Killing Commerce

Canada, Economy, Law

I import my beans freshly roasted from the fabulous JJ Bean Coffee in Vancouver, Canada. The place is charming and quaint—it sports a vintage 4-barrel Jabez Burns sample roaster. Back in the day, I used to love sipping a cup of the house blend and munching banana bread as I waited for my beans to be packaged.

The other day I was informed by JJ Bean’s insurance agent that the company’s goods will no longer be available in the US:

Legal liability laws in the US and Canada differ markedly with respect to consumer products. American product liability laws include ‘Strict Liability’ and this difference makes it prohibitively expensive for JJ Bean to continue with its US sales.
In Canada when a business sells a product, and that product causes harm to the consumer, the consumer must prove that the product caused the harm. In the US the onus of proof shifts onto the business owner, who must prove that he did not negligently cause the harm, something that is generally much more difficult to prove.
Accordingly, commercial legal liability insurance premiums in the US are much higher than in Canada, and if a Canadian business sells products into the US they are subject to these higher rates.

Because JJ Bean is a small franchise, it doesn’t generate enough business to support the steep overhead.

It is clear that Canadian law is far more compatible with the free market. American law is illiberal; it gums up trade, infantilizes Americans, and is tantamount to open season on business. What makes it particularly egregious is that, in the event that some malcontent initiates criminal proceedings against the company, the law leans toward a presumption of guilt, not innocence. Innocent until proven guilty; no crime without intent—now aren’t those supposed to be some of the foundations of the American judicial and constitution tradition?

Realism Or Racism? (& Excellence Vs. Offal)

English, Literature, Racism, The Zeitgeist

I never tire of commending—and recommending—the generally apolitical Times Literary Supplement for its intellectual rigor. I’m equally energetic when it comes to berating that bit of dreck, the New York Review of Books, for its pamphleteering. The latter’s obtuse art and book critiques, interspersed as they are with lengthy political essays on the undisputed purity of Hamas or Cuban-styled healthcare, fall into the category of agitprop.

In a preface to his review of two books dealing broadly with the fraught topic of racial—or what I term rational—profiling, the TLS’s James Bowman doesn’t disappoint. He quotes the former Education Secretary, William Bennett, who created an uproar by saying that,—If you wanted to reduce crime, you could—if that were your sole purpose—you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossibly ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.'”

“The remark,” observes Bowman matter-of-fact, “was widely characterized as ‘racist’ and President Bush was called upon to disavow the views of his fellow Republican—and he obliged with that new favorite substitute for moral judgement, the word ‘inappropriate.’ Yet while doubtless tactless—the sort of deliberate provocative comment that delights the philosophy professor, which is what Bennett used to be—his words had been in substance nothing more that a statement of the undisputed fact that in America black people proportionately commit more crimes than whites.” (My emphasis; Bowman’s words)

To underscore my original point, the TLS is generally liberal (although more classically so) but is committed to a heuristic pursuit of truth and excellence. The NYRB is left-liberal and dedicated to the crass promotion of specific political perspectives. If it reluctantly succumbs and discusses “the color of crime,” the “debate” is carefully in root-causes circumlocution and strictly confined to the Three P’s—the pale patriarchy, poverty, and powerlessness. No wonder the TLS is sophisticated and fascinating and the NYRB as pedestrian and dull as any good Bolshevik bulletin.

Realism Or Racism? (& Excellence Vs. Offal)

English, Literature, Racism, The Zeitgeist

I never tire of commending—and recommending—the generally apolitical Times Literary Supplement for its intellectual rigor. I’m equally energetic when it comes to berating that bit of dreck, the New York Review of Books, for its pamphleteering. The latter’s obtuse art and book critiques, interspersed as they are with lengthy political essays on the undisputed purity of Hamas or Cuban-styled healthcare, fall into the category of agitprop.

In a preface to his review of two books dealing broadly with the fraught topic of racial—or what I term rational—profiling, the TLS’s James Bowman doesn’t disappoint. He quotes the former Education Secretary, William Bennett, who created an uproar by saying that,—If you wanted to reduce crime, you could—if that were your sole purpose—you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossibly ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.'”

“The remark,” observes Bowman matter-of-fact, “was widely characterized as ‘racist’ and President Bush was called upon to disavow the views of his fellow Republican—and he obliged with that new favorite substitute for moral judgement, the word ‘inappropriate.’ Yet while doubtless tactless—the sort of deliberate provocative comment that delights the philosophy professor, which is what Bennett used to be—his words had been in substance nothing more that a statement of the undisputed fact that in America black people proportionately commit more crimes than whites.” (My emphasis; Bowman’s words)

To underscore my original point, the TLS is generally liberal (although more classically so) but is committed to a heuristic pursuit of truth and excellence. The NYRB is left-liberal and dedicated to the crass promotion of specific political perspectives. If it reluctantly succumbs and discusses “the color of crime,” the “debate” is carefully in root-causes circumlocution and strictly confined to the Three P’s—the pale patriarchy, poverty, and powerlessness. No wonder the TLS is sophisticated and fascinating and the NYRB as pedestrian and dull as any good Bolshevik bulletin.

Zoning Free Speech

Bush, Free Speech, Private Property

During a Memorial-Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery, the president expressed his “awe of the men and women who sacrifice for the freedom of the United States of America.” Earlier in the day, he had put his “awe” into action by signing

[T]he Respect for America’s Fallen Heroes Act, passed by Congress largely in response to the activities of a Kansas church group that has staged protests at military funerals around the country, claiming the deaths symbolized God’s anger at U.S. tolerance of homosexuals.
The new law bars protests within 300 feet of the entrance of a national cemetery and within 150 feet of a road into the cemetery. This restriction applies an hour before until an hour after a funeral. Those violating the act would face up to a $100,000 fine and up to a year in prison.

Bush honors so-called freedom fighters by limiting the freedom for which they allegedly fought? The Act, of course, is an extension of the suppression of peaceful assembly via “free speech zones,” perfected under Bush, and documented here by James Bovard.

The only acceptable limits on speech are 1) those proscribed by private property—you have no right to deliver a disquisition in my living room, unless I allow it. 2) When speech poses a “Clear and Present Danger,” for which the required threshold is extremely high, as it should be. (I’d say that limiting speech is so abhorrent that, to give but one example, the preferred course of action against imams who publicly preach and incite violence against Americans on American soil is deportation, not censorship.)