Suboptimal Planet

Give peace a chance

2012-02-10T08:50:00.004Z

BBC News reports:

Argentina is to make a formal complaint to the United Nations about British "militarisation" around the disputed Falkland Islands.
...
In her address on Tuesday, Ms Fernandez accused the UK of "militarising the South Atlantic one more time".

"We will present a complaint to the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly, as this militarisation poses a grave danger to international security," Ms Fernandez said.

"We cannot interpret in any other way the deployment of an ultra-modern destroyer accompanying the heir to the throne, who we would prefer to see in civilian attire."

She asked UK Prime Minister David Cameron "to give peace a chance".

Although we have many reasons to question David Cameron's judgement, I don't think he's planning an attack on the Argentinian mainland, or anywhere else in the South Atlantic.

There was peace in the Falklands from 1833 until 1982, when Argentina attacked after nearly 150 years of British rule. On the 14th of June, the islands will celebrate another 30 years of peace. Peace will prevail there until the next act of Argentinian aggression.

I'd like to think that any diplomats repeating Ms Fernandez's absurd suggestions to the UN would be laughed out of the chamber, but I expect a different reaction from that ignoble club.

Democracy and property rights

2012-02-08T22:53:00.011Z

An email reached me today from Detlev Schlichter, who had some frighteningly insightful comments on democracy and property rights:

The way modern democracy has developed, it is entirely incompatible with any notion of property rights. Property rights today are never absolute, they are conditional. All property in our society belongs ultimately to the state. You are simply allowed to use some property as long as you keep paying whatever fees and levies the state imposes on you, and as long as you conduct yourself according to what the state deems appropriate. The moment you fall behind paying your dues, any and all your property is at risk of confiscation.

As Doug Casey says: Try not paying your property tax for a year or two and you will find out who really owns your house.

Already more than 160 years ago, the German philosopher Max Stirner wrote that the existence of a state and the notion of private property are incompatible. The state has the monopoly on legalized violence, on taxation and on legislation, and those who run this monopoly have no interest in protecting your property but every interest, and every means, to invade it. While that was also true of monarchic states, at least there it appears that the inherent class chasm between rulers and the ruled encouraged some restraint: kings and dukes were afraid of the mob. In democracy, the state represents the mob. It could well be the fate of every democracy to ultimately descend into mob rule, and no environment is more suitable for this than a prolonged economic crisis.

I've been reflecting recently on how a stable, minimal state could be maintained without the injustice of an aristocracy.

The universal franchise does seem to be a large part of the problem. As a believer in meritocracy, I couldn't countenance any sort of caste system, but it cannot be right, or sustainable, for net beneficiaries of the state to vote for increasingly generous payments from a wealth-producing minority.

Rothbard argues quite convincingly that there is no such thing as a just tax. For now, though, I'm still inclined toward minarchism rather than anarcho-capitalism, so I seek a tax regime that is

cheap to enforce
cheap to comply with
minimally invasive
minimally distortive [1]

The best I've been able to come up with so far is a system that taxes passports, and nothing else.

Passports would not be required to leave the UK, though other countries may still require one for entry. The passport office would require no more personal information than at present. Overall, the government would need to know much less about us. How you make your money, for example, would be no business of the state.

Passports would come at a cost sufficient to fund a police force, courts, and a military capable of defending us against credible threats.

Passports would also entail voting rights. Those unable or unprepared to meet the fee would be disenfranchised, but it hardly seems the right word in this context. Anyone would be free to vote, provided they fund the (minimal) services they enjoy, and the cost would hopefully be less than is currently collected through council tax.

As I wrote in 2010:

In 1900 the government spent £265 million, equivalent to £24 billion today. If spending had been kept at those levels, council tax would suffice to cover it.

In 30 years' time, the world will be a very different place. It seems unlikely that a welfare state on current lines will exist. Sooner or later, we shall all have to live within our means. The buck cannot indefinitely be passed to the next generation. We can only hope that there is not too much bloodshed in the transition.

[1] I remember a good article on the deadweight costs of taxation that Jamie Whyte published with The Times. It is currently stuck behind a paywall that libertarians can't begrudge, however much we may lament the past free linking.

Rioters 'felt inferior'

2012-02-07T02:28:00.004Z

From yesterday's 'Torygraph':

People who took part in last summer's riots did so because they suffered from low self-esteem and mistrust of the police, a report has claimed.

No further details provided.

The Guardian has more.

Words fail.

60 years of currency debasement

2012-02-07T01:06:00.011Z

In celebration of HMQ's 60-year reign, The Telegraph reprinted a few pages from 1952:

My eye was immediately drawn to the top right:

Price: 2d. D for denarii — old pence. 2/240 of a pound. Slightly less than a decimal penny: £0.008333.

Today's price?

£1.20. So The Telegraph costs 144 times as much today as it did in 1952. Apply your own hedonic adjustment, but it's hard to argue that today's Telegraph is 144 times better than the 1952 version. Who has benefitted from 60 years of currency debasement?

Even more interesting than the articles were the adverts.

£96.45 (11.5 thousand times the cost of a newspaper) would get you a 300 mph flight to New York with TWA, "Starting May 1st ... subject to Govt. approval".

The advert from Johnnie Walker noted "Maximum prices as fixed by the Scotch Whisky Association".

An advert from City & West End Properties Ltd offered "Unfurnished Mansion Flats in the West End and South West of London at rentals of £400-500 p.a."

I wish they'd include reprints every day. Perhaps a page from each decade, going back to 1900. I'm sure it would give a useful sense of perspective.

The VDARE effect

2012-02-07T00:46:00.005Z

I just traced another recent spike in my blog traffic to VDARE.com.

Patrick Celburne writes:

Sean Gabb’s essay for us last night on the fruits of abolishing Britain’s 800 year old rule prohibiting Double Jeopardy – the extremely dubious Show Trial convictions this month over the 1993 death of a black youth – seemingly coincided with a very long piece on Gabb by a U.K. blog called Suboptimal Planet: Is Sean Gabb a racist?

Suboptimal Planet is a very young blog (started December 2009) and is probably written by a young blogger. The piece is a depressing demonstration of how crude emotionalism – hysteria in fact – has become considered intellectually valid and respectable where the discussion of racial matters is concerned.
...
Maybe Suboptimal Planet will mature. But such trembling deference to conventional opinion to the exclusion of the consideration of facts is unpromising.

Crude emotionalism? Hysteria? Deference to conventional opinion?

Read the article, if you haven't already, and let me know what you think.

In any case, Dr. Gabb is perfectly capable of defending himself.

Alcohol Concern at the BBC

2012-02-05T23:54:00.004Z

Recorded here for posterity:

Drinking "just a little more than they should" puts people at risk of serious illness including heart disease, stroke and cancer, the government is warning.

A TV advertising campaign is being launched to press home the message.

It warns regularly drinking two large glasses of wine or two strong pints of beer a day triples mouth cancer risk and doubles high blood pressure risk.

BBC News, February 2012.

And what's the recommendation from the neo-prohibitionists, obligingly promoted by the BBC?

Emily Robinson, of Alcohol Concern, welcomed the campaign.

But she added: "Telling people they could be drinking too much can't be our only solution to the country's alcohol problem.

"We also need to see minimum alcohol pricing brought in as soon as possible, as well as making sure high quality services are available for people who may have developed a serious alcohol problem."

Ah yes, another wonderfully balanced article from our impartial state broadcaster.

One of these days I'll get around to tracking the mean time between BBC articles calling for restrictions on alcohol. I suspect there's at least one a week.

Heating, eating, drinking, smoking and breeding

2012-02-02T00:26:00.005Z

I was about to blog this extraordinary story from BBC News, but I see James Delingpole has beaten me to it:

this glorious piece of unintentional comedy from the BBC News website is too good to miss. (H/T Nicholas Jones)

It analyses what BBC reporter Julian Joyce seems to believe is the heartrending plight of a family in Wales struggling to get by on benefits.

Apparently – claims unemployed father-of-seven Raymond ("not his real name" – love that detail!) – if the Government manages to enact its heartless scheme to impose a £26,000 per annum cap on welfare benefits, then it could be a "choice between heating or eating."
Unfortunately, all sympathy for this family evaporates when Joyce goes into more detail about their budget. We learn, for example, that their weekly shopping bill includes "24 cans of lager, 200 cigarettes and a large pouch of tobacco." They also spend £32 a week on mobiles and £5 on their Sky TV subscription. But all this is now threatened by the heartless fascist Coalition government: why, if it gets its evil way, then this family's £30,284.80 annual benefit package will shrink by £82.40 a week!

The BBC article has a handy clickable graphic explaining the family's weekly income and spending.

Ray on entertainment:

'I go out once a week, on a Friday night. I meet up with my mates in the pub and have three or four pints.'

That's three or four pints courtesy of you and me, on top of the 24 cans of lager we buy him as part of his weekly shop.

Ray on communication:

'My wife and I have mobile phones, and so do all of the teenage children. You try telling teenagers they're going to have to do without their mobiles and there'll be hell to pay.'

Presumably Ray's teenagers share his sense of entitlement and aversion to work.

Ray on the weekly shop:

'Our biggest expense. We do all our shopping at Tesco or Morrisons in one big go. Mostly we buy the "value" range - tinned meatballs, baked beans etc. On the cigarettes, my wife tried to give up, but she missed one appointment on the course and they threw her off it.'

Poor woman.

Ray on library books and playing in the park:

'We get the Sky Movies package because we're stuck in the house all week - otherwise we wouldn't have any entertainment.'

It rains a lot in Wales, but usually not so much that people are "stuck in the house all week".

So far the article has attracted 1258 comments, which are worth skimming.

Delingpole concludes:

The whole piece is such a textbook case study of a) why Britain is completely screwed and b) the prevailing BBC-fomented left-liberal cultural assumptions which explain why we got into this mess and why it's going to be so hard to get out of it that you almost wonder whether Julian Joyce is in fact not a right wing plant parachuted into the BBC by the Conservative party's black ops department.

It's worth reading some of the 600 plus comments below to realise just how badly this sob-story jars with the national mood. Or at least the national mood among that part of the country which actually works for its living.

"They do not own a car or take a regular annual holiday"? I should ruddy well hope not if we're footing the bill.

"The market for my skills dried up 10 years ago"? Then retrain, you workshy sod.

"Father-of-seven?" Meanwhile in the private sector, hardworking couples think long and hard before having another child, recognising as they do that kids cost enormous amounts of money which they – as respectable people with a work ethic – fully expect to have to pay out of their own income, rather than as the feckless underclass do by spongeing off the state.

Quite.

Bailouts and bonuses

2012-01-31T10:51:00.001Z

Yesterday's article from Toby Young:

RBS shares fell 2.5% this morning, partly on the back of Stephen Hester's decision to waive his bonus. As Alistair Heath pointed out on the Today programme this morning, investors are clearly worried that from now on RBS will be subject to frequent political meddling and will no longer be run as a commercial business. What this means is that, thanks in part to the populist posturing of Ed Miliband and Chuka Umunna, as well as their anti-capitalist cheerleaders in the media, the bank is now worth £330m less than it was at close of play on Friday evening. So the leaders of the Labour Party haven't saved the British taxpayer £1m; they've cost the taxpayer £329m. Nice one, guys.

Stop Press: Turns out I was wrong about this. In fact, the British taxpayer has lost £900m from this bonus fiasco.

It is an impossible situation. On the one hand, it can't be right for the executives of loss-making state-owned enterprises to take home massive bonuses (most loss-making private sector enterprises don't pay bonuses at all). On the other, the banks cannot hope to recover and return to profitability with constant meddling from politicians. The only solution is not to bail banks out in the first place.

Two aspects of this sorry saga are worth highlighting, however.

The first (as noted by DK and others), is the staggering hypocrisy and shameless opportunism of the Labour party. It was Gordon Brown who bailed out the banks, with the enthusiastic support of the current leaders of the Labour Party. More than that, they seemingly agreed a contract that provides for the very bonus they're now denouncing.

The second item of note was captured beautifully in a tweet from @RyanCPS:

Anyone else wish our political leaders gave Hester's bonus-style scrutiny to every £1 million of state spending?

Daniel Hannan also covered the story of Hester's bonus:

Hester has done precisely what the Government brought him in to do, salvaging what he could from a wrecked bank and preparing it for privatization. The fall in the share price of RBS is hardly his fault: all bank shares have lost value, partly because of the eurozone crisis and partly because of the Government's own regulations. If anything, Hester's bonus is less generous than he might have expected on the basis of his contract and results. Yes, it's a larger sum than I'd have offered had I been the minister who agreed his contract; but, again, that's hardly his fault.

In any case, the bonus is the one part of his package that is performance-related, being payable in stock. If RBS shares rise, he gains, if they fall, he loses. I can't for the life of me understand why critics should have seized on this aspect of his remuneration, rather than the £1.2 million basic salary which he will receive regardless of whether the company prospers. The anti-bonus media campaigns have had the perverse effect of pushing banks into paying higher salaries – surely more objectionable than rewarding employees in proportion to their success.

All fair points.

I'll grant that many executive compensation schemes, especially in the financial sector, have used definitions of 'success' that don't align well with the long-term interests of the shareholders, but that's nobody's business but the shareholders (or at least it would be, if the government could resist their bailout urges).

However, Hannan goes on to write something that strikes me as subtly but significantly wrong:

You might feel a legitimate resentment against RBS pay packages, even if they are not directly financed by taxpayers, but be relaxed about those in private banks. If so, I agree with you; but you and I are in the minority. Barclays' Bob Diamond was recently being criticised in almost exactly the same language as is Stephen Hester today. The fact that Barclays declined a bail-out, paid a premium to recapitalize privately and then outperformed the banks that had taken government cash, was lost in the general cry of 'why does anyone need that much?'

There are very few genuinely private banks, and Barclays is certainly not among them. All the major commercial banks suckle at the teat of the central bank. Even when they're not being explicitly bailed out, they're being heavily subsidised. That's not free enterprise, it's monetary socialism.

And though Barclays declined a bailout, they almost certainly benefited from the bailout of RBS, just as Goldman Sachs benefited from the bailout of AIG. It's impossible to say how things would have played out if all of the bad banks were allowed to go bust, but there would have been more justice.

Schlichter on cash

2012-01-31T09:11:00.001Z

Another superb article from Detlev Schlichter:

Decent citizens don’t use cash. Cash is used by tax-cheats, terrorists, drug-dealers and child pornographers. Once this is established it will be a short step to severely restricting or even banning the withdrawal of cash from bank accounts. As all banks will soon anyway be mere branches of the ever-expanding central bank, which prints the money to keep the nominally private banks alive, all transactions will then be just electronic bookkeeping adjustments at the state central bank. All financial transactions will then be entirely transparent to the authorities. “Irrational” behaviour can be identified early and – eliminated.

