We Don't Task By Email
Asheville Hungers for Money
Buncombe County is considering that most hateful of things to a government, cutting spending. What could drive such a drastic step?
Much of the estimated shortfall, which ranges from $15.1 million to $25.7 million, is tied to reduced sales tax revenue and unpaid property taxes. While state law doesn't allow property tax waivers due to natural disasters, the collection rate as of Jan. 13 was nearly 1% lower at the same time last year.
Anticipating that some property owners who sustained damage to their property will have difficulty paying their tax bill, paired with increased unemployment, the county is projecting property tax revenue to fall by 2-2.5% this year, resulting in a $4.8 million to $6.5 million loss. Property tax is the largest revenue stream for the county....
In November, Buncombe County’s Tourism Development Authority estimated that the county would see a 70% decline in tourism in the last quarter of 2024. For businesses, that could mean a $584 million loss in revenue, the Citizen Times previously reported.
The county is also projecting to receive up to $11.6 million less from the state and federal government, permitting and licensing, and other services like EMS fees.
Emphasis added.
I've been amazed by the tone of the journalism and remarks from government officials about the property taxes. 'You just owe us the money; it doesn't matter if you lost everything. It's the law! You've got to magic that money out of thin air for us, even though the property that your wealth was based upon was destroyed. We don't care that can't even borrow against it because it all washed away. We recognize that you may "have difficulty" paying us given that your life savings was destroyed, but by thunder we intend to get it. We passed a law!'
Meanwhile, note that the state and federal inputs are actually expected to decline by eight figures this year. It's not just that storm aid isn't coming (not to North Carolina; California is slated to get lots). The year-over-year inputs are being sharply reduced.
Again, though, this is ultimately for the good. Cutting government spending will be good for Asheville, as it will be for everywhere where we manage to get government spending cuts. A lot of it is public-sector salaries and hiring, which are inflated. They're also looking at the public school system, which really ought to be eliminated entirely and replaced with private/voucher systems. The public education system, like the prison system, has at this point become positively harmful to the civilization it purports to support. We'll be better off the more thoroughgoing the reform finally turns out to be.
Stoicism without Attribution
"Aristotle's Masterpiece"
Books explicitly designed for sexual education also existed in the period [i.e. Regency England]. One well-known work was the grandiosely titled Aristotle’s Masterpiece, first published in 1648 but regularly revised and reprinted throughout the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. (No connection to the ancient Greek philosopher is supported by the historical record.) The manual includes descriptions and diagrams of sexual anatomy, including an explanation of the clitoris as crucial to female pleasure.... Though Aristotle’s Masterpiece and its later editions were often published anonymously, print runs were high and the book sold extremely well — even when the medical information therein was considerably out of date.
One of the most consequential events in theology as a branch of philosophy followed a similar misattribution: Plotinus' work was translated into Arabic under the title "the Theology of Aristotle." In fact the Neoplatonic and Aristotelian metaphysics weren't even especially compatible, but the misattribution caused the Islamic philosopher Avicenna to spend a decade or so developing a system that harmonized them. This system was extremely helpful to later Christian philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, who wanted to incorporate rediscovered Aristotelian natural philosophy (i.e. science) into a Christian intellectual world that had strong Neoplatonic foundations thanks to some early saints. To this day, much of Catholic theology rests on Avicenna's work as reinterpreted by Aquinas and others.
It's not clear that this other work had a similarly titanic effect. Hopefully it improved some marriages, however, which is not a small thing for human happiness.
Good Girls
Orthosphere on Prison
In his 1896 biennial report to the Texas Legislature, the Superintendent of the State Penitentiary detailed the previous employment of the 4,446 convicts under his care.* I was interested to note that 9 of these jailbirds had been “ministers of the gospel,” which placed them on par with “barkeepers” (also 9), but well below “cigar makers” (3), “cowboys” (1), “prostitutes” (1), and even “journalists” (2).I would guess that Texas was then home to roughly the same number of barkeepers and ministers of the gospel, so we may suppose that the average moral quality of the men in these two professions was about the same. I can report, however, that the category “ministers of the gospel” came off better than that sump of turpitude and iniquity, the category of “school teachers.” Although statewide roughly equal in number to the ministers of the Gospel, pedagogues were incarcerated at nearly double their rate (17 total).
"Firefighters" wasn't a profession then, but it's pretty analogous to cowboying in many respects -- at least wildland firefighting like what is being discussed below, which has a lot of being outside, clearing land, and cutting fire breaks. Good for the soul, partly because it's real work for the body.
Cease-Fire in Gaza
A Barrage of Dodged Bullets
Build Back Better was a sweeping agenda of economic reform on the scale of the New Deal, meant to solidify its author as the “FDR-sized” president he wanted to be.
Dusting the text off now, you can feel that ambition. Across two bills — the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan — it sought to spend over $4 trillion across a decade.... an epochal expansion of government spending and ambition, on par with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal or Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.
