Fire Hydrant of Freedom

My take - I do not think of this as a "Dem" issue or another reason why you should fear Obama.  It may suit the conservative urge to blame the ideology of the "other side".  To find further fault with the someone you already do not like, trust, or agree with.  They have a face and a name and make an easy target for your discontent.  Too easy.

Rather this is a Big-Government-out-of-control problem.   And it would not make any difference who is in the White House.

Government is an institution.  Like all institutions, it is self-preserving.  The checks and balances are essential and must be maintained.  Otherwise the institution starts to act in its own interests.  Pure faceless mechanics.

As mentioned in the previous thread (Political Economics), the Harper government in Canada just dropped corporate taxes by 1.5% to 15%.  That will equate roughly to 33 billion annually given back to Canadian corporations.

Harper has recently been complaining about the 3/4 trillion sitting in corporate coffers stagnant - most enterprises sitting back during the rough economic times to hold onto their surpluses.  This break will allow them to hold even more money stagnant. 

The assumption seems to be that corporations are going to spend us out of tough times by growing, investing, and otherwise freeing up those stagnant funds.  But that does not really seem to be happening.  Like spooked consumers, they are sitting on the money to see how this plays out.  Which of course just drags out the recovery.

In the case of consumers, you can sometimes get them to start spending even when they probably should remain cautious or work hard at reducing their debt.  Corporations on the other hand are run by some of the most saavy financial types to be found.  They know better than most when to move and when to sit still (although no guarantee of good sense).  And you can expect corps to do what is best whether they get a tax break or not.

I can see the long term benefit of tax breaks - attracting more foreign business, encouraging investment and innovation, etc.  But in a stale or limping economy where the future is uncertain, I do not see why this is a good move, at least in the short term.  Why would corps start spending significantly under these circumstances?  The only real use of corp reserves seems to be the usual M&A activity that accompanies a slow economy.

So is there any reasonable expectation that lowered corp taxes will help jump start an ailing economy?

Tricky checking in after being away for the holidays.  Thanks to Crafty for forwarding a short reply I made on the Canadian situation.

While I am likely of another ideological stripe than many of you (judging from the rhetoric), I am far more interested in the ground truth - and good critical thinking - than odiously repeating any dogma.  Regardless of whether one personally appreciates the recent actions of our government, one can hardly attribute Canada's strong economic state to them.  There simply has not been enough time to show the consequences.

Check back in 5-10 years once the effects from the changes have filtered down through the economy.  And through the social fabric.

If you want to look at the current evidence as indication of anything, consider that the strong banking regulatory environment (established long ago by more liberal governments) is in part responsible for our solid footing.  And that we are a heavily resourced country with high international demand, particularly from Asia where we have very strong ties.  And that we in Canada have not experienced the same degree of instability because we are not as free-market based (even if you take a Friedmannian view that they are not free enough and any issues arising are due to the extant limitations) as the US.  Our relatively strong system of checks and balances has meant that we could ride this period out with less direct and collateral damage.

The Harper government only just achieved a majority last fall - they have been riding a minority government for several years - so it would be misleading to read the current signs as if their policies of the last few months are responsible.  Prior to that, the centrist (for Canada) Liberal government was in power for decades and was primarily responsible for most of the current policy and our economic position.  So if you want to find something laudable about our strength, look a bit further back in our history instead of singling out decisions made in the last 2 months.  It takes years to define a stable economic position.

Of course, one of the things the current Harper government is in the process of doing is dismantling many of those shielding mechanisms - the 67 year old Canadian Wheat Board (which buys from all wheat farmers and represents them on the international market) has just been killed off.  Harper is certainly a fan of free(r) markets and believes this change long over due.  And let's check back in 10 years and see if we are all that better off.

He is also dismantling our long gun registry (being contested by the provinces), introducing a new hard-on-crime bill (without explaining how the significant new costs will be borne - and despite the general view that the same approach has failed in the US, economically as well as socially), backing out of climate change commitments, turning away from the UN, and building up our military.

Which may sound like an attractive cup of tea - but note that he is simultaneously severely limiting debate in Parliament, raising personal taxes (as mentioned), reorganized the Senate by adding 35 new appointed senators, reducing the transparency and accountability of the government (e.g. closing committee meetings to the public watchdogs who are supposed to oversee and report on the government), dropping our detailed census (that provides facts for effective public policy), and committing the country to expensive, non-economic programs (e.g. military spending, military activity, new prisons, border security unification) without proper accounting and in the face of mounting debt. 

