price controls on medicine — may not directly inflate the currency, as the two other parts of his plan would, but it would likely distort the market and perhaps reduce the supply. Prices are information, and the government risks massive harm if politicians assume the signal is always that some greedy executive wants more money.
Drug price increases could indicate that the manufacturers need to send the signal to their own suppliers or the labor market that they need more resources. They could indicate that innovators are coming up with new medicines that are expensive to research. Or they could indicate that many more people want the drugs than manufacturers can satisfy, so high prices force people to make more-careful decisions when balancing medicine against other things on which they might spend their money; the people in most desperate need will tend to choose the drugs, an option they might not have if people who didn’t need them as badly bought them up because they were cheap.
Whatever the specifics of current events may be, a civilization cannot address inflation by alleviating its symptoms. Attempting to do so can destroy the civilization as government pours more and more medicine down their people’s throats, making the sickness worse.
Of course, it may be that General Treasurer Seth Magaziner understands the likely effects of his policies very well but simply doesn’t care. He sees an opportunity to pander, so he’ll take it and (presumably) hope that reality intervenes with some stroke of luck to avoid the foreseeable consequences, or at least to provide some scapegoat to bear the blame.
Featured image of a Great Depression bread line from flickr.
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I’m not ready to endorse Sundance’s theory on The Conservative Treehouse, but it provides an interesting perspective by which to judge events going forward:
The near horizon looks pretty clear. Gasoline will keep rising fast and will cost $6 to $7/gal before next spring. There is no way under current Joe Biden policy to avoid this, unless he was to completely abandon his energy policy; that’s not likely. The climate change ideologues, academics and far-left communists behind the Biden policy are not likely to see the catastrophic economic damage as a bad thing, instead they will likely say it’s the new normal.
With that level of supply side economic chaos seemingly unavoidable, the only way for Biden to try and mitigate political damage is an attempt to halt the demand side. That’s why the administration needs Omicron.
Under this theory, fear-mongering over new variants of COVID acts almost like raising interest rates to cool the economy, only powerful special interests would be the first hurt by that means (ah, trickle-down), whereas keeping people home and not spending hurts the powerless masses, first.
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Businesses on Hope Street in Providence were all prepared for one of their biggest days for sales: small business Saturday. Oops:
Providence Water crews closed a portion of the street early Saturday morning and part of the afternoon for utility work. The construction has been happening for some time, but business owners, like Asher Schofield of Frog & Toad, thought the work would be paused on such an important day.
In fact, earlier in the week, Democrat Mayor Jorge Elorza was promoting free on-street parking for the area on that day.
How does the city not have a central location or process to ensure that these conflicts don’t happen?
And of course, it’s (unionized) government, so the clients (i.e., people who live and work in the city) can’t just note the problem and send the workers packing. Whoever makes a mistake, the consequence is never borne by the organization that collects our money to “serve” the rest of us.
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A new variant of COVID-19, Omicron, (don’t ask what happened to Xi!) has been identified in South Africa. It took only a ten second search to find this important and comparatively positive information about Omicron.
Omicron is reported to be seven times more contagious than the Delta variant and yet in the last two months, the reported cases and deaths from Africa have continued to decline.
Further, Omicron cases are very mild. In fact,
Looking at the first data coming out of Southern Africa, virologist Marc van Ranst said this weekend that “if the omicron variant is less pathogenic but with greater infectivity, allowing Omicron to replace Delta, this would be very positive.”
So it is possible that the mild Omicron may displace the Delta variant, which would be “very positive”. Its mildness of symptoms is actually what led to it being identified.
So the initial information about Omicron is comparatively very good. Yet the WHO’s initial news release about Omicron, as well as an update from yesterday, disturbingly lack this information as does the CDC’s statement.
And most news reports about Omicron for the first couple of days have included only the narrow, negative focus of the WHO and CDC statements, completely omitting the full, valuable information out of South Africa from medical boots on the ground. Dr. Angelique Coetzee, pictured, one of the doctors in South Africa who identified Omicron among her patients, cautioned against such “hype” in this video by Reuters [emphasis added].
But the hype that’s been created currently out there in the media and worldwide doesn’t correlate with the clinical picture and it doesn’t warrant to just cut us off from any travelling and ban South Africa as if we are the villains in the whole process.