Little of this became law, of course. The bipartisan infrastructure law enacted in 2021 included $250 billion in new transportation spending, less than half of the Jobs Plans’ number; even adding the $72 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act for electric vehicles doesn’t close the gap much. While the Jobs Plan included $1.6 trillion in climate spending, the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate measures are estimated to cost less than half that much. The CHIPS and Science Act passed in 2022 appropriated all of $79 billion to support manufacturing, a far cry from Biden’s $590 billion bid, and largely didn’t appropriate money for science at all. And then there’s the American Families Plan, almost all of which fell by the wayside, not passed by Congress in any form.
Imagine the inflation associated with this titanic flood of Federal spending. What we got was bad enough. Your dollar wouldn't have been worth anything if all that planned print-money spending had been dropped into the market.
When I think of the 'Build Back Better' slogan, I always remember this video.
When reforms work the way they're supposed to
Rehabilitation through Firefighting
A Liberal Struggles
Beginning with the oil crisis of the 1970s, an abyss slowly opened up between a credentialed elite and an uncredentialed working class whose steady union jobs were stripped out and shipped overseas. Those of us who got the credentials to enter the professional classes did well, but plenty of our fellow citizens fell behind. We didn’t notice this in time, and our failure opened up a chasm between who we were, what we believed and the people we represented. We kept offering “equality of opportunity,” a chance for the credentialed few to enter the professional elite, without tackling capitalism’s remorseless distribution of economic disadvantage itself.
In the meantime, we lament the “identity politics” of our populist and authoritarian competitors, when it would be more honest to admit that identity is where all political belief actually comes from, including our own. My identity — charter member of the White professional classes of Canada — defined my liberalism. What the liberal critique of identity politics does get right, though, we owe to our much-maligned individualism. Identity is not destiny....We were naive about the nature of this problem [of increasing diversity], preferring to believe that all reasonable human beings would embrace a revolution of inclusion, when the reality was that our generation had upended the entire social order, and even our own place in it. Diversity — of gender, sexual orientation, race, religion and class — was a virtue in comparison to the dire cantonment of peoples in silos of exclusion, but liberals turned diversity into an ideology. Once an ideology, it quickly became a coercive program of invigilation of speech and behavior in the name of dignity and respect.Credentialed White people of my generation welcomed the revolution because we could invite recruits of color into our ranks without ever feeling that our own elite status was being challenged. We didn’t seem to notice that nonelite White people were threatened, even betrayed, by the new multiracial order. Faced with what we thought was White racism and sexism, when it was mostly fear, we began promulgating codes of speech and conduct to impose diversity as a new cultural norm.... Worst of all, we censored ourselves, willingly turning off our bullshit detectors and stilling the inner doubts that might have made us confront our mistakes.
Tyranny, in other words, imposed with a clean conscience because they thought it was the best thing for everybody. A tyranny gladly accepted even over one's own thoughts, even when the ideas being presented were -- as the author himself says -- fairly obvious bullshit.
We began promoting arguments as true based on the gender, race, class, origins or backstory (oppression, discrimination, history of family violence) of the person uttering them. The value that we placed on diversity and inclusion led us by stages to jettison a care for truth itself. We ended up compromising the very epistemological privilege that had provided us with such unending self-satisfaction.
Again, a fairly healthy process even if it is badly motivated. It doesn't approach the questions that are of increasing interest to me, which is whether or not power itself is the problem -- a thing never to be trusted to anyone, however grand their ideas and serious their self-reflection, but always to be distributed as widely as possible to avoid the evils of its concentration. It is better that power should be placed in the hands of the virtuous, if it must be placed in any hands at all; but it might be better still to prevent such concentrations.
Few men are good enough to rule themselves, and perhaps none fit to rule others; even this man admits to serious errors and misjudgments affecting the whole of society, which he and they carried on with until the wheels came off. Only now does he pause and reflect, and only for the purpose of getting the power back.
An Honest Piece on Alcohol
The report describes the relationship between alcohol and cancer in different ways: the number of new cases of cancer a year in the United States potentially related to alcohol consumption (roughly 100,000); the number of annual cancer deaths that might be attributed to alcohol (roughly 20,000, compared to nearly 200,000 cancer deaths attributable to smoking); the increase in absolute risk for developing alcohol-related cancers (a 2.5-percentage-point increase for women and a 1.5-percentage-point increase for men); and the relative risk for specific cancers, such as breast cancer (one study suggests that a drink a day increases a woman’s risk by 10 percent).But it’s hard for individuals to translate statistics to their own lives. A small increase in relative risk is difficult to make meaningful, even for people who understand what “relative risk” means. (It doesn’t mean a 10 percent risk of breast cancer; it means women who drink may be 10 percent more likely to get breast cancer than women who don’t.)There are many other open questions that might seem important to a person deciding whether to change her habits: Is a glass of wine as carcinogenic as a daily martini? Does it matter how old you are when you start or stop drinking? And perhaps most important, do you lower your cancer risk if you quit drinking tomorrow, regardless of your age? The answers to all of these questions are unclear.
Equal Protection
Triumphant, Broken America
Snowfall
It has begun. We're expecting, according to the weather service, somewhere between 2 inches and a foot of snow. Given how unpredictable the weather is in these mountains, I believe that delta is the best they can do. I spent the morning putting chains on trucks to get ready for possible emergency operations, but I hope to spend the weekend not going anywhere. Snow is a rare treat even in the mountains of the Southern Appalachians, so I hope that we will get to enjoy it.