Whatever you may think of Julian Assange’s Wikileaks, it is deeply troubling how quickly and easily this organization was crippled by Visa and Mastercard cutting it off from its donors. This gives you a taste for where we are going.

Read the whole article.

Tom Paine on feminism

2012-01-27T09:02:00.002Z

A superb comment from Tom Paine at The Last Ditch, which perfectly captures my own view:

I have two splendid daughters and no-one can be more feminist (in the proper sense of the word) than I. I oppose all remnants of the dead social attitudes that might impede their progress. But I don't want them degraded by any "positive discrimination" laws that would deny them the sense of achievement I am confident their merits will earn.

This is not about laws, but ideas. The great error of modern leftist thinking is that laws are educational tools. Laws are weapons, not blackboards, and re-education at the point of a gun is seldom effective. If second-rate specimens of any minority group are forced by law into jobs they don't deserve, the resulting resentments are more likely to *generate* hostile attitudes than quell them.

The Samizdata effect

2012-01-27T00:22:00.005Z

I was surprised to find a sudden spike in the traffic to this humble blog.

It seems I owe it to a reference from Johnathan Pearce at Samizdata:

(H/T, Suboptimal Planet: a new blog that I thoroughly recommend).

I am honoured, and will endeavour to meet expectations.

Bashing the bishops

2012-01-25T00:18:00.004Z

The higher echelons of our established church seem to be infested with noisy socialists (at best, tragically misguided; at worst, cynical, hypocritical, and deeply immoral).

So it was quite a relief to read that one former Archbishop recognises the lunacy, and immorality, of opposing the government's proposed benefits cap:

five bishops, led by the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, the Rt Rev John Packer, tabled an amendment to the Welfare Reform Bill, arguing that the cap discriminated against families with several children
...
But writing in the Daily Mail, Lord Carey - who was Archbishop of Canterbury between 1991 and 2002 - said the bishops "cannot lay claim to the moral high-ground".

"Considering that the system they are defending can mean some families are be able to claim a total £50,000 a year in welfare benefits, the bishops must have known that popular opinion was against them, including that of many hard-working, hard-pressed churchgoers," he wrote.

"The sheer scale of our public debt - which hit £1tn yesterday - is the greatest moral scandal facing Britain today. If we can't get the deficit under control and begin paying back this debt, we will be mortgaging the future of our children and grandchildren."

Lord Carey praised the efforts of Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith - whom he called a "committed Christian" - to overhaul a benefits system which, at its worst, "rewards fecklessness and irresponsibility".

He argued the cost of benefits was "increasingly stoking social division" among the "squeezed middle, who feel resentment at the 'handouts' given to the long-term unemployed".

And he said the welfare system, originally designed to tackle "want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness", had become an "industry of gargantuan proportions which is fuelling those very vices and impoverishing us all".

Quite.

Whyte on Polynesians and female executives

2012-01-22T14:36:00.003Z

Another superb article from Jamie Whyte:

Despite its familiarity, the idea that unjustified discrimination explains the small percentage of female directors is implausible. In fact, it is pretty obvious that no one really believes it. To see why, consider another apparent statistical anomaly.

Polynesians make up about 0.01 per cent of the world’s population. But they make up about 10 per cent of the world’s professional rugby players. In other words, if you knew nothing about rugby, Polynesians or history, the number of Polynesian rugby players is 1,000 times greater than you might expect it to be.

Those who make a business of fretting about unfair discrimination do not fret about the remarkable under-representation of non-Polynesians in professional rugby. This could be because they are uninterested in rugby and non-Polynesians (one of the more nebulous and uncomplaining racial groups). But there is also a good, non-discriminatory reason for not fretting: namely, the fact that professional rugby is a competitive business.

If the disproportionate number of Polynesian rugby players resulted from discrimination against others, this would present a rugby entrepreneur with an opportunity. He could recruit a team of superior but unfairly overlooked non-Polynesian players and then “kick arse” in the professional competitions. This would soon end any unjustified preference for Polynesian players in other teams. It is because nothing now stops this happening, and yet it does not happen, that we know Polynesians are not the beneficiaries of racial prejudice in rugby.

Whyte concludes:

People who claim to have spotted inefficient business practices are hard to believe when, instead of pouncing on this opportunity to make a profit, they attempt to pressure other firms into stopping it. If you discovered that apple farmers use needlessly expensive techniques for picking their fruit, would you complain about it in the media and call for the government to put a stop to it? Or would you keep your mouth shut and quickly get into the apple picking business?

Those who try to bully businesses into appointing more women to senior positions would have you believe that they are forgoing this profit opportunity for themselves and, instead, forcing it on people who are irrationally reluctant to take it. Both the lobbyists and the sexists, we must believe, care little for profits. This may provide a pleasant vacation from the usual accusations of unfettered capitalist greed. But it is still hard to take seriously.

Our anachronistic aunt

2012-01-21T11:49:00.004Z

Tom Clougherty has nicely expressed something that I've been thinking for a while (with particular reference to BBC Three):

The point of public service broadcasting is, one would assume, to address some failure in the broadcast market – to produce and air content which benefits the public, and which would not otherwise be produced or aired by commercial players. But if you buy this market failure argument, you have to concede that ‘public service broadcasting’ is likely to be a fairly elitist project. The intention may be to bring high culture to the masses, but in reality you will probably end up subsidising the tastes of the relatively wealthy and well educated with a tax paid largely by those who have no interest in such things. This is clearly a rather perverse outcome.

On the other hand, if you “dumb-down”, if you chase market share with populist programming, then the rationale for compulsorily funded public service broadcasting disappears. By way of illustration, let’s look at tonight’s broadcast schedule for the BBC 3 TV channel.

At 7pm, we get Pop’s Greatest Dance Crazes, “a top 50 countdown of the hippest, sexiest, quirkiest and campest dance crazes of the last 40 years.” At 8pm, it’s Don’t Tell the Bride, a reality TV show in which a man gets £12,000 to arrange his wedding, but isn’t allowed any contact with his wife-to-be while he does it: “Four weeks apart will push their relationship to the limit.” At 9pm, it’s How Sex Works, which is a documentary about twenty-somethings who get around a bit. At 10pm, it is time for Eastenders (a miserable soap opera), followed by documentary Bizarre Crimes (self-explanatory), and a series of cartoons imported from the US. If you are lucky enough to still be awake at 4.25am, you get to watch Cherry Healey look for “essential truths amongst the tales of sex and debauchery to see if losing your virginity is about more than just having sex for the first time.”

Can anyone really argue that programming like that justifies forcing television-owners, on pain of imprisonment, to pay £145.50 a year to a government agency? It’s a rhetorical question.

Clougherty concludes:

Public service broadcasting is caught between a rock and a hard place. If it sticks to its ‘market failure’ remit it will appear elitist and lose public support. If it chases a larger market, it will undermine any reasonable case for public funding. Ultimately, public service broadcasting and the licence fee that sustains it are an anachronism – something which might (just) have been appropriate when we had two TV channels and limited broadcasting spectrum, but no longer make sense in a world of thousand-channel satellite television and high-speed internet streaming. With almost limitless choice available at the click of a button, we don’t need government to entertain us, inform us, or filter our cultural diets for us. Curiously enough, the way that technology has democratized the media means that democracy itself no longer has any valuable role in broadcasting. It’s time the BBC and the government realized that.

Hannan on capitalism and ethics

2012-01-19T23:40:00.002Z

Another good article from Daniel Hannan:

In an open market based on property rights and free contract, you become wealthy by offering an honest service to others. I am typing these words on a machine developed by the late Steve Jobs. He gained from the exchange (adding fractionally to his net wealth) and so did I (adding to my convenience).

Under the various forms of corporatism tried by fascist and socialist regimes, by contrast, someone else – generally a state official – gets to allocate the goodies, guaranteeing favouritism and corruption.

That’s not to say, of course, that malpractice is unknown in capitalism. Man is fallen and, under any system, some will give in to temptation. It’s just that in a state-run economy, corruption is systemic and semi-legal. Indeed, the most egregious forms of wrongdoing in our existing Western economies tend to be the ones that involve governments: lobbying for improper favours, securing taxpayer bailouts and the like.

He goes on to consider the moralistic hypocrisy of the Left, epitomised by their generosity with other people's money:

I have told the story before of how MEPs reacted to the Indian Ocean tsunami. Speaker after speaker rose to propose gazillions in aid. But when one old boy, a sweet-natured Italian Catholic, rose to suggest that we make a personal gesture by donating a single day’s attendance allowance, the warmth drained from the room. Those who had been promising vast sums on behalf of their constituents glowered sullenly at the poor fellow. His proposal was icily dismissed and the meeting moved on.
Nor does this double-standard apply only to governments. It is equally true of ‘corporate social responsibility’. When you boil it down, this too means being generous with someone else’s money. Businessmen get to feel good about themselves while loading the costs on to their shareholders, their clients and their suppliers. Wouldn’t it be far better if they openly set out to maximise their profits, and then chose, as individuals, to give a chunk away?

It can’t be repeated too often: when you give to good causes, you are making a moral choice. When the government takes an equivalent sum from you in taxation and spends it on your behalf, you are not. This is not to say that all taxation is wrong: some things need to be paid for collectively. But the argument for state involvement is a practical, not an ethical, one.

I recommend the whole article.

Obama to shrink government?

2012-01-15T21:38:00.010Z

BBC News reports

US President Barack Obama has laid down the gauntlet to Republicans by asking Congress for the power to shrink the federal government.

He told business leaders that he wants to close the US commerce department and merge six agencies.

The White House said the plan would save $3bn (£2bn) over 10 years and cut 1,000 to 2,000 jobs through attrition.

The proposal is seen as an attempt to counter Republican criticisms that Mr Obama is a big-government liberal.

Let's put that in context. $3bn over 10 years is $300 million a year. That's a lot of money to you and me, and I'm sure it would be a good idea for those savings to be made. But every year American government agencies spend $6 trillion (6000 billion; 6 million million).

What's 300 next to 6 million? The proposed savings amount to 0.005% of total expenditure. Is this really newsworthy? If it's truly an attempt "to counter Republican criticisms that Mr Obama is a big-government liberal", is it anything but laughable? Can the insignificance of this proposal really be lost on the journalists and editors at the BBC?

Some of that spending is out of Obama's control, but the federal government burns through over half of the total: $3.52 trillion in 2009:

300 out of 3.52 million is still utterly insignficant: less than 0.01%. In failing to point this out, BBC News is either grossly incompetent, or staggeringly disingenuous.

Let's have a look at US public spending in a historical context :

The various levels of government in the US spend over 5 times as much today, in real terms, as they did in 1965.

Federal government spending leapt from 523.18 billion 2005$ in 1960 to $3193.90 billion 2005$ in 2011 — a 6-fold increase in real terms.

Anyone who was truly serious about cutting the size of the federal government would be talking about trillions, not billions or millions.

Public or private downgrade

2012-01-14T11:15:00.006Z

According to BBC News,

The cut in the so-called sovereign ratings of governments is likely to lead to most other borrowers domiciled in the same countries - including banks and companies - being downgraded.

Although the move has been widely expected, it is still likely to make it somewhat more difficult and expensive for borrowers from those countries to raise money, including for the governments themselves.

Is this true? And if so, how does it work?

Why should the creditworthiness of individuals and private companies be connected to that of governments?

I can only assume that it's a feature of our corrupt caricature of capitalism. If the government struggles to borrow, it will struggle to spend, which may impact company profits and personal incomes. And in extremis, a government that struggles to borrow will have a harder time bailing people out.

I can imagine something similar happening in the private sector. If the economy in a certain town is heavily reliant on a single company or industry, the prosperity of the residents, and their creditworthiness, is tied up with the viability of the dominant employer. If the industry goes pop, a thriving community may turn into a ghost town, with various bankruptcies and foreclosures along the way.

The problem, then, is twofold:

All sectors of our economy - household, corporate, and government - are overly reliant on credit
Governments, over the course of the last century, have become the biggest of big players.

If we are to achieve stability and prosperity, we need to kick our addiction to cheap credit and government pork.

UPDATE

It occurs to me that there may be another factor at work: psychological inertia. The long-standing wisdom has been that government debt is safer than other forms. Why risk your money with competing entrepreneurs, when you can invest in an organisation that confiscates the profits of the winners? What's happening with these downgrades is an overdue recognition that government debt isn't as safe as previously thought. But it could be that investors haven't yet re-evaluated their standing rule that government debts are safer than private debts. Or perhaps some have, but they are basing their choices on the path of the herd.

Europe's great ventures

2012-01-14T00:20:00.005Z

Last June I blogged about "Europe's space freighter".

Today, I read from the same correspondent, Jonathan Amos, that "One of Europe's great astronomical ventures is coming to a close".

The BBC is a powerful beast, but even it will struggle to manufacture a European demos.

France downgraded

2012-01-13T22:44:00.003Z

Long expected, finally delivered:

To be sure, France is in trouble, but fundamentally it is not in much worse shape than your average western welfare state.

Quite why anyone puts stock in the word of these agencies, who famously failed to predict the recent crash, I'm not sure. I expect it has something to do with one of the few sensible points made by John Maynard Keynes:

“It is not a case of choosing those [faces] that, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those that average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.” (Keynes, General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, 1936).

No sane investor can trust the word of S&P, but it seems that enough believe that other investors believe in the worth of their ratings.

How our grandchildren will look back, and laugh.

Was Cameron's veto for nothing?

2012-01-13T18:29:00.003Z

Daniel Hannan writes:

Twenty-six EU leaders are reported to have agreed a new draft for the FU Treaty. Although the text is not yet available, it apparently still makes references to the EU institutions. On what possible legal basis, though, can it do so? This is supposed to be an accord among 26 states (though it will almost certainly be fewer in the end) which just happen to be members of the EU. They can no more decree meetings with the European Parliament than with the Majlis of Oman; no more lay down that the ECJ should arbitrate their disputes than that the Idaho Supreme Court should do so.

If they want to use EU institutions, they need the permission of all 27 members. Yet they have made clear that they are unwilling to meet even the token price that David Cameron had demanded in return, namely a guarantee that future regulations in the field of financial services couldn't be imposed without Britain's consent. The PM cannot possibly concede this point: doing so would reverse his veto – the single most popular act of his premiership. Nor can he allow the precedent to be set that the EU's mechanisms and procedures might be accessed without the explicit permission of all 27 members. If he did so, there would in practice be no more vetoes any more – ever. Any countries wanting to adopt some new integrationist measure would simply sign a treaty among themselves, and carry on using the Brussels institutions.

