Catallaxy Files

Antonin Scalia was an associate Justice of the US Supreme Court. Although Spartacus is not a legal scholar or lawyer (recall prior disclosure about being able to see his reflection in a mirror), Spartacus considers the late Justice Scalia was on of the best Supreme Court judges ever.

Nominated to the Supreme Court in 1986 by President Ronald Reagan, Justice Scalia also holds a special place in Spartacus’ heart because it was Scalia’s words that inspired Spartacus to write (to the extent that what he produces is actually “writing”).

In response to an interviewer question about whether he ever penned a reply letter to a newspaper or other hostile correspondence, Scalia replied that he has written many letters in response; and then binned them all. That, for Spartacus, was the invitation to put finger to keyboard.  Many years of Spartacus’ written rants also went into the bin.

Justice Scalia unexpectedly died in February 2016 and his replacement to the US Supreme Court was a political battle of the highest order. It could be argued that the battle to replace Justice Scalia contributed in some way to the election of President Donald Trump.

Upon his death, President Obama nominated Merrick Garland as his replacement. And so commenced a 12 month battle for the control of the US Supreme Court.

The US Constitution requires that Supreme Court Justices (and many other roles) be nominated by the President and confirmed by the US Sentate. The majority leader of the Senate then as now was Senator Mitch McConnell. Senator McConnell refused to even allow a hearing to consider the nomination of Judge Garland on the basis that it was an election year and the 45th President, whomever it would be, should be allowed to nominate the successor to Justice Scalia, rather than the lame duck 44th President (Obama).

It was a high risk strategy given the then expectations of a Hillary Clinton presidency.

To cut a long story short, Judge Garland was not appointed and Judge Neil Gorsich was. Many commentators have suggested that the appointed of Gorsich to the US Supreme Court has possibly been the most important, most consequential and most lasting decision made President Trump. At least so far.

But back to Justice Scalia.

Over the holidays, Spartacus has been reading a book on the collected speeches of Justice Scalia. It is called Scalia Speaks and here it is. Spartacus is perhaps 2/3 through, but the last speech read was by Scalia given in Poland in 2009. The speech was titled Mullahs of the West: Judges as Moral Arbiters. A copy of this speech is available here.

Like pretty much all of Scalia’s writings, the speech was clear, crisp and beautifully argued.

Obviously there are differences between the governing model of Australia and the US, but notwithstanding, Spartacus would commend this relatively short document to all Cats. Here is a small sample – connected but not contiguous sentences:

In the first half of the last century, American political theory was obsessed with the expert. The key to effective government, it was thought, was to take the direction of government agencies out of the hands of politicians, and to place it within the control of men experienced and knowledgeable within the various fields of government regulation.

….

It is fair to say that the project was a grand failure – for two basic reasons. First, and most important, it was discovered (and this should have been no surprise) that many of the most important issues to be decided by government agencies – even agencies dealing with seemingly technical fields such as telecommunications and transportation-have no right or wrong answers that experts can discover. They involve social preferences which, in a democracy, can only be expressed through the political process.

Australian energy, telecommunications and what other policies have been handed over to the “experts”.

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The following is a condensed version of an article I have had published in Quadrant on-line

The Australian broke a story about dissension in the Coalition ranks regarding the “in principle” decision, announced by Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg, to allow Australian firms to acquit their carbon dioxide emission obligations by buying overseas credits. 

Mr Frydenberg said this merely advanced a decision to “consider” these measures taken when Tony Abbott was at the helm.  And when Mr Abbott and others denounced the option of overseas emissions purchases, which will, of course, be either totally bogus or downright fraudulent, Minister Frydenberg made a smart-alec comment: “It is worth noting that Mr Abbott’s position on international permits is closer to the Greens than that of Australia’s big employers.”

Perhaps Minister Frydenberg was simply trying to claim a continuity of support for what he saw as the least-worst option available to him, but bagging his former leader made him appear to be undermining a rival to his likely and widely mooted ambition of becoming the next leader of the Liberal Party.