Note that, although the government holds majority in House and Senate, they only won 40% of the popular vote - and yet they regularly claim a mandate from the people as the justification for rushing bills through without more than cursory debate.

So before anyone including the media starts cherry-picking facts from our experience and imagining a causal relationship with our economic performance, I would encourage you to research a little deeper.

There is a bald irony present:  When our healthcare system was being referenced as a possible model for the US, most (including myself) were quick to say that Canada has a very different scale and nature.  Any comparisons would hardly be appropriate or meaningful.  But now that the actions of our current government align ideologically with a more conservative approach, Canada suddenly becomes a model for the US or proof of the value of a particular viewpoint?  That is convenient and selective, not critical, thinking.

The media needs to take a cold bath.

As has been said clearly, the result is reproducible and therefore "puzzling" - and so the group at CERN have offered up their data to other groups to confirm (or deny).  The natural course of science.  The speed of light limit is a long-standing principle (if you call 100 years "long") and represents a significant challenge to the scientific status quo.  But note that nothing will fall apart or become more or less true should this result stand - even if it does turn out that neutrinos are "breaking the law", like so many revelations in scientific discovery it will simply mean developing newer and better models that account for everything we have seen to date plus this.

This is currently in the realm of "science fiction" - or at least "science speculation".

In gravitation, Newton was proved "wrong".  Then Einstein.  And I'm sure one day Hawkings will also fall to the latest and best description of gravitation.  We all know that we haven't been able to include gravitation properly into the unified theory.  It may be because there is some subtlety about space-time that we haven't accounted for.  This may help us uncover it.

It's exciting frankly.  I don't know why the media portrays it as threatening.  No scientist thinks that they know the ultimate truth about life the universe and everything.  Science is a series of models - not some stranglehold on truth about reality.  Any scientist who believes otherwise should be shown the door.  In fact, challenging existing canon is a natural consequence of what every critical thinking scientist should be doing - albeit not gratuitously.  It's good science (remember, this is not a religion, despite our tendencies).

In this circumstance, unambiguously, the first position taken is that they must be making systematic errors and they want another group to check it independently.  Good scientific process.  Until that is done, this is like a UFO sighting - possibly something revolutionary but much more likely something quite banal and well understood - a mistake in scientific preparation and/or analysis.  Occam's Razor at work.

The media is like some crazed terrier who goes barking madly up and down the hallway every time it hears a floorboard creak.  You need a new dog.

Update:  From the UK Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/23/physicists-speed-light-violated:

Professor Jim Al-Khalili at the University of Surrey said it was most likely that something was skewing the results. "If the neutrinos have broken the speed of light, it would overturn a keystone theory from the last century of physics. That's possible, but it's far more likely that there is an error in the data. So let me put my money where my mouth is: if the Cern experiment proves to be correct and neutrinos have broken the speed of light, I will eat my boxer shorts on live TV."

Update:  XKCD skewers the issue

XKCD http://xkcd.com/

As it happened, I was reading an analysis of the role  of mythology in scientific undertakings (a personal favorite of mine) and found a passage that exemplified some of what I was just referring to in the previous post:

While many myths simply try to give form to our own past, others are intended to be both descriptive and prescriptive. Like laws of nature, they must hold true everywhere and for all time. Their adherents can brook no alternative perspective. The tendency to settle prematurely on a particular outlook is exacerbated in the guild system of health care. The practitioner must not be seen as equivocating, and the field as a whole must not be seen as thoroughly divided in its core orientation. Science is unitary, and in order to appear scientific, at least provisional assent must be yielded to a unitary vision. Such a unitary vision is likely to start out as largely myth.

The aspirational social sciences have a particular problem here because it is so difficult for a proposition to rise to the level of established fact or theory. Indeed one can sympathize with political scientist Clinton Rossiter who declaimed at one point: “I believe this so strongly that it almost becomes a fact.” Instead these fields move forward by consensus. If reasonable consensus is achieved within a discipline, then provisional scientific validity is simply claimed. The Diagnostic Statistical Manual of psychiatry is perhaps the best exemplar of this process at work. The science behind it is meager, but that becomes a non-issue in the face of general acquiescence to the DSM formalism. What we have here, plain and simple, is myth masquerading as science.

We actually have a ready diagnostic to distinguish myth disguised as science from actual science. If a particular proposition brings forth strong emotions in its defense, then we are dealing with myth. One can be sure that no one mounts the ramparts on behalf of Newton’s Laws of Motion.

Siegfried Othmer - from Wagner, Myth and the Brain

Active social mythology is not given significant attention in my view.  But that's another post another time.