Price Regulation in Hispanic California

1977 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 613-629
Author(s):  
Robert R. Archibald

In the eighteenth century the Spanish Crown regarded the setting of maximum prices as a legitimate function. Price fixing was intended to guarantee a just price to producers and consumers. Underlying the entire scheme was a desire by the monarchy to insure the adequacy of the fixed incomes of government employees. Hispanic California provides a case study of price fixing. Fixed prices in California were of two varieties. Prices were limited on those goods coming from San Bias with a view to keeping the cost of living within the limits of military salaries in Alta California. In the late 1770’s, mission agriculture began to produce surpluses. For a number of years the only significant outlet for this excess was the military establishment. Because it removed the burden of providing staples from the Naval Department of San Bias, the Crown willingly turned to the missions as a source of supply. The missions gradually assumed the monopoly of provisioning the military, which had belonged to San Bias. In order to ensure that military salaries would suffice to keep body and soul together and to protect them from price gouging the government determined that price regulation was essential.

2021 ◽  
pp. 003802292110510
Author(s):  
Hassan Javid

Historically, despite the tremendous influence exerted by Islam on public life, religious parties and organisations have historically failed to do well at the ballot box, receiving an average of only 6% of votes cast in elections since the 1980s. Focusing on the case of the Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), a new Barelvi political party and social movement that has campaigned on the emotive issue of blasphemy since being formed in 2015, this article argues that the clientelistic, patronage-based nature of democratic politics in Punjab, coupled with factionalism and competition within the religious right, continues to play a role in limiting the electoral prospects of religious parties. Nonetheless, as was seen in the General Elections of 2018 in which the TLP outperformed expectations, there are particular circumstances in which the religious parties are able to make electoral breakthroughs. While the TLP was able to make effective use of populist rhetoric to garner some genuine support for itself, this article argues that the organisations sustained campaign of protests over the issue of blasphemy fed into broader efforts by the military establishment and opposition political parties to destabilise and weaken the government of the PML-N prior to the 2018 elections.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 93 (5) ◽  
pp. 777-777
Author(s):  
J. F. L.

Cynics argue that the reason Bill and Hillary Clinton pistol-whipped the drug industry over vaccine prices just days before the State of the Union was to intimidate the rest of U.S. industry into silence oven the tax-laden economic proposal. And the reason cynicism like this is coming back into vogue is that the Clintons, as elsewhere, had so transparently demagogued the vaccine issue, leaving huge and obvious parts of the immunization problem unmentioned ... A more honest explanation of the problem at least would have mentioned both the famous liability suits that pushed up the cost of vaccines and the government bureaucracy's own failed efforts to immunize the poor. That brings us to the second widely known reason that so many children don't receive the proper immunizations: The bureaucracy can't figure out how to get the job done. Any child in any state can receive free vaccines at a public-health clinic paid for by state and federal money. So why don't more parents respond? One large reason is that the public system is very inconvenient. Before they will administer a vaccination, many public-health clinics require a physician's referral or a complete physical. They don't phone with a reminder that it's time again for the shots. And, like the department of motor vehicles, their hours often aren't convenient for working parents .... So yes, there's a problem, but clearly it's about something more complicated than just price. The President's answer is to spend $300 million to "improve outreach efforts" and hire more staff for the public clinics.


Author(s):  
Elisheva A. Perelman

Chapter VI analyzes the arrival of the Young Men’s Christian Association in Japan and with it, the rise of the moral enterprise in evangelical work. For the Y.M.C.A., this meant balancing the need for converts in the nation with maintaining an amiable relationship with the Japanese government, both for the survival of the organization and for the presentation of powerful sponsorship to the home office of the Y.M.C.A. and its donors abroad. The organization found a successful niche with the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, serving as army workers on the front lines and on the home front. By ministering to soldiers, the Y.M.C.A. managed to ingratiate itself with both the military and the government, although these friendly ties did not eventuate in mass conversions to Christianity. Similarly, the work of the organization in the aftermath of the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 helped appease government naysayers. Nevertheless, these efforts were often at the cost of attention to problems like tuberculosis plaguing the Japanese state.