Faced by the reverence of Mr Turnbull, and his departmental head, Martin Parkinson, for wind and solar energy, the Frydenberg strategy has been to ensure the costs of the policy are fully understood, including requiring the inherent unreliability of “renewable” plant is recognised by forcing those contracting to buy it also to buy a “firming” contract as insurance for when it is unavailable.  This feeds into the National Energy Guarantee, which will allegedly provide us reliable energy at $110-115 per MWh (a little over twice the price that would be available under the coal-based system now being deliberately destroyed).  It will also provide a pathway to meeting Australia’s targets under the Paris Climate Change Agreement which specify emission reductions of 26%-28% (50-52 per cent per capita) on 2005 levels by 2030.

The progress on that path — how each year’s target will be set and what disciplines will enforce it — are all left unexplained.

These matters take on an ethereal nature when set against the reality of international developments.  Now that Trump has taken the US out of the Paris Agreement, countries having agreed to abatement measures account for only one quarter of global emissions.  Even their one-quarter share of emissions overstates their importance since any carbon taxing actions they take will ensure their energy-intensive industries shift to developed countries with no carbon taxes.  Australia is already seeing this with the departure of aluminium smelters, previously the nations’ paramount manufacturing sector (Kurri Kurri in NSW and Point Henry in Victoria have already closed).

Compounding this is the actions of President Trump in making the US more business friendly.  Not only has the president rejected the Paris Agreement, reversing the Obama Era restraints on coal and gas, but his taxation reforms and deregulatory agendas are proving extremely attractive.  The Pratt organisation, the Visy group of companies, has committed to a $2 billion expansion of its US pulp and paper business. Australia is too uncompetitive for the Pratts to make such an investment at home.

The search is on for palliatives to the damage from wind and solar.  The Prime Minister’s favoured Snowy 2 pumped-hydro plan was initially costed at $2 billion.  But the feasibility study puts this at $4 billion, with one observer estimating an outcome price at over $8 billion for a largely worthless investment.

Australia seems a long distance from adopting the novel Trump solution of allowing the market to operate freely and without subsidies, a system that at the turn of the present century gave us the cheapest electricity on earth.

Further to Spartacus’ rant the other day about the pathway to the elimination of cash, consider the evolution of self driving cars.

Lets us not fool ourselves. Self driving cars are coming.  Don’t believe Spartacus. Listen to Bob Lutz, a former vice chairman and head of product development at General Motors and also former senior executive with Ford, Chrysler, BMW and Opel. According to Mr Lutz:

The end state will be the fully autonomous module with no capability for the driver to exercise command. You will call for it, it will arrive at your location, you’ll get in, input your destination and go to the freeway.

We are not there yet, but it is not a matter of technology.  The technology is pretty much here already.  What is not yet developed is the social and regulatory architecture.

Consider for example a car hurtling along when a young child runs out in front. There is not sufficient time or space for the car to stop and its only options are either to hit the child or to swerve away and hit another car killing its occupants. What should the driver do?

With a human driver, given the limited time to decide, the driver will revert to instinct or reflex and the outcome would have a randomness to it.  But with self driving cars, the car’s computer would be programmed to make pre-determined assessments. The car’s response could be random or the car’s response would be to preserve other drivers on the road or to preserve the child.  The self driving car’s computer may even have an algorithm that estimates the age of the “road runner” and may have different options depending on the age of runner.  These decisions would need to be decided and coded in advance. And the legislative and insurance architecture would need to be in sync.

But consider if all the cars on the road were self driving. In the scenario above, the car could swerve away from the child and the other car will synchronously swerve away too, thus protecting everyone. But that synchronization could only happen if both cars are self driving.

And so it will be argued that it is safer for everyone if no-one drives and so for this and other reasons governments will outlaw human driving. Fewer accidents. Less traffic because of speed and navigation optimisation across cars.

So now with every single payment and receipt being tracked and logged because of the elimination of cash, most every single movement will be tracked and logged also. And in a bonus, because the transport will have to be paid for, the payment for the movement will also be tracked and logged.

Now there are clearly some pluses to this. No more traffic fines. No more parking fines. No more parking meters. But don’t think for a second that state and local governments will re-engineer themselves for a lower tax revenue life. Perhaps they will start selling your movement data.

But the big state is about to get even bigger.  All in the name of consumer outcomes.

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