Perhaps the most harmful, certainly the most insidious, aspect of the reaction by certain officials to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic eighteen months ago was their narrow focus on and promotion of only certain (always negative) data points. Exhibit A is the now infamous weekly COVID press conferences held by Governor McKee’s predecessor. Month after month, these featured a relentless, thudding, some would say brainless, emphasis on deaths and new cases and a perpetual, willful disregard for any positive data, particularly the disease’s sky-high survival rate. The survival rate was clear early on in the pandemic but this very good news, arguably the most important datapoint of all, was studiously omitted from the public communications of the former Governor Raimondo, her Director of Health and certain other governors and officials around the country. This resulted in fear and even panic completely disproportionate to the risk posed to the public by a disease with a 99.8% survival rate, a reaction that made the public far more amenable to the extreme, ultimately ineffectual and highly damaging “mitigation” measures imposed by certain governors and leaders.
Let’s not do that again. Our elected officials and the media need to give the full picture about Omicron, both negative and positive. Early this afternoon, President Biden said that Omicron is a “cause for concern,” not a “cause for panic”. That’s a small step in the right direction rhetorically. He and his CDC have an absolute obligation to go much further and promptly give out all the information about Omicron as it comes in, including especially from doctors at ground zero, not just very selective, negative aspects of the disease which amount to manipulative misinformation.
Image: Screenshot of South Africa’s Dr. Angelique Coetzee from this Reuters video.
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In the public debate, particularly when we get into moral questions near and dear to activists, claims seem to work their way to being common wisdom inexplicably. Assumptions become assertions that this or that thing ought to be done, but with no explanation as to why. Even more, when the people making assertions are academics, our society still tends to assume there’s some basis for their claims. (This tendency is fading too slowly, but it’s fading.)
While filling in for Dan McGowan on the regular “Rhode Map” column in the Boston Globe, Edward Fitzpatrick offers “6 things we learned while running 6 miles with the president of the University of Rhode Island.” Three of them are personal information about Marc Parlange, which we’ve no basis to question. One of the six items is about URI’s requests for Rhode Island’s federal COVID windfall, which is a whole separate topic. But the other two items both include claims that deserve to be questioned. Here’s the first:
While running past URI’s Peckham Farm , Parlange pointed out the site of a proposed 60-acre greenhouse and agricultural innovation center that he said could grow 10 percent of the vegetables eaten in the state each year. While that plan has drawn some opposition, he emphasized that Rhode Island is now only producing 2.5 percent of the vegetables its residents consume. “So we are a big importer of veggies,” he said. “That is not sustainable.” Some day, he said, the state could grow 100 percent of its own vegetables.
Why is importing vegetables “not sustainable”? If it’s easier and cheaper to grow vegetables outside of Rhode Island, the claim would arguably be more rational that it’s unsustainable to produce any of our earth-grown diet in the Ocean State than implying that we should endeavor to grow all of it here. Sure, we could say it’s important to diversify our sources of food in case we are somehow cut off from places that are better suited for farming. We can cite various other reasons we value farming in our state, from ambiance to maintenance of some level of homegrown expertise.
But the claim that sustainability creates an imperative to push toward being veggie self-sustaining reeks of ideology and self-interest.
The second Parlange claim worth challenging comes with this:
We also ran past the future site of the Tomaquag Museum, which plans to build a new facility on 18 acres owned by URI. And he noted that URI just began offering scholarships to undergraduates who are federally recognized members of the Narragansett Indian Tribe. “We recognize that we are on the traditional and unceded territory of the Narragansett First Nation,” he said.
Wondering what “unceded territory” even means, I came across an interesting post by Canadian Rob Chipman, who asks and answers just that question. In Canada, at least, it appears that the government has created a legal condition in which it affirms that it may not have gained clear title (so to speak) to land that it then sold to settlers some centuries ago. That might create a legal mess, but at least one can make the case that “unceded territory” does exist on our continent.
Human nature being what it is, however, we have to keep open the possibility that the President of the University of Rhode Island has picked up a term that applies in Canada and is creating doubts about the validity of his own institution’s land ignorantly and for no good reason. Indeed, his reference to “First Nation” suggests he might be confused, because that term (which is also used in his prior home of Australia) is common in the country to the north of the United States. If he’s colloquially adopting a legal term and conflict that doesn’t apply in Rhode Island, however, that’s a reckless thing for a new chief executive to do.
Per the university’s own “detailed history,” Kingston farmer Oliver Watson sold the land for the university in a legitimate way in 1888. How the Watsons got ahold if it isn’t as easy to learn, but a history of the area by Sandy McCaw of the Southern Rhode Island Chamber of Commerce describes a very different set of transactions than in Canada. Much of the land in the area was indeed transferred from the Narragansett sachems through one deal or another.
Anybody inclined to argue that it isn’t clear the land was those sachems’ to negotiate away must either to point to an alternate owner or concede that ownership wasn’t a truly applicable concept at the time, having mainly to do with a family’s having settled territory and thereafter defended it.