Quite.

The correct course is also clear:

to encourage the FU, rather than the EU, to become the main forum for integration. After all, if 26 (or 22 or 20 or however many) states have agreed to common economic government, doesn't it make sense for tax harmonisation to take place within that framework? Why not, for example, apply the Tobin Tax through the FU, whose members seem to want it?

Rather than obliging the FU states to establish a wholly new institutional structure from scratch, why not simply transfer departments from the existing EU institutions to the FU? Let the FU run Eurojust; let it run the European External Action Service; let it run the Agriculture and Fisheries DGs at the European Commission; let it take over, bit by bit, the functions of the EU that have to do with political union. And, once all this has happened, let it assume control over the European Parliament and the European Court of Justice, leaving non-participant states in alooser arrangement along the lines of the present-day European Economic Area.

Hannan finishes with a beautiful metaphor:

You wouldn't even need to call it leaving the EU. The EU might still survive, like the shell of an egg sucked dry by a weasel, its function reduced to maintenance of a single market and enhanced intergovernmental co-operation. At that stage, though, it might make sense to give it a new name. How about European Free Trade Association?

Gabb on defending the indefensible

2012-01-13T01:11:00.002Z

Earlier this week, I asked

Is Sean Gabb a racist, or is he just a valiant defender of free speech who's sometimes deliberately provocative. Does he care about race per se, or is he just interested in it as a proxy for cultural issues?

My conclusion was that it didn't matter one way or the other - a libertarian's prejudices may hurt him, but they don't threaten the genuine rights of others.

Today, Gabb has published an article detailing the controversial causes he has taken up over the years as a matter of libertarian principle:

Of course, I have written at greater length about all the usual libertarian things – drugs, guns, porn, kinky sex, taxes, regulations, war, and so on and so forth. But none of this is controversial. What is presently controversial is all that I have written over the years in support of “racists” to have their say and be left alone. I cannot be bothered to link to all the various essays written since 1993. But there was my defence last month of Emma West, and my defences last week of the men convicted of the Stephen Lawrence murder. Miss West has now been charged with assault. I cannot comment on this, but I will say that all she was filmed saying on that tram came under the heading of freedom of speech.

As for the Lawrence convicts, I would never argue that they were nice men. But I do argue that their trial was not fair. Most of the evidence looked fabricated. I suspect the jury was packed – and, however the jury was composed, the men had been so demonised since 1993, that a fair trial would have been impossible. Above all, one of them could only be put on trial by abolishing the ancient and essential rule that no one should be made to stand trial more than once for any one alleged offence. It is a disgrace that the entire “liberal” establishment did not explode with outrage. They would never have put up with this sort of trial for a Sinn Fein/IRA terrorist, or one of the Brixton rioters – and rightly. The long, collective orgasm with which they received news of the convictions will bring them one day into the same universal disrepute as those who cheered the conviction of Oscar Wilde in 1895, or who mobbed people with German names in 1914.

In all this, and much, much more over the past thirty years, there is what ought to be an obvious consistency. I am a libertarian activist, and I see it as my duty to stand up for freedom of speech and freedom of association and due process of law – and for much else – whenever they are denied. And, since I do not have unlimited time or money, I make my biggest noises in those hard cases where other “libertarians” choose to sit on their hands. Sometimes, I have found myself speaking up for people who have become lifelong friends. Sometimes, I have defended people I would normally cross the road to avoid. That is not important. What is important is that, if we do not defend freedom in the hard cases, there will eventually be no freedom at all.

I recommend the whole article.

HS2 pushed ahead - cui bono?

2012-01-13T00:41:00.005Z

I last blogged about HS2 in November.

On the 5th, the FT quoted Westminster's most promising MP:

The maths doesn’t add up; this is just sinking capital into a lossmaking project. If you’re going to use the power of the state to do that, then you shouldn’t be surprised that this country is getting poorer.

On the 7th, James Delingpole blogged:

I don't think anyone would dispute that our infrastructure is woeful. But I also think you'd be hard-pushed to argue that Britain's most pressing infrastructure problem right now is the inability of rich commuters to get from Birmingham to London half an hour earlier than they would otherwise have done.

On the 10th, Jonathan Isaby had his say in The Telegraph

So, the worst-kept secret in Westminster is finally out: after days of leaks and briefing to the press, the Government has announced that it intends to spend £32 billion of our money (that’s their estimate at this stage, at any rate) on the High Speed Rail link between London and the North of England. And it won’t be completed for – wait for it – more than twenty years (again, that’s the timescale they’re estimating. For now).

By anyone’s standards, £32 billion is an eye-watering amount of cash – and all the more so at a time when families and government alike are having to look for savings. It works out at well over £1,000 for every single family up and down the United Kingdom, and large numbers of us remain unconvinced that this will be money well spent.

The project doesn't make sense. Taxpayers don't want it. For whose sake is it being built?

What currency for an independent Scotland?

2012-01-12T23:35:00.002Z

On tonight's Question Time it was suggested that an independent Scotland could somehow be denied the use of GBP as currency.

I'd be interested to know how this could be achieved.

I don't see why they couldn't legislate any currency they like as legal tender: GBP, EUR, USD, XAU. Or they could legislate none at all, leaving it to the people to decide which currency (or currencies) they prefer.

Paine on clichés

2012-01-12T23:29:00.002Z

A nice little quote from Tom Paine, in the comments on a very good article:

All cliches, I know. But sometimes cliches are ruts worn in language by the repeated passage of truth.

Divide and rule

2012-01-11T21:45:00.008Z

Dianne Abbott's "divide and rule" tweet instantly struck me as ironic, for it is grievance-mongers and tribalists like the Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington who contribute to social division. And Abbott is right that people are easier to manipulate and subdue when they are divided.

In the course of some recent searching [1], I came across the following excerpt from John Stuart Mill's On Representative Government:

Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. The influences which form opinions and decide political acts are different in the different sections of the country. An altogether different set of leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of another. The same books, newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, do not reach them. One section does not know what opinions, or what instigations, are circulating in another. The same incidents, the same acts, the same system of government, affect them in different ways; and each fears more injury to itself from the other nationalities than from the common arbiter, the state. Their mutual antipathies are generally much stronger than jealousy of the government. That any one of them feels aggrieved by the policy of the common ruler is sufficient to determine another to support that policy. Even if all are aggrieved, none feel that they can rely on the others for fidelity in a joint resistance; the strength of none is sufficient to resist alone, and each may reasonably think that it consults its own advantage most by bidding for the favour of the government against the rest.

This is where we find ourselves: short on fellow-feeling, divided into so many groups of "us" and "them", bidding for the favour of the government against the rest. Many races. Many cultures. Union v management. Rich v poor. Town v country. Labour v Conservative. Smoker v non-smoker. English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish — and that's just the UK. In the EU, we have an empire whose fragmentation rivals that of the Habsburgs.

But at the risk of sounding conspiratorial, the problem is broader. The loudly and proudly expressed animosity between American and European politicians is largely synthetic. They have more in common with each other than they do with us.

You don't have to be a tinfoil hatter to recognise that there is a ruling class, and that it has been going global. Will the ordinary people wake up, and recognise their true, common enemy. Not any time soon, it would seem.

[1] This article, discovered in the course of writing this blog post.

Andrew Marr on repression and coercion

2012-01-10T09:26:00.002Z

Reading one of Sean Gabb's articles linked from my previous post, I discovered an interesting Guardian article from 1999 by Andrew Marr. Topically, it was written "post-Lawrence inquiry", and considered what the "elite liberal establishment" should do to stamp out racism.

Though partially tongue-in-cheek, and slightly self-deprecating, the article leaves no doubt about where Marr sees himself in our society. They may occasionally be hypocritical, but Marr and his fellow Übermensch have a right and duty to mould the lower classes according to their vision for society.

What then can be done? (Apart, of course, from widespread and vigorous miscegenation, which is the best answer, but perhaps tricky to arrange as public policy.) First, we need to raise still more taxes to help regenerate inner-city ghettos and to employ more young people, white and black. ...

The next answer was given by Doreen Lawrence, welcoming the report's emphasis on education: 'I truly believe in education our history, our background, is what separates us.' But, though teachers are the most effective anti-racist campaigners in the country, this means more than education in other religions it means a form of political education. Only people who understand the economic forces changing their world, threatening them but also creating new opportunities, have a chance of being immune to the old tribal chants.

And the final answer, frankly, is the vigorous use of state power to coerce and repress. It may be my Presbyterian background, but I firmly believe that repression can be a great, civilising instrument for good. Stamp hard on certain 'natural' beliefs for long enough and you can almost kill them off. The police are first in line to be burdened further, but a new Race Relations Act will impose the will of the state on millions of other lives too.

Lovely.

Charities and public health experts

2012-01-10T03:43:00.005Z

The BBC's attack on alcohol really is relentless. I'd be surprised if a week goes by without at least one story on the subject. Here's the latest:

People should have at least two days a week completely clear of alcohol, a group of MPs says.

It is one of the recommendations in a report by the Commons science and technology committee, which is calling for a review of all government guidelines on alcohol in the UK.

It says there are "sufficient concerns" about the recommendations on how much people should drink.

The report has been welcomed by charities and public health experts.

Charities and public health experts, eh?

Prof Sir Ian Gilmore, from the Alcohol Health Alliance UK, said: "The main recommendation of setting up a review of evidence to come up with clear guidelines would be very valuable indeed."

If you read Christopher Snowdon's blog, that name will be familiar.

Alcohol Concern chief executive Eric Appleby said: "Accessible and reliable public information on alcohol harm is an essential element in tackling Britain's problem with alcohol misuse. However, the government must accept that information alone is insufficient.

A grassroots charity lobbying the government on behalf of concerned citizens? Not according to fakecharities.org:

Summary

Created by the British government in 1985, Alcohol Concern wages an incremental campaign against drinkers and the drinks industry.

Details

...

Its 2008/09 accounts show a total income of £1,137,582, of which:

Department of Health (restricted grant): £142,000
Department of Health (unrestricted grant): £400,000

Big Lottery Fund: £127,275
—
Total £669,275 (58.8% of all income)

It received just £8,186 in public donations.

Who else has the BBC lined up?

Chris Sorek, chief executive of alcohol awareness charity Drinkaware, said: "Drinkaware welcomes the committee's recommendation for greater efforts on helping people understand the unit guidelines and how to use them.

Surely this is a real charity, funded by small donations from millions of concerned citizens. Nope:

Drinkaware is funded by donations from the alcohol industry.

Current funders include major retailers, pub companies and producers who have pledged approximately £5.2 million per year through to 2012. We work with a wide selection of organisations to tackle alcohol misuse, to lead education campaigns and develop corporate social responsibility campaigns.

Quite why the 'alcohol industry' is funding these neo-prohibitionists is anyone's guess. Perhaps someone at the Department of Health had a quiet word with them ...

Is Sean Gabb a racist?

2012-01-09T22:00:00.000Z

I first read Sean Gabb's Cultural Revolution, Culture War (PDF) in September 2009, shortly before I started blogging.

To a friend who suggested it, I replied:

A very interesting read. There's much in there that I agree with.

Although I despise 'political correctness', and I'm deeply concerned about the steps towards Thought Police, I did detect a whiff of racism at times; perhaps I've been indoctrinated by the multiculturalist hegemonic ideology ;-)

My views are much more firmly libertarian now, and my disgust for the British state and the BBC has grown, so I'm minded to re-read the book and re-evaluate my assumptions.

Gabb despairs at racially biased news coverage:

To take a notorious example, everyone knows that the overwhelming majority of interracial crime in Britain and America is black on white. Yet this is not reflected in the media coverage. When the black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, was killed in South London back in 1992, the story received lavish coverage in the media; and the story continued through failed trials, a public enquiry, and the official and media harassment of the unconvicted suspects. The much larger number of black on white murders—known rather than suspected murders, and containing an obvious racial motivation—are either not reported at all or covered briefly and without comment in the local media.

It should be easy enough to establish whether Gabb's claim is true, but true or not, few people would be prepared to state it as plainly.

Gabb is perhaps even more concerned about propaganda in state-funded fiction:

look at the BBC Radio 4 soap The Archers. This is supposedly an “every day tale of ordinary country folk”. It was this once. Nowadays, it is almost agitprop street theatre in its propagandising. Every male character is a monster or a weakling, or both. The female characters are pillars of feminist strength. The village pub is run by two homosexuals. The village solicitor is an Asian woman. A few years ago, the daughter of one of the characters brought back her black South African husband. His voice made it plain what he was: not one of the characters commented.

Not having listened to The Archers, I can't comment. From what I know of the BBC, Gabb's assertions seem plausible enough, but once again, it's not the sort of argument you tend to hear in polite company.

Some time later, Gabb took up writing for the American website VDARE.com:

12/02/11 - The Persecution Of Emma West
04/29/11 - Monarchy, Nation-States, And The Failed Reign of "Elizabeth The Useless"
01/19/11 - John Stuart Mill, The BNP, And The U.K.'s Dying Democracy
11/09/10 - A Nail in the Fuse Box: The Persecution of the British National Party
10/13/10 - News From England: The New Ruling Class And Taxpayer Funded Brainwashing In "Sindia-Lesbianopolis"
05/09/10 - Everyone Loses In Britain's Election. Could be A Good Thing.
03/14/10 - It Happened There (3): Court Cripples British National Party For Being Too, Well, British
01/27/10 - It's Happening There: Britain's Emerging Police State
10/24/09 - BBC's Question Time and BNP's Nick Griffin: Stumbling Into The Mainstream, Against A Wall Of Bias
08/31/09 - The British State vs. The BNP—The Post-Modern Tyranny of "Human Rights"
06/08/09 - England: The Peasants are Revolting

Their FAQ page gives a sense of what VDARE is about:

Why VDARE.COM / The White Doe?

Is VDARE.COM "White Nationalist"?
What is "Immigrant Mass Murder Syndrome?"

“Why Does VDARE.COM Run All These Weird Ads?”

What do I do if a link wants me to register to read it
Reporting Illegal Aliens - 2006 Update

Reporting Illegal Aliens - 2009 Update
How can I report an Illegal alien?

Why is VDARE.COM blocked at my office/ library/ school/ etc? [Note: we're constantly updating this].
Do you understand what's going on with the Minutemen?