1975 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 317-327
Author(s):  
Robert P. Shay

When the officials at the British Treasury sat down to sketch out their proposals for the 1937 budget, they knew that they had a problem. During the previous year the Government had been forced to embark upon a costly five year rearmament program by the massive growth of the German military establishment, and the bills for that program were beginning to fall due. £180 million had been spent for defence in 1936, £60 million more than during the previous year, but £100 million less than the military services estimated would be necessary in 1937. The Services' estimate was in the words of Edward Bridges, a Treasury under-secretary, “a good deal higher than anything which I anticipated in my gloomier moments.” He knew, however, that there was little chance that it would be reduced. The question immediately at hand was where the funds could be found to pay for the burgeoning cost of defence not only in the coming year, but in the years to follow.Another Treasury under-secretary, Fredrick Phillips, estimated that they could not realistically expect to raise more than £180 million of the £280 million they required from existing taxation. Although the canons of orthodox finance, to which the Treasury usually adhered, dictated that taxes should be increased to meet the deficit, everyone at the Treasury realized that such a measure would extinguish the growing prosperity which the Government had so laboriously and successfully nurtured since the economic collapse of 1931. Reluctantly they decided to resort to the fiscal device which Neville Chamberlain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had once disparaged as “the broad road that leads to destruction”: borrowing.


1983 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Allan

Libya enjoyed steadily rising oil revenues after 1960 and became a significant member of the world's trading community. By 1980, oil revenues were over US $20 bn and these enabled development spending to approach US $10 bn per year as well as permitting large allocations to consumption, defence, and international ventures. The sums involved in the three sectors cannot be defined precisely as defence spending, and the cost of such military campaigns as the 1981 intervention in Chad are not available. Whether such data were precisely known or not, the spending options were limited to these three sectors, and trade-offs had to be made between them when financial resources became constrained. The first two sectors, development and consumption, were of great interest to the population in general, while defence and international ventures were of interest to the leadership as well as having appeal to that special constituency which populated the military establishment of the country.


Asian Survey ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-193
Author(s):  
Sahar Shafqat

Pakistan began the year with the military establishment having tightened its grip on political institutions, but as the year progressed, opposition parties sought to reassert themselves and challenged both the PTI government and military leaders. Political movements took center stage as religious extremists as well as regionalist movements drew strength from the challenges to the PTI government. Feminists demanded action after a series of sexual assaults, and religious minorities continued to be targeted by violence. The COVID pandemic upended the economy, which was already straining under low growth and high debt and deficit conditions. Foreign relations provided many challenges as the government sought to target India for its mistreatment of Kashmiris, while the Pakistan–China relationship remained strong.


Subject Military moves and economic gloom. Significance The government has faced a political crisis within the military establishment, connected to an honour tribunal related to crimes committed during the 1973-85 dictatorship. President Tabare Vazquez was forced to dismiss seven army generals in the course of a month. The issue coincided with troubling economic data and deteriorating public accounts that represent a threat for Uruguay’s investment-grade rating, at a time when the governing Frente Amplio (FA) appears to be on the back foot in advance of the October general elections. Impacts The human rights issue united the FA but will have limited electoral traction amid more immediate economic concerns. The fiscal deficit will not allow for stimulus spending. An opposition alliance looks likely to be able to unseat the FA in October, at the very least taking its congressional majority.


Significance The government is determined to prevent a repeat performance, even at the cost of creating new tensions with the military hierarchy. It seeks to establish a narrative that Morales’s resignation was a coup and that the 2019 elections were fair. Impacts Arce will seek to prevent opposition governors from making common cause. Bolivia will continue to receive US criticism for its policies related to coca production. Attempts to forge closer relations with Peru will run into opposition in Lima.


Author(s):  
Necati Polat

This book explores the transformation of Turkey’s political regime from 2002 under the AKP rule. Turkey has been through a series of major political shifts historically, roughly from the mid-19th century. The book details the most recent change, locating it in its broader historical setting. Beginning with the AKP rule from late 2002, supported by a wide informal coalition that included liberals, it describes how the ‘former’ Islamists gradually acquired full power between 2007 and 2011. It then chronicles the subsequent phase, looking at politics and rights under the amorphous new order. This highly accessible assessment of the change in question places it in the larger context of political modernisation in the country over the past 150 or so years, covering all of the main issues in contemporary Turkish politics: the religious and secular divide, the Kurds, the military, foreign policy orientation, the state of human rights, the effective concentration of powers in the government and a rule by policy, rather than law, initiated by Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian populism. The discussion at once situates Turkey in the broader milieu of the Arab Spring, especially in terms of Islamist politics and Muslim piety in the public sphere, with some emphasis on ‘Islamo-nationalism’ (Millî Görüş) as a local Islamist variety. Effortlessly blending history, politics, law, social theory and philosophy in making sense of the change, the book uses the concept of mimesis to show that continuity is a key element in Turkish politics, despite the series of radical breaks that have occurred.


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