It may be that farmer Watson’s family acquired the land through some less-well-documented means, but that’s a case to be made, not a fact to be asserted by somebody whose professional obligation seems more reasonably to be defending the university’s legal interests, not undermining them.
Whatever the history of the property may be, it’s not Marc Parlange’s to cede away.
Featured image by Paul Kane on WikiArt.
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The so-called QAnon Shaman was particularly unfortunate to have the best outfit among those who pressed into the U.S. Capitol on January 6 and has been sentenced to jail for about three-and-a-half years. Contrast his case, as Jonathan Turley does, with the story of a smirking Antifa thug who attacked a congressman’s office with an ax:
The self-avowed Antifa member took an axe to the office of Sen. John Hoeven’s in Fargo on Dec. 21, 2020. Federal sentencing guidelines suggested 10–16 months in prison but he was only sentenced to probation and fined $2,784 for restitution . . . he then reportedly mocked the FBI for returning his axe. Others declared him a hero and Democratic politicians pitched in for his legal defense.
The situation that our government is setting up is one in which the political right will be less inclined to protest while the political left feels increasingly bold in its destruction and violence. It’s pretty hard to come to any conclusion other than that this is what Democrats want.
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Don’t get me wrong. It’s wonderful that the New York Times is raising any questions at all about why Democrat strongholds aren’t the utopias that voters were promised and to challenge the obviously facile talking point that evil Republicans are to blame, even where the GOP has almost no power.
That said, Johnny Harris and Binyamin Applebaum studiously avoid in their well-worth-watching 15-minute video the possibility that the failures they lament are not a “failure to live their values,” but actually the true manifestation of the incentives and principles of progressivism. Just so, Rhode Island progressives assert regularly that our Democrat-run government is “conservative,” and true believers may, umm, believe it, but they use that term (like “white supremacy”) as an escape hatch to avoid evaluating themselves.
The idealism Democrats sell to certain constituencies (such as minorities and kids) is a ploy. It goes like this: all these progressive ideals require centralized planning and control, because only smart people can make the system work and only good people will make it happen (read: those stupid conservatives will block what you want if you don’t give us good progressives power). When they get in power, though, look carefully at their plans. Lots of talking. Lots of commissions of special interests and insiders. Lots of assertions about what the problem is and lots of passion about what boundaries the solution should have.
It turns out that when you give individuals power, they do what makes sense to them, and (surprise, surprise) it rarely makes sense to them to do things that will affect their own lives adversely. Most of their solutions can be understood as bribes or payoffs to the people who put them in power, but even to the extent they’re genuinely trying to solve problems, they enter office having sold talking-point solutions. Their plans leave no room for management or reevaluation; giving them power was the solution. The true objective is never to solve the problem, which would eliminate the politicians’ selling point.
Put differently, progressivism cannot work even in principle because the moment a solution gives some weight to civic equality and individual rights or decentralizes power, it isn’t progressive anymore.
Tiverton’s budget process is illustrative, here. For years, people have lamented the heated politics in town, which they say disrupts the community feel. So, when I was on the town council, one of my key policy efforts was to start the process of designing a budget plan. With everybody at the table, we would create a baseline of what we though was reasonable for increases in this, that, or the other thing. Then each year, as we formed our budget, if people wanted more for specific purposes, we could refer to the baseline and determine where the money would come from. This would allow everybody in town to see how the interests were being balanced and assert their own preferences.
Guess what: progressives and special interests don’t like that. They actually don’t like concrete plans that enact their professed ideals. In part, they may dislike this sort of planning because they know their desires are unreasonable and would never win if plainly stated. In part, progressivism is a way for people to feel like they’re the good guys, so progressive policies must have the quality of limiting the influence of people defined as “bad.”
Perhaps in larger part, however, progressives prefer the muddy, undefined planning of the political process, whereby one amasses power and then does what one thinks best in the moment. They need discord so that they can blame problems on their opposition in vague terms and make everything a political fight with no transparency.
Featured image by Vladislav Babienko on Unsplash.
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Aristocats, reconfigured (11-22-21) from John Carlevale on Vimeo.
Aristocats band members Lloyd Kaplan (eader, saxophone, clarinet, vocals), Joe Holtzman (drums), Stan Holtzman (keyboard), and Dennis Pratt (bass, vocals) join host John Carlevale. After two years of not performing music due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the death of band member Nat Piccirilli, the Aristocats have regrouped and reconfigured. They are performing once again. We meet the newest member of the band and reconnect with former members. They perform some of greatest songs by some of the most famous writers of music. This special production is dedicated in memory of Nat Piccirilli, who appears at the end in a brief video of his last performance on State of the State at age 97.
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