Why Do We Keep Writing About Intelligence? An IQ FAQ

What should I read about America's immigration disaster? VDARE.com friend Paul Nachman has written a guide to the literature [PDF] itself a fairly long article. For a brief"introduction to his guide", see here.

For all I know, they make some perfectly valid points, but it's not the sort of site that most British people, even British libertarians, would be prepared to associate themselves with. Alarm bells ring loudly.

Most recently, I was struck by the attention given to race in Gabb's The Churchill Memorandum. One the one hand, the abundance of politically incorrect language seems appropriate to an alternative 1959; its absence would have been anachronistic. On the other, one gets the sense that Gabb is more interested in questions of race than most people alive today. Chapter one gives a taste:

Somebody muttered, from a few places behind me, about the interminable wait. We shuffled forward another eighteen inches. One of my coloured porters strained with his box. Since the others didn’t think it worth the effort of moving theirs, he scraped it an inch or so across the uneven floor, then went back to sitting on it.

“They call me Major Stanhope,” came the reply in a tone that avoided all hint of rebuke. The officer turned the pages of the passport.

“Well, Major Stanhope,” he said, now mockingly, it says here you’re subject to Imperial immigration control. You sure don’t look like no nigger.”

“British bred,” came the now breezy reply, “though born in Cyprus. The law is very strict, you know—doesn’t just apply to Her Majesty’s coloured subjects. One law for all and all that.” The officer continued looking at the much-stamped pages.

“Next,” the clerk grated. It was my turn. Still trembling, I put my passport on her desk and pulled out the paper copy of my exit visa. She ignored the documents and pointed at the five wooden boxes my coloureds were still attending.

“Next,” she cried. I glanced at my coloureds and pointed at the boxes. There were hours still to go till boarding. But I could at least get out of this bloody queue.

You'll find much more of the same in chapters two to six, which are also available online, and throughout the rest of the book. All quite tame, really, but it seems extreme by modern standards.

Is Sean Gabb a racist, or is he just a valiant defender of free speech who's sometimes deliberately provocative. Does he care about race per se, or is he just interested in it as a proxy for cultural issues?

Ultimately, it doesn't matter.

When Gabb makes a factual claim on matters of race, people may be inclined to doubt it, but the claim will either be true or false, and verification is easier now than ever. People may likewise scrutinise his rhetoric, and once distilled down to its essentials, his argument will either be logically sound, or not. In any debate, we must be wary of those who appeal to motive. Arguments stand or fall on their own merits; motives don't matter.

Moving from the academic to the practical, racism in a libertarian, however distasteful and incongruous, is harmless. It is an issue for the racist, his friends, and family, but poses no threat to others. A bigoted libertarian may choose not to hire people of a certain race, or may refuse to serve them. He may say rude things. But nobody has a right to a job. Nobody has a right to be served. And nobody has a right not to be offended. The racist libertarian owes them nothing.

A racist statist, by contrast, can do tremendous damage. She will demand unequal treatment, favouring one group over another. She will interfere with voluntary transactions between individuals, requiring businessmen to act against their instincts and interests. She'll lobby for our speech to be censored, and use the institutions of the state to indoctrinate our children. If we do not at least outwardly conform to her views, the race-obsessed statist will see us arrested, and our children placed in the care of the state. She will create a climate of fear, with legitimate concerns going undiscussed, and tensions steadily rising.

For my part, I think individualism and libertarianism go hand-in-hand. Racists should be free to hold their views, and to go about their business, so long as they don't infringe on the similar rights of others, but I can't understand why they would cut themselves off from so many brilliant individuals.

Aggregates and averages are of little interest to me. The differences within groups tend to be much larger than the differences between them. Even if it's true that blacks, on average, are better lovers, it would be a foolish woman who passed up a promising suitor, simply because he was white. Even if it's true that blacks, on average, are better basketball players, it would be a foolish coach who chose players based on skin colour, rather than ability. And even if it's true that Asians tend to be more intelligent than whites, who in turn are more intelligent than blacks, it would be a foolish employer who hired based on averages, rather than assessing the aptitude of individual candidates.

Racism is stupid, but it shouldn't be illegal.

Is Dianne Abbott a racist?

2012-01-07T12:30:00.001Z

Toby Young writes:

Diane Abbott is in hot water again. The gaffe-prone Labour MP sent a tweet to a black journalist that read: "White people love playing 'divide & rule'. We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism"
...
in playing the race card, was Diane Abbott herself being racist? According to the OED, racism is defined as "the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races". By that definition, Abbott was being racist. She was attributing a characteristic – loving to play divide and rule – to a race – white people – and it's plainly an unattractive quality, i.e. intended to distinguish the race in question as morally inferior to the people they're guilty of oppressing.

In an update, he added:

Diane Abbott has now tweeted a response to the outrage her original tweet caused: "Tweet taken out of context. Refers to nature of 19th century European colonialism. Bit much to get into 140 characters." That's weak. She wasn't just referring to "19th century European colonialism", but saying that the same tactic is still used today, hence her warning to Bim Adewunmi not to criticise any black community leaders. She didn't say "White people loved playing 'divide and rule'". She said "White people love playing 'divide and rule'".

True. And whether her tweet relates to present-day whites or 19th century whites, it's still a racial generalisation. I don't think there's any wriggling out of this one.

Young's key point is this:

Imagine the uproar if an equally prominent white Conservative MP said something similar about black people on Twitter? The Conservative whip would be immediately withdrawn and he or she would be forced to step down at the next election.

True enough. But to Young, justice demands that

At the very least, Diane Abbott should apologise and resign from her position as a shadow health minister.

I disagree. Abbott should be entitled to her views, however perverse and unhelpful. Neither she nor anyone else should be pressured to apologise or resign over such comments. Everyone needs to lighten up.

Condell on Christmas

2012-01-06T09:17:00.006Z

Pat Condell's latest video is well worth watching:

I've just been reading a news report about some American atheists who have been trying to get a public Christmas nativity scene removed because they say it makes them feel excluded and intimidated and offended ... can't you just feel the emotional trauma these poor people must be suffering? No, me neither ... this is what happens when atheism meets political correctness.
...
as an atheist myself, I can't help but feel horribly tainted by association. And believe me I'm as atheist as it's possible to be. I think religion is utter nonsense, and I claim the right to criticise, ridicule, and insult it as much as I like. But not the right to stamp out harmless aspects of it, which is why I'm a secularist, and not a totalitarian.

I have a copy of the bible in my house, because it's part of my cultural heritage. Not because I think the bible is true, any more than I think that Shakespeare's plays are true, but I wouldn't be without them either. I like churches, especially the sound of church bells, and I don't want to see them bulldozed. But I do want to see the power of the church, not only bulldozed, but ground into a fine dust, and buried in the deepest part of the deepest ocean on the furthest planet it's possible to find.

Religion needs to be kept in check when it tries to step on people, or when it tries to elbow its way into their lives uninvited. The nativity doesn't do this. It doesn't even come close. It's part and parcel of the Christmas furniture. It's part and parcel of the culture that I and most people in the Western world were born and raised in, and it only excludes people who want to be excluded.
...
And yes, we all know that the story itself is ridiculous. The entire tableau is utterly barmy and worthy of open mockery and ridicule. But to claim that it sends a message of intimidation and exclusion, and therefore must be banned, is both infantile and sinister ... Yes, some people may choose to be offended, but some people are offended by anything, and frankly, they can go to hell.

I couldn't agree more.

Condell goes on to highlight some truly ridiculous research from Simon Fraser University in Canada, which The Telegraph covered on the 20th of December:

Michael Schmitt, a social psychologist behind the research, decided to carry out the study after controversy over whether Christmas should be celebrated in public in case it offends non-Christians.

He said: "Simply having this 12-inch Christmas tree in the room with them made them feel less included in the university as a whole, which to me is a pretty powerful effect from one 12-inch Christmas tree in one psychology lab.

"I don't think it's really going to undermine anyone's experience of Christmas to tone it down.

"We're not suggesting 'no Christmas' or 'no Christmas displays at all,' but in contexts where we really do value respecting and including diversity in terms of religion, the safest option is not to have these kinds of displays.

"I understand why it might feel threatening to people.

"But I think if people do care about making a whole range of different kinds of people feel included and respected, then we can make some small changes that would go a long way toward creating a more multicultural or inclusive society."

The researchers published their results in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

I'm sure Condell is right when he suggests that "if all the social psychologists on the planet were to disappear in a puff of smoke, nobody would be worse off".

Returning to the original story about the nativity scene (covered by the Daily Mail), I should add that while I share Condell's contempt for those who cry 'intimidation' and 'exclusion', I don't think it's appropriate for public funds or public property to be used for religious displays — or indeed for any other purpose beyond their essential function. There's a huge difference between resenting inappropriate public expenditure and calling for displays on private property to be banned. It's unfortunate, and perhaps disingenuous, for Condell to conflate the two issues.

But a nativity scene on a courthouse lawn is such a minor abuse of taxpayers' resources, compared to the US government's multi-trillion dollar profligacy, that anyone taking offence at it can scarcely claim the banner of Reason.

Gabb on disabled parking spaces

2012-01-01T17:48:00.004Z

In a recent interview with BBC Radio 5, Sean Gabb reportedly argued:

That there are seriously disabled people, and these deserve some consideration.
That only those evidently disabled should have any parking privileges.
But that many evidently able people have acquired disabled parking badges.
That there are too many disabled parking bays in most car parks - anyone looking at these alone would conclude that there were more seriously disabled people in the country than parents with young children.

I agree.

Driving around the recently-redesigned car park of my local Sainsbury's, I was struck by the number of disabled spaces. They stood empty, despite the gay abandon with which disabled badges have recently been issued. A quick search of their website confirms that they have 5 more disabled spaces than parent-and-child spaces.

I'm not sure whether Sainsbury's feel under legal pressure to offer these spaces, or if they've fallen victim to independent lobbying from disabled rights groups. The move certainly doesn't seem to be in response to actual customer demand.

Smell smoke, get lung cancer!

2011-12-30T15:48:00.004Z

The best addition to my blogroll this year was surely Christopher Snowdon's Velvet Glove, Iron Fist.

In his latest post he exposes the shameful tactics of Professor Peters, chairman of ASH Australia, and the complacency of the Australian media in the face of some truly absurd claims:

Professor Peters told Mr Lavac, 65, and his wife to reduce their exposure. After living in their flat for 18 months in 2005-06, they moved. In March, 2008, Mr Lavac felt unwell. A CT scan detected a shadow at the top of his right lung, and a biopsy confirmed cancer...

Mr Lavac, who had never smoked, lost a third of his right lung. His surgeon and Professor Peters told him that, on the balance of probabilities, the lesion had been caused by passive smoking.

Yes folks. We live in a world in which professors of medicine tell people that they have developed lung disorders because they lived in a flat for 18 months above people who smoked. This is the state of hypochondria and intellectual retardation we have reached in the last days of 2011.

One day, when sanity is restored, we will look back on such stories and laugh. For now, other emotions dominate.

The denormalisation of tobacco continues

2011-12-28T12:39:00.003Z

BBC News reports:

The government is reminding supermarket retailers in England to remove tobacco displays within the next 100 days.

The Department of Health said the ban, which will come into force on 6 April, would protect young people who were often the target of tobacco promotion.

Smaller shops do not have to change their displays until 2015.

They've been talking about this sort of thing for a long time, but it had somehow escaped my notice that it was actually going ahead. It seems this was a New Labour nanny state initiative that the Coalition predictably failed to kill:

From 6 April 2012, customers in England will still be able to buy cigarettes in the normal way, but the ban - which was announced in 2008 - will mean cigarettes will have to be kept under the counter.

The chief medical officer for England, Prof Dame Sally Davies, said: ''Ending tobacco displays in shops will protect young people from unsolicited promotions, helping them to resist the temptation to start smoking.

"It will also help and support adults who are trying to quit.''

I'd wager that very few 'young people' start smoking spontaneously in response to 'unsolicited promotions' in supermarkets or corner shops. Almost all of them will be offered a cigarette by a friend, and they will initially smoke whichever brands their friends smoke.

As for adults, it's not the government's business to tell them how to live.

In immediate practical terms, there aren't any benefits to this move, only inconvenience and expense for shopkeepers and customers. The real goal is to further denormalise smoking.

Thoughcrime in Britain

2011-12-26T13:12:00.005Z

1984:

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

2011:

England captain John Terry will face a criminal charge of using racist language towards footballer Anton Ferdinand during a Premier League game.

Mr Terry is alleged to have used racist language towards the 26-year-old Queens Park Rangers player during Chelsea's 1-0 defeat at Loftus Road on 23 October.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said Mr Terry was accused of a racially aggravated public order offence.

What did he say that was so offensive, so disruptive to 'public order'?

The BBC won't say. You have to turn to The Guardian for the grown-up version:

Video footage circulated on the internet of an incident towards the end of QPR's 1-0 victory in which it has been suggested Terry calls the home defender a "fucking black cunt" as he retreats into his own half of the pitch.

Was the charge brought because the victim of Terry's terrible abuse saw no choice but to involve the police? It seems not:

The decision to charge Mr Terry was taken after police received a complaint from a member of the public.

Ah yes. No doubt a white middle-class Guardianista, offended on someone else's behalf.

Crackberrys for factory workers?

2011-12-26T12:01:00.006Z

BBC News reports:

Volkswagen has agreed to stop its Blackberry servers sending emails to some of its employees when they are off-shift.

The carmaker confirmed it made the move earlier this year following complaints that staff's work and home lives were becoming blurred.

The restriction covers employees in Germany working under trade union negotiated contracts.

This move sounds like it might be sensible, and at least it wasn't imposed by the government, but I was surprised by the trade union connection.

Do VW factory workers receive emails, and Blackberrys to read them on?

Or are German office workers unionised?

I suppose a company the size of VW will have a large standing bureaucracy, and bureaucrats are naturally inclined towards unionisation, but it still surprised me.

Whatever the reason behind it, trade union involvement in any matter should be considered sinister. Behind any agreement with unions lies the threat of strike, implicit or explicit. And because it is illegal to sack striking workers, free contracts are distorted in favour of unionised labour.

The demise of the dollar

2011-12-26T11:47:00.003Z

BBC News reports:

China and Japan have unveiled plans to promote direct exchange of their currencies in a bid to cut costs for companies and boost bilateral trade.

The deal will allow firms to convert the Chinese and Japanese currencies directly into each other.

Currently businesses in both countries need to buy US dollars before converting them into the desired currency, adding extra costs.

