Buckling Up For Your Own Good (and theirs too)

According to the Brant News today, 16,000 people in Brantford were detained and searched without a warrant this month…impressive.

Of course, that’s not exactly the wording of the original article.

We certainly have short memory spans. As recently as 40 years ago, any kind of “seat belt law” was considered an obnoxious invasion of liberty. But under the guise of “safety”, we have become very accustomed to laws that allow bureaucrats to dictate and mandate the devices we use for health care purposes. The promises of significantly reduced highway fatalities and lower insurance rates quickly found its way into the memory hole as the studies showed mixed results for the former and no impact on the latter.

Worse still, the “safety lobby” got its real start in the early 80’s, a coalition of the auto giants and insurance companies who were faced with pending legislation to install air bags, a hassle and expense they resisted. Transportation regulators hinted that if the safety lobby could pressure the government to pass seat belt laws, the industry could thereby pass the costs of its regulations to the consumer and taxpayer instead in the form of fines and higher insurance rates. This partially backfired for the auto makers and insurers since air bags were eventually mandated anyway, and costly lawsuits for the malfunction of seat belts as well as air bags have resulted (the costs for both, of course, went to the consumer). But it was an unqualified success for the state and an excellent example of the gradual growth of government power.

It began with a compromise, seat belt laws would only impact drivers who were already “bad” (stopped for other infractions) in what was called “secondary enforcement”. But of course, lobbyists continued to chip away at those limitations, and typical of the growth patterns of the regulatory state, soon enough, check points were set up with the express intent of checking specifically for seat belt infractions (and any other violations spotted during the visual search), a free surveillance/cost cutting service for the insurance companies and a permanent source of new tax revenue.

"Illegal Smokes"

Submitted today to the Brantford Expositor___

Every once in a while, an editorial such as Christina Blizzard’s rants about the “dangers” of black market cigarettes (“Revenue and lives up in smoke”, April 10). The motives are usually easy to discern, if not the logic. It’s not about native sovereignty; it’s about nicotine addiction among young children, she claims. Somehow, it is believed that teenage smoking can be reduced by drafting convenience store clerks as unpaid babysitters, an extension of moms “watchful eye”. The problem, of course is that the age verification stickers on the cash registers, and the tax inflated prices of regulated tobacco does not discourage teen smoking, but merely shifts it underground and beyond the view of caregivers.

No doubt, having the government relieve caregivers of their parental authority and responsibility is the bottom line for some, but this alone does not explain a crusade aimed not at tobacco, but specifically against cheaper, unlicensed cigarettes.

There is, of course the “lost tax revenue”; public service propaganda designed to recruit the average taxpayer as a stakeholder in defense of the tobacco cartel, despite the fact that the state can always compensate for “lost taxes” by looting someone else. So who are the real beneficiaries of this hand wringing over the “illegal trade” in smokes, and whose interests are really at stake? Why, it’s the tobacco cartel itself, and its efforts to use the state to restrain the informal, underground trade in cigarettes. It’s a turf war, all in the name of “the children”, of course.

Indeed, Illegal tobacco is big business. But legal tobacco, protected by regulations and licensing, is an even bigger business with the tax funded resources to suppress its competitors. Supported by a coalition of retail, state sponsored charities and corporate interests, big tobacco mounts an impressive “public health” campaign that attempts to teach us all about how a drop in their market share is not just bad for your health, but a threat to western civilization itself.

As the formal, regulated tobacco cartel collapses under its own weight, native “smoke shacks”, as they are called, are part of the process of reindustrialization, of reduced overhead and less burdened supply chains and networks. It is the free market, seeping through the cracks of the corporate state.

Ending the Land Claims Mess in 3 Steps

Of course, it won't be satisfying to those with a vested interest in altering the balance of government power and the redistribution of wealth and real estate, but it strikes at the heart of the matter and is the only way of "resolving" the issue to the least detriment of all innocent parties concerned.

1. Abolish the racist Indian Act.

2. Dissolve the Department of Indian and Northern affairs and end the reserve system.

3. Currently, approximately 11% of the land mass in Ontario (example) is privately owned; the remaining 89% either houses government bureaucracy or federally administered "crown lands" (the bulk of the land being the latter). Open all such land to private homesteading, and amend the Bill Of Rights to acknowledge full property rights for all Native *individuals*, including the right of homesteading and voluntary (not managed by the state) mutual aid associations.

Done. Cost to the taxpayer: $0

More Adu about Nothing

Monday morning, the legal teams return to court to seek a ruling on whether there will be an injunction on native "protests" at development sites in Brantford. Of course, we have had essentially an interim injunction for some time now, largely unenforced, to address these protests. And in March last year, we had this strange impasse:

Justice Harrison Arrell issued an interim order telling natives to stop protesting, and Brantford to not enforce its anti-protesting bylaws for two months.

Which I always thought was more than a little superfluous. If natives stopped protesting, no such enforcement would be necessary or even meaningful. So why not just reword the interim order as "stop protesting", period? The above is more like telling a perpetrator, "if you don't break the law, we won't charge you with a crime". Huh?

The Gift that Keeps Taking

Brantford’s most cherished myth. The “rebirth” of the core brought by the University complex seems to have taken on the status of a legend. It’s one of those things you have to convince yourself of, through a desperate ritual. The ritual has to do with confusing causes with effects. You pour money into a big whole, so a crowd of people come and scoop it up. So you dig deeper and throw more money in it. More people dive in, and soon after, you think the party you’ve thrown now has it’s own momentum. The problem is, people are being forced to dig this whole deeper and repeatedly, with the proviso that in exchange for this, the recipients promise to devour it quickly and in as large quantities. An investor who does with his own money is called a fool. A politician who does this with your money is called a “wise city planner”.

