Barrel Strength

When I find the National Post getting soft I turn to the Financial Post for the really conservative market-oriented view. Its castigations of the global warming con job have been a source of amusement and great comfort. By contrast, its views on telecommunications have been economically illiterate.

The Financial Post’s  (or its lead editorialist Terence Corcoran’s) view of telecommunications has been: we have enough competition now to deregulate. Two competitors in the general area, cable and telephone, are enough, and three is a sufficient cause to leave the market alone. No attention needs to be paid to the market conditions in a particular place; it is sufficient that competitors exist in the same urban area, regardless of whether your building is served by one or two carriers. Mandated sharing of facilities, where the big incumbents must share facilities with ISPs, is just “telecom trotskyism”, in the glorious invective of Terrence Corcoran.

Thus it was with interest I read “Abolish the Canadian rail monopoly” by François Tougas in today’s Financial Post. Tougas is a senior lawyer at Lang Michener and an adjunct professor of competition policy at the UBC Faculty of Law - not a likely candidate for Trotskyism.

Tougas says:
“The best way to regulate a natural monopoly is to introduce competition by allowing others (a “guest” railway, in this case) to access the track infrastructure of the incumbent (the “host” railway) to vie for the business. Modern economies already do this with other network industries like telecom, cable and electricity and gas distribution.”

But where barriers to entry are “tremendously high”, says Tougas, railways are able to carry on free from competition. Where you cannot build a rival rail-line, the existing regulatory remedies available to captive shippers are insufficient. There is no market. Tougas recommends “running rights” - the right to pass your traffic over the lines of another railroad, using someone else’s railcars, and paying them a regulated rate for the privilege. Otherwise there occurs an unjust transfer of wealth from industries to carriers.

There is no difference in principle between “running rights” in the railway case and “access to underlying facilities” in telecommunications. Why then does the Financial Post rail at Professor Michael Geist (and by extension, all the companies which benefit from sharing of underlying facilities, such as MTS-Allstream) as Trotskyites, and Professor Tougas gets a free pass?

Are ideas made acceptable by their content, or by their provenance? Is what is good for natural resource producers in Flin Flon bad for businesses in Markham and Pierrefonds? Should the telephone companies and other carriers take a part of the profits of all electronic transactions, because they can? But railroads should not? One is tempted to think that the reason why different positions are taken by the Financial Post on the identical issue is that we can visualize railroads; we do not really have a precise mental image of networks.

For a further treatment of Terence Corcoran’s sadly mistaken views on intellectual property, see the comment by the economist Joseph Potvin on digital rights management.

I have maintained that the hostility shown by Human Rights Commissions towards Steyn and Levant comes from lawyers, some of whom drink deeply from poisoned wells on their passage through three years of law school.

The message being conveyed to the students who take courses from certain professors is that free speech is an American concept, which they are wrongfully exporting to Canada and other places through the usual instruments of cultural imperialism. Mr. Stacey of the federal branch of our human rights commissions was typical in his view that free speech was an “American doctrine”.

I cite as an example the essay found in (2003) 49 McGill Law Journal 59 by Professor Jane Bailey, “Private Regulation and Public Policy: Toward effective restriction of Internet hate Propaganda” as a pertinent example of the creeping abrogation of free speech in the name of “multiculturalism”, and “equality” that were enshrined in Trudeau’s 1982 Constitution. I argue that the consequences of that Constitution are being witnessed now in the prosecution of Steyn and Levant.

Read the rest…

UPDATE: It’s back! Click and enjoy!

Direct link to video on Youtube

Alas! The IP Lawyers probably saw that the long excerpt from a German version of Hitler’s last days in the bunker offended “fair use”. That is the most charitable interpretation I can give. The subtitles in English had nothing to do with the bunker, of course. They were a completely accurate rendition of the facts in the Warman-Jadewarr-Barabara Hall-CHRC imbroglios. Anyone with the source of this parodic film, please let me know ehere it can be found. It is too precious to be lost.

I think it was William Shirer in ‘Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’ who talked with a German who compared Adolf Hitler to the stock figure of the Heiratsschwindler, a confidence man who cheats widows and spinsters out of their little means with the promise of marriage. Like the marriage swindler, Hitler achieved his end by promising what he never intended and taking what could never be recovered. To me, the Heiratsschwindler is the human rights commissioner who swears to the truth of a glowing future against a guaranteed investment today. All will be well if you but surrender the right to think and speak and read and write. Within the marriage swindle, the crisis comes when the victim must assign all her assets to the custody of the mustachioed villain. At the first sign of resistance, the Heiratsschwindler gathers himself into a ball of principled and outraged fury to explode upon his victim. “How can you dare to doubt my integrity and my intentions? I give you the promise of love and assured financial security, based on the soundness of the investment scheme for which I need all your savings, more or less immediately and without conditions and certainly without troublesome questions which visibly upset me and delay our bliss.” Trust, indeed love, is the basis of the swindle but the closer is emotional blackmail of the basest kind. If you are not already acquainted with the sinister plans of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, I would urge you to study them without delay. This is the confidence trickster writ large.

These are excerpts from the Canadian Human Rights Commission Annual Report of 2007

Warman v. Wilkinson 2007 CHRT 27

In a decision rendered on July 10, 2007, the Tribunal upheld the complaint filed by Mr. Warman against Mr. Wilkinson but dismissed the complaint against the Canadian Nazi Party. The Tribunal found that Mr. Wilkinson communicated messages through a website that were likely to expose individuals to hatred and/or contempt on the basis of religion, sexual orientation, race, colour, national or ethnic origin, or disability. Read the rest…

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Wikileaks/

IN 1860, when the Confederate States of America established themselves, a constitution was passed that had several interesting features. “Congress was forbidden to pass a protective tariff or to appropriate money for internal improvements.” So wrote Shelby Foote in his magnificent “the Civil War: A Narrative” (at page 42). Now what could that mean, no appropriations for internal improvements? The pressing need was to settle the West. Railroads needed incentives to build out their infrastructure, as we would call it today. In the North, the withdrawal of the Southern Democrats, the then conservative party, freed the northern Yankee improvers to grant land to railways, endow colleges with state land, and to pass the Homestead Act, which gave 150 acres in freehold to any man or woman who settled and farmed a piece of land in the western states for three years. All these statutes were first passed in the years 1860-1865 when the South seceded. The Southern bottleneck that opposed the passage of progressive legislation voluntarily withdrew.

The Republicans were then the party of the North, of New England and its western colonies, such as Kansas, Ohio, Michigan and Minnesota. They were the progressive party. They were the ones pushing the slaveholding states into secession, by electing that Republican radical abolitionist (so the South thought), Abraham Lincoln. The colours of the parties were then appropriate to the traditional connotations of red and blue. Democrats - blue -conservative: Republicans - red - liberals. More than people care to recall these days, the US Civil War was a battle between progressive Republican New Englanders against conservative Southern Democrats. Can we agree that people who believe in the right to own slaves are conservative of an extreme interpretation of private property?

Read the rest…