It's surprising that it's taken them this long.

The dollar-centric monetary order that has prevailed since WWII is collapsing, and good riddance.

The prosperity of billions of people will depend on what replaces it.

What's half a trillion between friends?

2011-12-24T23:39:00.004Z

Daniel Hannan writes:

I'm not sure people have grasped the magnitude of what has just happened. The European Central Bank firehosed €489,190,000,000 at the eurozone banking system. Five-hundred-and-twenty-three banks snatched greedily at the cheap cash.
...
the ECB is hoping that banks will buy government debt with it – as, indeed, they are more or less obliged to do under the Basel III rules. So eurozone governments are borrowing money to lend to private banks to lend to, er, eurozone governments.

It's a collosal sum, especially for an ostensibly conservative central bank.

Detlev Schlichter has more:

The pathetic state of the global financial system was again on display this week. Stocks around the world go up when a major central bank pumps money into the financial system. They go down when the flow of money slows and when the intoxicating influence of the latest money injection wears off. Can anybody really take this seriously?

On Tuesday, the prospect of another gigantic cash infusion from the ECB’s printing press into Europe’s banking sector, which is in large part terminally ill but institutionally protected from dying, was enough to trigger the established Pavlovian reflexes among portfolio managers and traders.
None of this has anything to do with capitalism properly understood.

Quite.

Thoughtcrime in France

2011-12-24T23:35:00.004Z

I haven't been following the news very closely lately, but it sounds like the French have decided to outlaw some more Bad Thoughts. Daniel Hannan has said all I'd want to say on the matter:

I am not competent to pronounce definitively about 1915. Where I do feel competent is in condemning the French decision that, from now on, even to question one side of the argument is a criminal offence. In any free society, the right to say what you believe surely trumps the right not to be offended. This, though, is not even one of those ludicrous ‘hate crime’ issues. What is being proscribed here is intellectual enquiry.
Turkey is right to react as it has. French lawmakers would never dream of legislating to restrict a free discussion of, say, Stalin’s deportations, or the Belgian atrocities in the Congo – or, indeed, France’s own abuses in the Algerian war. Turks are being picked on because French politicians believe that there are votes in Turcophobia, just as Nicolas Sarkozy calculates that there are votes in Anglophobia.

Gabb: Free Yourself from the Lefty Ghetto

2011-12-24T05:44:00.003Z

I just caught up with Sean Gabb's recent letter to The Guardian. It's worth reproducing in full:

Lefties, as a rule, only read other lefties. This seems to be the case with George Monbiot. His attack on libertarianism (This bastardised libertarianism makes 'freedom' an instrument of oppression, 19 December) is the usual mix of unwillingness and inability to understand anything outside the intellectual ghettoes of the left.

He claims to have asked: "Do you accept that some people's freedoms intrude upon other people's freedoms?" – as if that were some knock-down refutation never made before. Of course we do. Our difference with him isn't that we are against courts and the other modes of dispute resolution. What we deny is that social peace requires an enlarged and omnicompetent state run by his friends.

He claims we "pretend … that only the state intrudes on our liberties. [We] ignore … the role of banks, corporations and the rich in making us less free." Not quite. We do believe that the state is the foremost violator of our right to life, liberty and property. But we also observe that banks are licensed and regulated creatures of the state, and that big business in general is only big because of state-granted privileges like limited liability, infrastructure subsidies, and tax and regulatory systems that cartellise costs and flatten competition from outside the magic circle. There is a difference between believing in free markets and supporting actually existing capitalism.

You could have published an attack on libertarianism that didn't border on misrepresentation. Or perhaps not. That would have meant exposing your readers to genuine libertarian positions. And that might, in a few cases, have opened the gates of their intellectual ghetto.

The UK's 950% debt-to-GDP

2011-12-24T04:06:00.005Z

An interesting perspective from Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge (H/T Andy Duncan):

While certainly humorous, entertaining and very, very childish, the recent war of words between France and Britain has the potential to become the worst thing to ever happen to Europe. Actually, make that the world and modern civilization. Why? Because while we sympathize with England, and are stunned by the immature petulant response from France and its head banker Christian Noyer to the threat of an imminent S&P downgrade of its overblown AAA rating, the truth is that France is actually 100% correct in telling the world to shift its attention from France and to Britain. So why is this bad. Because as the chart below shows, if there is anything the global financial system needs, is for the rating agencies, bond vigilantes, and lastly, general public itself, to realize that the UK's consolidated debt (non-financial, financial, government and household) to GDP is... just under 1000%. That's right: the UK debt, when one adds to its more tenable sovereign debt tranche all the other debt carried on UK books (and thus making the transfer of private debt to the public balance sheet impossible), is nearly ten times greater than the country's GDP

The figure apparently comes from Morgan Stanley Research:

Our official public debt is understated, and I'm not sure what assumptions go into the figures above, but even the BBC's Robert Peston [1] recently declared that the UK's debts are the biggest in the world:

At the beginning of 2010, I highlighted a fascinating analysis by the consultants McKinsey called Debt and Deleveraging, which showed quite how indebted the economies of the developed west had become.

McKinsey said that the UK had by 2008 become the most indebted of all the big, rich economies, more indebted even than debt-engulfed Japan.

It has now become widely recognised that perhaps the greatest economic policy failure in the UK, US and eurozone during the 16 boom years before the crash of 2008 was the explosion of borrowing by banks, households, businesses and governments - or, to use the jargon, the unprecedented and massive leveraging up of entire economies

Peston highlights the findings of a more recent McKinsey report:

According to the consulting firm, by the end of March this year, the aggregate indebtedness of the UK - that's the sum of household debts, company debts, government debts and bank debts - had risen to 492% of GDP, or almost five times the value of everything we produce in a single year.

That compares with 481% at the end of 2008.

So the UK's total indebtedness has increased, and is still the biggest relative to GDP of any of the big economies. That said, Japanese indebtedness is pretty much the same size - at the end of 2010, as opposed to the end of March 2011, Mckinsey says Japan's debts were also 492% of GDP.

Whether you believe the McKinsey figures, or the Morgan Stanley ones, things are looking very bad for the UK.

Durden concludes:

To call that "game over" is an insult to game overs everywhere. So here's the bottom line: France should quietly and happily accept a downgrade, because the worst that could happen would be a few big French banks collapsing, and that's it. If, on the other hand, the UK becomes the center of attention (recall this is the same UK that allows unlimited rehypothecation of worthless assets, and the same UK that unleashed the juggernaut known as AIG-FP's Joe Cassano - after all there is a reason why the UK has 600% its GDP in financial liabilities - financial innovation always goes there where it is least regulated), then this island, which far more so than the US is the true center of the global banking ponzi scheme, will suddenly find itself at the mercy of the market. At that point the only question is whether the vigilantes will dare to take down the UK, as said take down will result in an implosion in the very fabric of modern finance, much more so than what even a full collapse of France could ever achieve, or if due to the certain Mutual Assured Destruction that would follow a coordinated UK onslaught, the market will simply very quietly proceed to ignore the elephant in the room.

Apocalyptic!

I couldn't say whether Durden is right about the UK's supreme position in the "global banking ponzi scheme" (it seems more likely that the Americans pull the strings), but the global monetary and banking system certainly is rotten, and our financial services sector is disproportionately large.

Our best bet is to embrace default. Our politicians may push us to hyperinflation instead.

Let us hope we see more sanity in 2012 than 2011.

[1] Peston sometimes highlights the right issues, but he's far too corrupted by Keynesian thinking. That same BBC article includes the following gem: "To be clear, if governments had not continued to spend, our recession might well have become something much worse, a 1930s-style depression."

Friday's EU summit headlines

2011-12-11T12:48:00.010Z

Some headlines from Friday ...

Le Monde: "La Grande-Bretagne plus insulaire que jamais"
Der Spiegel: Auf Wiedersehen, England!

CNN: "Eurozone leaders reach deal without Britain"

The New York Times: "Treaty to Save Euro Takes Shape, but Britain Sits Out"

And closer to home ...

The Times: "Britain alone in the new Europe"

The Independent: "UK isolated as PM blocks treaty"

The Guardian: "UK isolation grows as other reconsider treaty"
The Telegraph: "EU treaty: Britain on its own as Cameron vetoes fiscal changes"
And of course the trusty BBC: UK alone as EU agrees fiscal deal

The mainstream media would have you believe we're as ronery as Kim Jong-il. The truth is we're not nearly lonely enough.

I hope this is the beginning of the end of our involvement with the EU. Time will tell.

Friday's quote of the day goes to Terry Smith, CEO of City broking firm Tullets (as reported by Guido, and highlighted by James Delingpole):

The UK is as isolated as somebody who refused to join the Titanic just before it sailed

Olympic overspend

2011-12-07T22:33:00.003Z

BBC News reports

The 2012 Olympic Games could overshoot its £9.3bn budget unless "rigorous action" is taken to curb costs, the Whitehall spending watchdog has warned.

The National Audit Office said a doubling in estimated security costs meant there was a "real risk" more taxpayer funding would be needed.

You have to read further down to find the true horror:

How 2012 budget has changed

2003: Consultants Arup put total cost of building and staging the Games at £1.796bn
2003: Tessa Jowell launches bid in May telling MPs it will cost £2.375bn - including a 50% contingency
2005: Bid succeeds in July with "prudent" estimate of preparing for games of £2.4bn
2007: Total budget, including a £2.75bn contingency, reaches £9.325bn
2010: In May the new government cuts the budget to £9.298bn and the contingency falls to £1.27bn
2011: In December the NAO says after the government's "assessed risks" are met £36m is left in contingency money

David Craig dedicates a chapter to the London Olympics in his 2008 book, Squandered. He concludes:

Why hold the Olympics in London or anywhere else? The Olympics started in Greece. In 2004, Athens did quite a creditable job with their Games, which they are still paying for. If the Olympics were only held in Athens in the future, the Greeks would find some use for all the expensive facilities they have already built and many tens of billions of pounds could be saved.

Makes sense to me.

Clegg: treaty change does not require referendum

2011-12-04T15:43:00.007Z

From this morning's Andrew Marr Show ...

ANDREW MARR:

Angela Merkel is right, isn't she, when she says that there has to be fiscal union if the Eurozone is going to hold together? ... Which in turn will mean a treaty change.
...

ANDREW MARR:

It would also trigger a referendum in this country about our relationship with Europe, so my next question is: Could the coalition survive a referendum on our relationship with Europe?

NICK CLEGG:

Well I don't think there needs to be a referendum for the simple reason that the change …

ANDREW MARR:

(over) The Prime Minister's promised one. If there is a treaty change, he's promised a referendum.

NICK CLEGG:

No, the referendum will only take place if there is an additional surrender of sovereignty from us to the European Union, to Brussels.

ANDREW MARR:

(over) I thought any substantial treaty change will trigger a referendum. That's what David Cameron said.

NICK CLEGG:

(over) No, no, no. Let me be very clear. The test, which we've legislated on, is if we, the United Kingdom, give up more sovereignty in a big way to the European Union …

The truth, of course, is that any moves to eurozone integration would fundamentally alter the nature of the European Union. As Lord Tebbit noted recently, "the eurozone group can always outvote the remaining member states".

In an article for the Mail on Sunday, Daniel Hannan wonders why we would pass up this golden opportunity to extricate ourselves from a declining regional trading block:

Is it, perhaps, that the Coalition is determined to avoid a referendum? Sources around the Prime Minister are briefing to this effect but I hope they are wrong: few things are as degrading as the sight of an administration that distrusts its own electorate.

Or maybe it is fear of being left out of a Franco-German plan. In truth, though, a regulated Continental bloc offers us huge opportunities. We would be the offshore haven, Hong Kong to their China.

This was the model that Winston Churchill proposed at the outset. In 1946, he called for a United States of Europe comprising France, Germany and their satellite countries.

The full text of that speech, given in Zurich on the 19th of September, is available from the Council of Europe.

Personally, I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea of an anti-democratic Franco-German union on our doorstep, but I don't think today's ordinary Frenchmen and Germans want war any more than ordinary British people do, and the EU doesn't afford any protection beyond what we already enjoy through NATO.

Equally, to the extent that it may be in our national interest to undermine continental moves to full political union, I'm not convinced that our politicians are committed to this goal, nor that the task is easier within in the EU.

We should get out, wish them well, and watch vigilantly.

Democratically elected Islamofascists

2011-12-04T15:14:00.002Z

BBC News reports:

Latest results from the Egyptian elections indicate that Islamist parties are likely to have a strong majority in the new parliament.

The political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood and a more conservative Salafist Islamist party are leading, while secular liberals are behind.
...
the Salafists, who could take second place, have made no attempt to soften their uncompromising views. They want to ban alcohol, segregate men and women, impose full shariah law, and are openly contemptuous of democracy.

Democracy is not an end in itself. It is only a good thing to the extent that it protects individual freedoms.

We'll have to wait and see how Egyptians enjoy tyranny of the Islamist majority.

Heath: Media is failing public in many ways

2011-12-01T10:26:00.004Z

Another excellent article from Allister Heath:

As the ComRes/Institute of Economic Affairs poll points out, the public has got completely the wrong idea about what will be happening to the national debt over the next few years. Because the coalition will be only gradually reducing the budget deficit, the national debt will continue to soar in cash terms and as a share of GDP. An extra £350bn or so will be added to the national debt before the next general election, if all goes according to plan. So far, so self-evident, you may think. Yet the public – primarily because of the way this story has been reported in print, online and in the broadcast media, together with Britain’s appallingly low level of financial literacy – has no idea whatsoever about this. It wrongly thinks that the coalition is planning to “repay our debt” – and fails to grasp the key conceptual difference between the annual deficit (or extra debt) and the outstanding total national debt (a stock which keeps on growing as long as there is a deficit).

The poll asked whether the coalition would be keeping the national debt the same over the next four years, increasing it by £350bn or cutting it by £350bn. Just nine per cent got it right – 21 per cent thought it would be staying the same and an astonishing 70 per cent thought the national debt would be cut by £350bn. This is an extraordinarily depressing finding and first and foremost a massive failure of journalism. It is also a failure of political communication and of education. Given such catastrophic levels of misunderstanding about what will be happening to the economy over the next few years, how can the public possibly come to a sensible decision about spending choices? It is a bitter blow for democracy and robs the UK of the ability to conduct a sensible, grown-up discussion about what should be done to tax and spend.