Anyone who believes that government stimulus spending is the engine of economic growth will laud the expansion of the tax funded University complex, and naturally the more tax money and real estate siphoned from residents to hand over to it’s new privileged class represents “progress”, no matter how many downtown shops close, and no matter how many low income families line up at the queue for public housing and drop off the EI rolls. The University complex just needs “one more” grant here, just “one more” expropriated building there. The revitalization is a 'raging success', but it stands to be derailed by any interruption in the conveyor belt that delivers the resources of this city into the hands of the University system . There’s that Orwellian refrain that the revitalization, the “rebirth” needs to be completed.

There’s another possibility. It never happened.

Earth Hour at Timmies

Tim Hortons has posted notices that it will participate in Earth Hour by reducing it's energy consumption during that hour. So by all means, don't expect toasted bagels, and do expect to nuke your lukewarm coffee when you get home. I'm sure the cash registers will be running on full though, with backup power if needed.

Debunking Brantford's "Hoover Myth"

You know, that myth that Hoover sat by and did nothing to prevent the great depression. Very wrong.

Well of course, we have our own municipal version of the Hoover Myth, and it goes something like this. Despite the (heroic at best and misguided at worst) efforts of successive city councils, the private sector allowed the south side to deteriorate, and government must come to the rescue.

Like me, you might not have seen this Expositor article, written a couple of years ago. Of course, true to the mainstream media and it's worship of power, it focuses on the "frustration" of good natured politicians trying to revive a sagging downtown, but unwittingly demonstrates a little more:

Contrary to popular impression, Steve Kun and others sought to transition from a commercial to a residential use of their properties:

In 1997, following a report entitled Downtown: A Time for Action, prepared by by the mayor's task force on downtown revitalization, zoning regulations for the downtown were changed in an interim control bylaw to allow commercial property owners to change their street level storefront space to residential.

The rationale was that the inability of the private sector to attract commercial investment had reached the point that any kind of development would be better to ensure some kind of use and occupation of the property rather than to leave it vacant and boarded up.

Of course, governments are usually the last to figure anything out, and for them it's either one designated "use" at a time:

In late 2004, though, as downtown revitalization gathered steam and property values began to rise, council and the Downtown BIA became concerned when landlords began to convert isolated individual storefronts to less desirable residential units not in keeping with its plan.

"The continuing trend of street-level residential uses has the potential to further negatively impact prospective development in the downtown core area," says the resulting staff report in June 2005.

So yet another zoning change to reinstate the ban on residential use at ground level was passed, but not on Kun, who had his previous permits grandfathered in (fortunately, since this would have driven up vacancy rates even more). This created a problem for the city:

The renovations were carried out gradually during 2006 and this year, so that most of the units were done and occupied by the time G.K. York's civic square private development and the public square reached completion. The two radically different forms of development are now fully apparent.

"The city is in no position to press its concern about all these ground-floor apartments, as long as they comply with property standards, the building code and other bylaws, " said Matt Reniers, the city's manager of policy planning and heritage.

Bylaws and property standards were not enforced? It sounds like the problem was they were being obeyed, so the city had to try another tack:

Again, quoted Mr. Reniers:

"They are considered a legal non-conforming use, so we don't have much control on that.

"About the only way the situation can be changed is if those buildings are demolished; they could be determined a discontinument of their present use, and any future development would have to adhere to the new bylaw."

And the rest is history. As I've said previously, the south side of Colborne was a stubborn holdout to the city governments "grand vision", so to punish it (and us), it must now be flattened.

"Culture" in Brantford?

I understand and sympathize with the idea of reinvigorating the downtown. My only criticism, and a very general one at that, is that cultural rebirth cannot be combined with the *decivilizing* influence of political pandering and reliance on civil authorities for implementation. There is a feedback loop between creativity and prosperity, which has been interrupted by the unlimited state and its ever expanding network of stakeholders. Filtered through conventional mechanisms easily recognized by government bureaucracy, like action groups and delegates before council, real spontaneity and a shared sense of natural community is replaced by a kind of sanitized, pseudo, or even "counterfeit culture".

The solution, perhaps, is to think small scale, and to make every effort to *de*-centralize community involvement, to encourage an unbridled independence by emphasizing property rights as an absolute, rather than as a means to the “greater good”. The consequence of this kind of approach, I think, is that the neighborhood (almost obsolete now) is less “vertical” (with people looking to political authorities to plan from above), and more “horizontal” (with people increasingly looking to natural authorities, and each other, for enlightenment). Instead of culture as a cause of a city’s rebirth, it is a result.

Eagles; Some of them can be Jerks Too

Much has been made of a remark by Councillor Ceschi-Smith to the effect that the bald eagles are "a nuiscance". Blogger Mary O'Grady is fuming about it as we speak.

Why is it so beyond the pale of respectable conversation to suggest such a thing? I didn't actually hear the heretical comment myself, and I am more inclined to think of the hubris of those self-appointed "protectors" as the real irritant, but it wouldn't hurt to consider that some birds might be jerks too, just like people.

A Do-it-Yourself Blackout

Another "Earth Hour" approaches. Apparently the goal is to make this a monthly affair, with this month's hour of power (or non-power) being Sat. March 27.

The objective? To "raise awareness" of the efforts to combat climate change. Think about it, what it would mean *literally* to prevent "climate change". Let's take on planetary rotation and reduce the number of sunspots too.

Earth hour has become something of a religious sacrament; a burnt offering to seek absolution from Gaia for ones "carbon footprint".

And it's a cool excuse for teenagers to text and grope each other in the dark while singing Kumbaya.

So where will you be during this months "Earth Hour"? I will be looking for televised coverage. In a room illuminated, of course, only by the sample CFL bulb received in a mass mailing. So I guess that kind of counts.