It is all the more tragic, seeing as we have a tax-funded broadcaster that claims to offer 'public value':

While commercial broadcasters aim to return value to their shareholders or owners, the BBC exists to create public value. In other words, it aims to serve its audiences not just as consumers, but as members of a wider society, with programmes and services which, while seeking to inform,

educate and entertain audiences, also serve wider public purposes. Public value is a measure of the BBC’s contribution to the quality of life in the UK.

The BBC creates public value in five main ways ...

And the very first of these?

Democratic value: the BBC supports civic life and national debate by providing trusted and impartial news and information that helps citizens make sense of the world and encourages them to engage with it.

EPIC FAIL.

Interest payments vs education

2011-12-01T08:06:00.002Z

In his latest blog, Daniel Hannan highlights an important graph that looks like it comes from The Spectator Coffee House:

How can anyone, left or right, think that it's a good idea to spend an ever-increasing portion of tax revenue on interest payments?

An unjustifiable strike

2011-11-30T22:23:00.002Z

Another excellent article from Westminster's most promising MP:

The Government have made sure that anyone who is within ten years of retirement will be able to retire on their current terms and they have also confirmed that low earners making under £15,000 a year (15% of the workforce) will not have to make increased contributions. In addition, another million workers earning up to £21,000 will have their total increase limited to 1.5 per cent over three years. Accrued benefits that people have built up already will be protected.

I find myself reflecting on the situation faced by those without taxpayer-guaranteed benefits. Suppose the aim is a retirement income of £15,000 a year for life. That means buying what’s known as an annuity. With pension savings of £10,000 buying an annuity worth about £500 a year today, to achieve just £15,000 a year, one would need pension savings of £300,000. To achieve a more comfortable £25,000, one would need to have saved £500,000.

And that income would not be index-linked for protection against inflation.

Quite. I recommend the whole article.

NUTs

2011-11-30T21:49:00.004Z

Here, for the record, are five "pension facts for parents", according to the National Union of Teachers:

FACT ONE

Teachers and other public sector workers are being asked to pay more for their pensions, work longer and get less in retirement.

FACT TWO

Many private sector workers have no proper pension provision. The Government should be acting on this, not attacking public sector pensions.

FACT THREE

Cutting public sector pensions will just make more pensioners poorer and put the cost of supporting them on to the State and taxpayer.

FACT FOUR

Damaging teachers’ pensions will lead to more teacher shortages and turnover, which will in turn damage children’s education.

FACT FIVE

The teachers’ pension scheme is affordable. Reports from the National Audit Office and the House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee show that the cost of teachers’ pensions is falling as planned.

I haven't yet found time to read their 16-page Fair Pensions for All pamphlet, but you have to wonder what planet they're on. Ignorant, disingenuous, or a bit of both?

I was also able to get a copy of this letter sent to NUT members in West Berkshire:

They're keen to maximise the disruption:

DO NOT tell your head teacher who is going to be on strike. This is because tactics have changed and we no longer need to encourage head teachers to support us. If a Head cannot be certain who will or will not turn up for work they can't easily keep the school open.

Disgraceful behaviour, but just what you'd expect from unions. They seem to think that the education system exists to serve them, rather than students and parents.

The sooner education is re-privatised, the better!

The bond bubble is bursting

2011-11-29T08:52:00.002Z

Another excellent article from Detlev Schlichter:

“The government can always pay.”

This is a statement that has no basis in fact. Any rational analysis will quickly expose it to be a fallacy. Economic theory, economic history, and plain good old horse sense can demonstrate effortlessly that this statement is an illusion. Yet, it is today a widely held and deeply cherished illusion in the world of finance (and, incidentally, the world of politics). In fact, it has become one of the defining myths of the modern fiat money era. It has for decades provided portfolio managers and bankers with an imaginary refuge from the turbulent world of capitalist “creative destruction”, a ‘safe haven’ where their nerves and capital could rest. The ‘free lunch’ might not have been a feast – only the ‘risk-free rate’ was to be had – but it was better than nothing and anyway a welcome break from capitalism and entrepreneurship. And by the way, if you leverage your government bond portfolio sufficiently with the help of central-bank-provided, zero-cost fiat money, the returns could still be quite handsome.
The fate of myths is that they sooner or later clash with reality. Then they are exposed as myths, which requires a painful giving-up of beloved certainties, a readjustment of paradigms and an abrupt change in behaviour. This is what we have been witnessing in European sovereign bond markets and will soon observe outside Europe as well.

It seems his message is slowly getting through to the mainstream media:

Investors sent Europe’s politicians a painful message last week when Germany had a seriously disappointing government bond auction. It was unable to sell more than a third of the benchmark 10-year bonds it had sought to auction off on Nov. 23, and interest rates on 30-year German debt rose from 2.61 percent to 2.83 percent. The message? Germany is no longer a safe haven.

Since the global financial crisis of 2008, investors have focused on credit risk and rewarded Germany with low interest rates for its perceived frugality. But now markets will focus on currency risk. Inflation will accelerate and the euro may break up in a way that calls into question all euro-denominated obligations. This is the beginning of the end for the euro zone.

Here’s why. Until 2008, investors assumed that all euro- zone sovereign bonds, as well as bank debt, were risk-free and would never default. This made for a wonderfully profitable trade: European banks could buy government debt, finance it at less expensive rates through funding provided by the European Central Bank, and pocket the spread.

The party is almost over. Let's hope the collapse comes quickly, and with minimal collateral damage.

A racially-aggravated offence

2011-11-29T08:12:00.007Z

BBC News reports:

A woman has been arrested after an online video apparently showed a woman abusing ethnic minority passengers on a packed south London tram.

The clip, viewed more than 10,600 times since being uploaded to YouTube on Sunday, shows a woman sitting with a child, shouting at fellow passengers.

British Transport Police said a woman, 34, had been arrested on suspicion of a racially-aggravated offence.

The BBC article doesn't link to the YouTube video, but the Huffington Post article they link to does. By now it has been watched 1,854,507 times.

She seems like a very unpleasant woman, and quite probably drunk or on drugs. She shouts foul language and generally makes a nuisance of herself. There is a sense in which she can be said to violating the rights of her fellow passengers — their right to peace and quiet. If this were private transport, you might expect her to be banned, possibly for life, for harassing customers.

But does it matter that her tirade was "racially aggravated"? Does she deserve a harsher sentence than someone who shouts similar abuse at rival sports fans, fat people, rich people or smokers? If she had restricted her rant to Polish people, would it have been any better? Should the law really consider skin colour more important than hair colour, height, physical attractiveness, or intelligence?

I think not, and I find it very disturbing that the notion of racially-aggravated crimes exists.

How many countries in the eurozone?

2011-11-29T07:53:00.003Z

That's right, according to BBC News, the "27 countries of the eurozone make up the largest trading partner for the US".

Schoolboy error, or wishful thinking?

The Lib Dems and Oxfam

2011-11-28T21:41:00.003Z

When I blogged about Oxfam last September, I wasn't aware that Daniel Hannan had covered the same theme back in 2008:

Is there anyone out there who just happens to support deeper European integration? Without being paid to say so, I mean?

I ask the question perfectly seriously. When he introduced the Bill to ratify the Lisbon Treaty, the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, made a song and dance about the fact that it wasn’t just Labour politicians who backed the wretched thing. A whole range of NGOs, he told MPs, had also come out in favour.

“The NSPCC pledged its support, as have One World Action, Action Aid and Oxfam,” he said, looking typically pleased with himself. “Environmental organisations support the treaty provisions on sustainable development and even the commission of bishops supports the treaty. This is a coalition, not of ideology, but integrity”.

Integrity, eh? Within a few hours, Eurosceptic blogs were pointing out that every single organisation he had cited received money from the EU (hat-tip EUReferendum.blogspot.com).

He linked to this old Conservative Home post from his latest blog, which considers how unfit the Lib Dems are to claim the legacy of classical liberals:

The Lib Dems, we read, want to be like Oxfam. I'd have thought they're more than half way there already. I've blogged before about the way in which Oxfam seems more interested in lobbying against free trade than in distributing medicines or building schools. Nothing wrong with advocacy work, of course; on the contrary, it's heartening to see people taking up causes in which they believe. I wonder, though, how many grannies chipping in their tenners know that Oxfam gets more than £30 million a year from the EU? And that it then uses some of its resources to lobby for closer European integration? Oxfam, like the Lib Dems, has generous and public-spirited supporters but corporatist and worldly chiefs.

The whole article is well worth reading.

Gerald Warner on forced funding for political parties

2011-11-28T09:04:00.003Z

A good article from Gerald Warner for Scotland on Sunday:

‘IT IS difficult to conceive of a more difficult climate in which to propose any increase in public support for political parties.” Those insightful words came last week from Sir Christopher Kelly, chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life.
...
Unfortunately, despite delivering himself of this common-sense verdict, Sir Christopher’s committee recommended exactly the suicidal course of action he had just identified: taxpayer subvention of the predatory gangs that call themselves political parties and have brought Britain to its knees over recent decades

Warner concludes:

Party politics is not about “public service”; it is about egomaniacs attempting to impose their views on society or, less harmfully, good old-fashioned self-seekers looking for a cushy billet. If they cannot find backers willing to support their mostly unhealthy ambitions, it is in no way the duty of normal people to part with their dwindling cash to support them. Any attempt to impose such a burden on taxpayers, as even the parties seem now implicitly to admit, would provoke a tsunami of resentment.

Janet Daley: try doing less

2011-11-27T12:13:00.004Z

Via Westminster's most promising MP, I discovered this Telegraph article by Janet Daley:

Gosh, what a parcel of goodies George Osborne is about to present to us in his Autumn Statement. Already promised last week were a government programme to underwrite the mortgages of first-time buyers, as well as a nifty £200 million “green deal” to encourage families to insulate their homes. Then there was a billion-pound subsidy to employers who give young people work experience that will lead to jobs. And who knows what more bounty is to follow in the speech itself?

Now where have I seen the like of this beneficence before? Oh yes – it was under Gordon Brown. As Chancellor (and then later when he was Prime Minister, through his half-hearted proxy Alistair Darling), Mr Brown would stand at the Dispatch Box and shower us with government spending projects. There were injections of cash into house-building, and grants for scientific research, and God knows how many initiatives to create “training” and engineering apprenticeships. All that micro-management: new “start-up” schemes and “one-stop shop” outreach services funded by this department and that department, and then re-packaged and re-announced so that they sounded less tired and predictable.

Maybe you thought we had got past this. Not just because additional public spending is now supposed to be anathema, but because the myth of government activism – the idea that intervention by the state is the answer to every economic and social problem – had been definitively routed. Apparently not: Mr Osborne and, we must assume, his boss still seem to believe that any unacceptable national situation must require direct action from them.

Very sad.

Toby Young on The Debt Delusion

2011-11-26T18:21:00.006Z

Mehdi Hasan is typical of high-profile Labour insiders. He's arrogant, cynical and mendacious, but not stupid.

Toby Young has produced a blog post in response to Hasan's latest attempt at disinformation: The Debt Delusion.

As Young puts it,

[Hasan's] view is that, far from trying to reduce the structural deficit by slashing spending on public services, the government should be taking advantage of historically low gilt yields to borrow more, spend more and stimulate the economy in the text-book, Keynesian manner.

As this blog and many others have pointed out, our Coalition hasn't really been "slashing" spending at all. The government is burning through more money than ever.

But according to Young, Hasan argues that there is a sense in which the cuts are real:

If you just focus on DEL (Departmental Expenditure Limits), i.e. the amount spent on public services each year, the picture looks bleaker. If you look at those same Treasury forecasts (see table 1.9), only three departments will see real-terms increases in expenditure over the course of this Parliament – Heath, International Development and Energy. The rest will see real-terms cuts. Spending on Education, for instance, is due to fall from £58.552 billion in 10/11 to £51.558 in 15/16, a real-terms cut of £6.994 billion or 14.3%. Overall, DEL is set to fall from £375.170 billion in 10/11 to £331.900 in 15/16, a cut of £43.27 billion or 11.53%.

A killer argument? Not quite.

Hasan believes these cuts are monstrous – just monstrous – and quotes the IFS in support of this view, which described the Chancellor's plans as “the longest, deepest, sustained period of cuts to public services spending at least since World War II.” However, what Hasan neglects to mention is that these "cuts" only pare down public expenditure to the level it was at a few years before the Coalition came to power. TME, for instance, is forecast to be higher in real terms in 15/16 (£668.5 billion) than it was in 08/09 (£658.823), some 11 years after Labour had been in power. The same goes for DEL, though you have to go a bit further back. Education spending, for instance, was lower in 06/07 (£51.048 billion) in real terms than it's forecast to be in 15/16 (£51.558). What Hasan and other left-wing critics of the "cuts" always gloss over is that public expenditure increased massively under the last government – more than 50% in real terms between 97/98 and 09/10.

All we need to do is roll back the clock.

Young goes on to consider the the importance of the bond market. It's true that they have to be kept on side as long as we're living beyond our collective means:

So the programme of cuts embarked upon by the present government last year is, in the grand scheme of things, fairly modest. Much more modest than the government's critics would have you believe. But what is indisputable is that if Britain hadn't embarked on this programme, our 10-year bond yields would now be in the red zone.
...
What Hasan overlooks – willful blindness? – is that on the eve of the last election the UK's 10-year bond yields, at 4.2%, were higher than those of Germany, Italy and Spain. This was in spite of having our own currency and a healthy debt rollover profile which supposedly guarantee our safety. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote an article at the time, quoting the fixed income director of Unicredit, Europe's second largest bank, predicting that the UK was next-in-line for a sovereign debt crisis. Does Hasan really believe that if Gordon Brown had been re-elected – and made Ed Balls his Chancellor – Britain wouldn't be in the same boat as Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Belgium and, now, Hungary?

If hell-bent on the Keynesian "stimulus" Hasan desires, a Labour government would have found no support from the bond markets. They would instead have turned to the printing press even more enthusiastically than our Coalition overlords.

Of course, the proper solution is to balance the books. And once the deficit is eliminated, it's hard to see why we should continue paying interest on government debt.

Far better to repudiate it. Bond market be damned.

Deutschland über alles?

2011-11-24T12:41:00.005Z

For the Cobden Centre, David Howden writes:

The Maastricht Treaty originally set limits on debts and deficits that European governments could incur – 60% of GDP for the former, and 3% of GDP for the latter. ... While these rules create political stability in the sense that they constrain the fiscal policies of the member countries, they have famously been abandoned. Indeed, Germany – the role model for European financial conservatism – was the first country to break the Maastricht Treaty. It has since become laughable. Ireland ran a budget deficit of over 30% of GDP last year. Several member states run public debt-to-GDP ratios of more than 100%. Only Finland continues to abide by these rules (with the Netherlands coming very close).

BBC News has this story in pictures:

According to the official figures, 'prudent' Germany has long had broadly the same public debt levels as socialist France. Even now, after extreme profligacy, official UK debt hasn't quite caught up with German debt:

Today (thanks to Tom Paine), I discovered this article from Reuters:

A "disastrous" sale of German benchmark bonds sparked fears on Wednesday the debt crisis was beginning to threaten even Berlin, with the Bundesbank forced to dig deep into its pockets to ensure the auction did not fail.

In one of the least successful debt sales by Europe's powerhouse economy since the launch of the single currency, the low returns offered -- just 2 percent annually over 10 years -- deterred investors made uneasy by the escalating cost of the crisis to Germany.

That meant the central bank had to pick up 39 percent of the 6 billion euros of debt Germany had hoped to sell after commercial banks bought just 3.644 billion euros of the issue.

Mountains of debt, bought increasingly by central banks rather than the free market. What's the worst that could happen?

We are the 60%

2011-11-23T22:17:00.010Z

In countries in which the poor have the exclusive power of making the laws, no great economy of public expenditure ought to be expected; that expenditure will always be considerable either because the taxes cannot weigh upon those who levy them or because they are levied in such a manner as not to reach these poorer classes. In other words, the government of the democracy is the only one under which the power that votes the taxes escapes the payment of them.
In vain will it be objected that the true interest of the people is to spare the fortunes of the rich, since they must suffer in the long run from the general impoverishment which will ensue.

— Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835 - Democracy in America, Volume I, Chapter 13

Yesterday I discovered a BBC News article entitled Tax: Do you give more than you get?

Though my household is by no means rich, it seems we are in the top decile. It turns out that a childless couple with both partners earning £32000 before tax is enough. To count among the 9th decile, all you need is £24000 each; for the 8th decile: £19000 each; for the 7th decile: £16000 each. All of these deciles are net contributors, according to the BBC (to the tune of £27221, £12433, £5457, and £1900 respectively).

There are a few things to note here. Firstly, £16000 isn't a huge salary. I'd wager that almost everyone of working age could manage it, if they tried hard enough. According to my calculations, you could achieve it by working 53 hours a week at the minimum wage [1], for 50 weeks. A hard life, but nothing like what our ancestors had to face. On the other hand, you have to ask why people would bother — all that work for the privilege of contributing £1900 (6 weeks of labour) to those who aren't inclined to work as hard.

Secondly, only the top 4 deciles are net contributors; 60% of households are net recipients. In a democracy, we should not be surprised that taxes "are levied in such a manner as not to reach these poorer classes".

Thirdly, the BBC calculator understates the weight of tax-eaters. As Rothbard puts it

The tax consumers consist of the full-time bureaucracy and politicians in power, as well as the groups which receive net subsidies, i.e., which receive more from the government than they pay to the government. These include the receivers of government contracts and of government expenditures on goods and services produced in the private sector. It is not always easy to detect the net subsidized in practice, but this caste can always be conceptually identified.
...
it is inherently impossible for bureaucrats to pay income taxes uniformly with everyone else. And therefore the ideal of uniform income taxation for all is an impossible goal. We repeat that the bureaucrat who receives $8,000 a year income and then hands $1,500 back to the government is engaging in a mere bookkeeping transaction of no economic importance (aside from the waste of paper and records involved). For he does not and cannot pay taxes; he simply receives $6,500 a year from the tax fund.

So we have at least 60% of households as net recipients of taxes. Are they grateful? On the contrary, many of them are are disappointed that they haven't succeeded in screwing more money out of the top 1%. Such is the tyranny of the majority.

[1] From 1 October 2011, the minimum wage for those 21 or older is (£6.08 for those 21+, from 1 October 2011)

Human rights

2011-11-23T07:34:00.010Z

BBC News reports:

Basic care for the elderly in their own homes in England is so bad it breaches human rights at times, an inquiry says.

Around 10 years ago I saw a framed copy of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the wall at Oxford Town Hall. By then I was already sick to death of the term, and I expected to disagree with every word of the declaration.

Initially, I was pleasantly surprised.

Article 1.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2.
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Article 3.

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Article 4.

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Article 5.

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 6.

Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

Article 7.

All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

Article 8.

Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.

Article 9.

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Article 10.

Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

Article 11.

(1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
(2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.

Article 12.

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Article 13.

(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Article 14.

(1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
(2) This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 15.

(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.

Article 16.

(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
(2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
(3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

Article 17.

(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

Article 18.

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Article 19.

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 20.

(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
(2) No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

Article 21.

(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
(2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
(3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

So far the declaration is a bit vague in parts, and open to abuse. For example, people can be deprived of their property despite Article 17, through high and unfair 'progressive' taxes, so long as the confiscation is not 'arbitrary'. On asylum, there seems to be a tension between "to seek" and "to enjoy". Similarly, the right enshrined in Article 13 to "leave any country" must surely be constrained by the willingness of other countries to allow entry. On the other hand, Article 19 is unequivocal, and all 'hate speech' laws must surely be considered a violation of this right. A mixed bag, then, but broadly consistent with classical liberalism.

It's only from Article 22 that things start to go seriously wrong ...

Article 22.
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

Article 23.

(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Article 24.

Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

Article 25.

(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Article 26.

(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
(3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

Article 27.

(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

Article 28.

Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

Article 29.

(1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
(2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 30.

Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.

I'm sure the signatories to the declaration didn't imagine anything like as generous as our present welfare state, but it's dangerous and immoral to enshrine any rights that require compulsory redistribution of wealth.

When they say employees are entitled to "just and favourable remuneration" and "periodic holidays with pay", they mean that employment contracts should be unequal, with employers compelled to offer pay and benefits that meet some arbitrary standard, rather than allowing employer and employee to agree the terms they see fit.

When they say that "everyone has the right to work", they imply that someone should be forced to give them work. It's not clear what they mean by "protection against unemployment", but they imply that the cost of that protection will be borne not by employees, but by employers and taxpayers.

When they say that "motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance", they mean that employers and taxpayers should be forced to support those who choose to have children.

When they say "education shall be free", they mean that people should be forced to pay for the education of other people's children.

The idea that compulsorily funded education should "further the activities of the United Nations" is really quite ominous.

If only they had stuck to negative rights!

As Wikipedia puts it,

if Adrian has a negative right to life against Clay, then Clay is required to refrain from killing Adrian; while if Adrian has a positive right to life against Clay, then Clay is required to act as necessary to preserve the life of Adrian.

The Wikipedia article also includes a good quote from Bastiat

M. de Lamartine wrote me one day: "Your doctrine is only the half of my program; you have stopped at liberty; I go on to fraternity." I answered him: "The second half of your program will destroy the first half." And, in fact, it is quite impossible for me to separate the word "fraternity" from the word "voluntary." It is quite impossible for me to conceive of fraternity as legally enforced, without liberty being legally destroyed, and justice being legally trampled underfoot.

Of course, the BBC article mentioned at the top of this post appeals not to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but to the ECHR:

The commission said such problems could be said to be in breach of various parts of the European Convention on Human Rights.

My blogging time for today runs short, so I'll have to leave the ECHR for another day, but I expect it to be far worse than the UDHR.

Plain packaging?

2011-11-21T13:22:00.004Z

A recent BBC News article includes an example of Australia's new 'plain' packaging for cigarettes:

Can any Australian look at that package and still feel that they live in a free country?

How long before they try to pull the same trick with beer and wine bottles?

Force-funded broadcasters of Europe

2011-11-20T19:57:00.003Z

I happened upon the BBC's licence fee page today.

It doesn't show anything useful, like how much money is wasted on BBC Three, but it does have a chart showing how our television tax compares with others across Europe:

I'm sure they expect us to rejoice.

Euro or democracy

2011-11-18T07:12:00.005Z

Daniel Hannan writes:

So this is what 'the full Monti' means. As well as being prime minister, the Brussels placeman has appointed himself finance minister. And how many elected politicians has the EU's Governor of Italy put in his cabinet? You guessed it.

It does sound quite dodgy, but I felt I had to ask the obvious question:

What percentage of Italian cabinet ministers are normally elected?

In our own cabinet, we have two unelected members: Lord Strathclyde and Baroness Warsi.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

In the US, "no person holding any office under the United States, shall be a member of either house during his continuance in office."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

And many in the current US cabinet (including Timothy Geithner, John Bryson, Shaun Donovan, Steven Chu, and Eric Shinseki) have never been elected.

This is generally considered a feature rather than a bug.

Of course, it seems likely that this particular cabinet will have European rather than Italian interests at heart.

The Guardian has published profiles for "some of Monti's technocrats":

The former European commissioner, Mario Monti, has unveiled Italy's new government. A distinguished liberal economist, he kept for himself the finance ministry. The list is stacked with academics, who will take more than a third of the seats in the new cabinet, and most will be unknown to members of the Italian general public.

It's not that I have any great love for politicians, or democracy. aureliusmarcus did a good job of outlining the flaws of our present system in a comment on that same Daniel Hannan article:

It seems to me that this crisis has served to expose some fundamental flaws in democracy, at least the form of representative democracy we practise in the west, as a system of government.

The first flaw in a representative democracy is that politicians tailor their policy agendas to whatever will attract the most votes, and then the electorate generally vote for the policies that garner unto then the greatest largesse form the treasury. This has progressively been the case across Europe from the end of WII onwards as countries have saddled themselves with increasingly unsustainable social contracts, widening public sectors (of which the EU itself is a perfect example) and productivity throttling employment laws.

The second flaw is that everyone has an equal vote, whether they are a wealth creator or a wealth eater. Eventually the wealth eaters reach a critical mass or tipping point, and begin to outstrip the ability of the wealth creators in society to continue to support them. After this point the likelihood of radical political reform dwindles and eventually vanishes. Again, we have seen this across Europe in recent years.

Finally, the third flaw in a representative democracy is that the turkeys will never vote for Christmas, even if the alternative is that they all die anyway, and no politician can ever get elected or survive on a platform that requires them to do so. So when faced with a situation such as we have at present, it simply cannot function as an effective form of government

So what happens? Exactly what we have witnessed. The situation remains increasingly untenable until eventually there is some sort of revolution, violent or otherwise. In this case a coup d'etat by the EU, but I am not convinced that it will be able to resolve the problems or even contain them for very long.

Unlike Daniel Hannan, I'm sympathetic view to the view (attributed to Churchill) that

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

The point is illustrated well by a recent YouTube clip that I discovered through Tom Paine: Obama Is Not A Keynesian, He's An American!

However, as Churchill also famously said:

All this idea of a group of supermen and super-planners, such as we see before us, “playing the angel,” as the French call it, and making the masses of the people do what they think is good for them, without any check or correction, is a violation of democracy. Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.

The whole Parliament Bill debate from that day, 11 November 1947, makes interesting reading. 64 years later, the supermen and super-planners are on the march.

Fight SOPA

2011-11-18T07:00:00.000Z

My Firefox Start Page greeted me with this today:

The link leads to the following text:

The internet we know and love is at risk. Help save it.

Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could profoundly affect the future of the internet. It's called the Stop Online Piracy Act.

The fact is that this legislation as written won't stop piracy. But it would pose a serious threat to social media and user generated content sites (like YouTube) across the internet. It could also undermine some of the core technical systems underlying the internet, creating new cybersecurity risks.

As a non-profit committed to keeping the web open and accessible to all, Mozilla wants to ensure that this legislation does not jeopardize the foundational structure of the Internet.

I hope American readers will take the time to investigate further.

Snowdon: We should stop panicking about Boozy Britain

2011-11-15T21:32:00.004Z

In a change from their regularly scheduled rubbish ...

Throughout October and November, The Independent Online is partnering with the Institute of Ideas’ Battle of Ideas festival to present a series of guest blogs from festival speakers on the key questions of our time.

This gave Christopher Snowdon a chance to publish this superb article.

He begins by summarising the popular narrative about alcohol:

Here’s what everybody knows about Boozy Britain. As a nation we are drinking twice as much as we did sixty years ago. The double whammy of cheaper booze and 24 hour drinking has led to an epidemic of alcohol abuse which threatens to overwhelm the NHS. Alcohol-related hospital admissions have doubled in less than a decade and now stand at over one million per annum. Millions of us put our health in jeopardy by drinking more than the daily alcohol limits.

He then proceeds to present the facts:

Yes, we are drinking more than we did in the immediate post-war years. An economic depression sandwiched by two world wars reduced alcohol consumption to the lowest in our history, but austerity Britain can hardly be considered a typical reference point. Using more relevant benchmarks, we are drinking less than we did in 1914 and very much less than we did in previous centuries. We are drinking only marginally more than we did thirty years ago and—here is a seldom spoken truth—we are drinking less than we did in 2002.
Yes, there are millions of us who exceed our ‘daily limits’ (they’re actually weekly guidelines). How could we not? These guidelines were not based on any real evidence when they were set in 1987 and methodological changes have since dragged several million more of us over the line of ‘hazardous drinking’. Limits that do not allow for tipsiness, let alone drunkenness, deserve to be ignored and yet the percentage of men and women drinking above the ‘limits’ has still been falling for a decade, with the largest decline seen amongst young men.

How to explain the discrepancy?

It can be argued that per capita alcohol consumption is a poor marker for drunkenness, alcoholism and alcohol-related harm, but a doubling in alcohol-related admissions at a time of falling alcohol consumption should raise sceptical eyebrows. Sure enough, the number of medical conditions that are considered ‘alcohol-related’ has tripled during this period and the system of estimating them has undergone what the NHS calls a ‘substantial change’. Hundreds of thousands of hospital visits, predominantly involving the elderly, are now classified ‘alcohol-related’. Our ageing population guarantees further rises in ‘alcohol-related admissions’ in the future.

I thoroughly recommend the whole article.

Has Hannan lost the plot?

2011-11-11T11:52:00.004Z

Daniel Hannan is generally sound, but he seems to be periodically afflicted by conventional wisdom. His latest article for the Daily Mail is a case in point.

I replied on his Telegraph Blogs site as follows:

"A default by Rome, on the other hand, would blow the European economy to smithereens."

Would it?

Certainly, those who were foolish enough to lend to the Italian government would lose out, but I don't see why the wider economy should suffer.

"Since no one would then lend it money,
it would have to print lots of lira very quickly to pay the salaries of
its soldiers, policemen and other vital public servants."

Has someone got to you, Daniel? Do you really believe that there is no fat left to be trimmed in the Italian public sector? Surely they could balance the budget without impacting any genuinely vital services.

Italy should embrace default. So should we all.

Allister Heath on Communism

2011-11-08T21:00:00.004Z

Another good article form Allister Heath:

Communism has been tried repeatedly. It doesn’t work. Most people just about remember this (though most youngsters will have forgotten by the time the next crisis comes about). Communism’s degree of failure is utterly incomparable with the failure of our present, mixed economy system (what we have is not pure capitalism or “neo-liberalism” but a weird and unstable combination of markets combined with a large public sector, high and graduated taxes, hugely powerful monetary authorities and a huge amount of regulation). Communism leads to collapse, starvation and dictatorship.

Heath provides plenty of examples, and recommends The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, which "details how at least 94m people lost their lives as a result of communism in the twentieth century".

But what of those compliant comrades who weren't forced to pay the ultimate price? Is there nothing to recommend the communist approach?

Two natural experiments were run last century: an unusually pure version of capitalism in Hong Kong versus real communism in China; a slightly more diluted but still highly capitalist model in post-war Germany versus a socialist system in East Germany. In both cases the triumph of capitalism was complete.

Heath concludes:

Instead of wasting time investigating the views of an economist whose overall system failed disastrously, we should be learning from those who understand that a free-market is the only possible system but who also grasp that current institutions tend to lead to booms and busts, especially if the price system is distorted by underpriced credit or underpriced risk as a result of central bank or government actions. If you are into dead economists, try reading Ludwig von Mises or F.A. Hayek. The latter predicted the crash of 1929 and the stagflation of the 1970s; their followers predicted the dot.com bubble and the collapse of 2008. Marx should remain buried.

It is a good point, well made.

MEPs insist on above-inflation budget increase

2011-11-08T09:17:00.004Z

Just for a change ...

MEPs have insisted on an above-inflation increase in the EU's budget, despite opposition from national governments.
On 26 October 2011 the European Parliament held its final debate on the draft budget for 2012, before final negotiations begin with the Commission and the Council of Ministers.
MEPs broadly followed a recommendation by the Budgets Committee to back - and exceed - the Commission's proposal for a 4.9% increase in the EU's 2012 budget compared with the 2011 budget.
This would give the EU a budget of approximately €132bn and the proposed rise is above the rate of inflation.

Read the rest of the sorry story at the BBC's ironically named Democracy Live site.

UPDATE:

What the BBC doesn't tell you is that no British MEPs supported the increase:

53 British MEPs voted against; 8 abstained.

In Germany, 61 voted for the increase; 9 against.

In France, 44 voted for the increase; 8 against.

Overall, 430 voted for; 122 against.

For the record, here are the British MEPs who shamefully abstained (5 Lib Dems, 2 Greens, 1 Plaid Cymru):

Cameron the money printer

2011-11-08T08:50:00.006Z

The Telegraph reports:

Mr Cameron is thought to be in support of a plan for the European Central Bank effectively to print money in a Continent-wide quantitative easing programme which could be used to rescue Italy and possibly Spain. The ECB is heavily dependent on German financing but Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has refused to support the bank playing a central role in a eurozone bailout package because of fears that it will cause high inflation.

It is the first time that the Prime Minister has publicly expressed his anger at Germany for blocking a deal involving the ECB.

Massive money printing: what could possibly go wrong?

It's as if the Germans have past experience of this ...

The Torygraph?

2011-11-08T08:41:00.004Z

I often have a go at the BBC, but the supposedly right-wing Telegraph shares many of their ridiculous views:

Worrying about the environment is not a concern you’d historically associate with Ferrari, but no one is immune from the global responsibility to decrease carbon emissions, not even niche manufacturers, and the Italian stallion must play its part.

The sad fact is that there aren't any voices of sanity in the British mainstream press. Only the tabloids come close, but they mix the occasional worthwhile comment with so much crap that most educated people dismiss them out of hand.

HS2

2011-11-08T08:18:00.006Z

BBC News:

The case for HS2 depends partly on the idea that time spent on the train is unproductive, so that if you can make the journey shorter there will be big productivity gains for the economy.

The government document setting out the cost/benefit analysis puts the value of that time saving at £7.3bn by 2043 - and that's just for the section running from London to Birmingham.

But when I got on a train at Birmingham International, I found plenty of passengers - in First Class at least - who appeared to disprove that theory.

With free wi-fi on the train, they were hunched over their laptops and smartphones, busy working rather than idling away the journey.

What do the passengers think?

If the HS2 project does go ahead the journey to London will be cut to just 49 minutes by 2026.

But the passengers I met did not seem too excited by that - Roisif Wilson, who spends some of the week shuttling between offices in Birmingham, was not convinced that the money would be well spent.

"We use the internet for conference calls anyway," she said. "We're living in a much more technological age and I think it would be good to invest in better wi-fi for more people. It's not a significant enough difference for the investment."

Personally, it strikes me as a grotesque waste of money. They should concentrate instead on getting our existing trains to run on time, and adding capacity so that people don't need to stand.

UPDATE:

Here's the latest from Westminster's most promising MP:

The Transport Committee’s report into High Speed Rail was released today. You can find it here.

I voted against the report. In my view, it is too supportive of the present proposals.

In committee, a number of us brought forward and voted for amendments which would have softened the report substantially. Some of these were defeated by just one vote. Full details can be found in the formal minutes at the end of the first volume.

£40bn IMF backdoor euro bailout

2011-11-08T08:07:00.003Z

BBC News reports:

The government says it would be able to hand over as much as £40bn to the IMF without a vote in the House of Commons.

That is more than three times as much as the annual budget for the police in England and Wales.

It is more or less the amount the Treasury raises in Corporation Tax in a year.

And until the weekend, many at Westminster had no idea the figure was so big.

Yet Parliament has already agreed to what Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander describes as a £40bn "ceiling".

I'd say 'shocking', but very little shocks me these days.

Any loans by our government to foreign organisations should be subject to a referendum. That £40 billion can be given away without so much as a Commons vote is deeply distressing.

The labour laws induce sloth, indolence

2011-11-08T07:56:00.002Z

An interesting article by Ian Morris of Stanford University in BBC News Magazine:

In 2011, we are used to reading in the newspapers that China is a crass, corrupt, economic giant, manipulating its currency and rigging the markets to catch up with the West. Back in 1911, though, British newspapers levelled exactly the same charges against the USA. And they were right. Within 50 years, the US had conquered the world's markets and the European empires were gone.

A disaster for Europe - or was it? In 2011 the average European lives 30 years longer than the average in 1911 and earns five times as much. Europe is far freer than it was in 1911 and has not had a major war in 66 years. All things considered, losing its number one spot and becoming dependent on American capital was a good deal for 20th Century Europe.

Will dependency on Chinese capital in the 21st Century be equally good?

No one knows, but the signs are not promising. Just last week, Jin Liqun, the supervising chairman of China's sovereign wealth fund, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that Beijing should only lend to Europe if the EU turns itself upside down.

"If you look at the troubles which happened in European countries," said Jin. "This is purely because of the accumulated troubles of the worn out welfare society… The labour laws induce sloth, indolence, rather than hard working." Europe might find Chinese economic hegemony much harder to live with than an American one.

Jin is right, and though Europeans may find the transition difficult, our deeply immoral, unfunded welfare state must die. I'm sure the British at the turn of the last century would have looked on our modern society with the same contempt.

71 percent of Germans want referendum on Euro

2011-11-08T07:43:00.004Z

Via The Cobden Centre's Twitter feed:

Translation:

According to an Emnid poll commissioned by "Bild am Sonntag" 71 percent of Germans want to be able to vote directly on important decisions to Europe and the Euro. Only 27 percent oppose it.

It will be interesting to see what coverage this gets in the British press.

More subsidy, Gromit?

2011-11-06T15:23:00.003Z

BBC News reports

Wallace and Gromit maker Aardman's head of TV has said the company may have to halt UK production of its famed stop-frame animations because it has become too expensive.
...
The main problem, he said, was that while films made in the UK can receive government help in the shape of a 15-20% tax credit, UK TV animation receives nothing.

The right answer, of course, is to do away with all tax credits, while reducing corporation tax across the board (preferably to zero).

The government shouldn't be picking winners. The best thing it can do is to get out of the way, and leave Britons to figure out what they're best at.

Besides reducing or abolishing corporation tax, there are a number of things the government could do to make British businesses more competitive internationally, without favouring one region or industry over another:

Abolish minimum wage (the government shouldn't condemn people to unemployment just because their labour is worth less than some arbitrary, centrally planned amount)
Repeal labour laws (both sides of an employment contract should be voluntary, and the terms should be decided by the employer and employee, not bureaucrats)
Abolish employers' national insurance (the last thing we should be doing at the moment is discouraging job creation)
Merge employees' national insurance with income tax (that's what it effectively is anyway), and make rates low and flat (so that there is never a disincentive to work)
Abolish Capital Gains Tax (we should not be discouraging investment)
Reduce welfare handouts to the absolute minimum (hostels and soup kitchens) so that everyone who can work, seeks work
Abolish all carbon taxes (if this seems radical, read 'An Appeal to Reason')
Exit the EU (so we can trade freely with all countries of the world, rather than just Europe)

Halal vs animal rights

2011-11-06T13:04:00.003Z

An interesting little video from BBC News. Here's the blurb:

Next month the Dutch parliament is expected to approve a ban on halal and kosher methods of slaughtering animals for food.

Those who proposed the ban say it is simply an issue of animal welfare, but it received strong support from the right-wing Freedom Party.

Many see it as a violation of their religious freedom, and among the Jewish community it is a worrying echo of a similar ban brought in by Hitler.

It's always amusing when different BBC causes come into conflict. Animal rights versus Muslim rights, who wins?

Left-wing defence of Islam has always been a bit strange, since most things you'll read in the Koran are antithetical to most things you'll read in The Guardian. But lefties are masters of doublethink.

It's also interesting to see the Nazis dragged into this. If you consider Islam as an ideology, it has quite a lot in common with Nazism. Both are totalitarian, anti-Jewish, and anti-free speech. Both require the individual to submit to the collective. Islam shares the Nazi desire for global domination, and condones, even encourages, the use of violence in pursuit of that goal.

We must rejoice that so many Muslims are bad Muslims, who don't take the Koran at its word.

My own view is that we should afford no special respect to religious beliefs. If society decides that a certain method of slaughter is inhumane, "God told me to" is not a valid defence.

Although I have nothing but scorn for animal rights extremists, I don't think that animals should be made to suffer unnecessarily. Animal welfare isn't high up my own list of concerns, but it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing for libertarians to support. I'm not going to stop eating meat any time soon, but I have a lot of sympathy with the position set out by David Graham:

I find it strange that so many of my fellow libertarians and anarchists oppose and ridicule animal rights with such passion. For one thing, an animal right is perfectly libertarian in that it is a negative right. Unlike incoherent positive rights, such as the 'right' to education or health care, the animal right is, at bottom, a right to be left alone. It does not call for government to tax us in order to provide animals with food, shelter, and veterinary care. It only requires us to stop killing them and making them suffer. I can think of no other issue where the libertarian is arguing for a positive right — his right to make animals submit to any use he sees — and the other side is arguing for a negative right!

It will be interesting to see how the argument develops over the coming decades.

FT: Capitalism need not be about greed and gambling

2011-11-06T11:51:00.005Z

A worthwhile article in the FT by John Kay:

Capitalism “should be replaced by something nicer”, one group of demonstrators demanded. The slogan encapsulates the incoherence of the protests at Wall Street and the City of London.

More than a century ago the sociologist Werner Sombart explained the lack of appeal of socialism in the US with the observation that “all socialist utopias have foundered on roast beef and apple pie”. The socialist utopias of Russia and China would later founder on precisely those issues. For roast beef and apple pie, today read iPads and Twitter. Protesters know capitalism delivers their mobile phones. Only a minority would renounce this material world altogether: which is how the Daily Telegraph could report that most went off at night to enjoy the sprung mattresses and showers that have replaced hay bales and water from the pump during two centuries of capitalist industrialisation.

Indeed. One of my favourite tweets from Sunday Morning Live this morning was the one commenting on the impressive Wi-Fi signal enjoyed by the protesters.

Kay continues:

A semantic confusion leads us to use the word market to describe both the process which puts food on our table and the activity of gambling in credit default swaps. That confusion has enabled people to claim the virtues of the former for the latter.
...
The inventors of social networking sites resemble the occupiers of St Paul’s Churchyard tents more than the occupants of boardrooms. The besuited Winkelvoss twins, lobbying and litigating for a share of Mark Zuckerberg’s business, embody the deformed view of market economics which confuses business interests with free enterprise.

Quite.

Of course, state should not prevent gambling, whether through casinos or stock exchanges, and it shouldn't take any interest in private sector executive salaries. What it should do is allow bad gamblers to go bust, and stop subsidising businesses (whether they be banks, car manufacturers, or eco-industrialists). We need less government intervention, not more.

Schlichter on the euro

2011-11-05T13:02:00.002Z

Detlev Schlichter:

Europe’s problem is not that many different countries share the same currency. Many more and much more different countries did the same between 1879 and 1914 under the gold standard, and it worked very well. The problem is precisely that they do not share an international, apolitical and inelastic commodity money, but a fully elastic and politicized fiat money that comes with build-in expectations of government and bank bailouts.

This is excerpted from a superb interview with ValueWalk, covering a wide range of topics.

I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Austerity

2011-11-05T08:47:00.006Z

BBC News defines austerity as follows:

Economic policy aimed at reducing a government's deficit (or borrowing). Austerity can be achieved through increases in government revenues - primarily via tax rises - and/or a reduction in government spending or future spending commitments.

It's probably a fair description of how the term is used by the mainstream media these days, but it's a far cry from what I think of by 'austerity'.

WordReference.com serves up a more traditional definition:

Concise Oxford English Dictionary © 2008 Oxford University Press:
austere /ɒˈstɪə, ɔː-/
▶adjective (austerer, austerest)

1 severe or strict in appearance or manner.

2 lacking comforts, luxuries, or adornment.

– derivatives
austerely adverb,
austerity noun (pl. austerities).
– origin ME: via OFr. from L. austerus, from Gk austēros ‘severe’.

This is consistent with images of genuine austerity from times gone by.

It's deeply wrong that a word with these connotations is used to describe attempts by wealthy societies to live within their means.

As I wrote in May 2010, we don't have to go very far back in time to find much lower government spending:

Simply scaling back to the 'austerity' of 2002 would save hundreds of billions of pounds, and even accounting for increases in welfare costs, it would be enough to take us from deficit to surplus, allowing us to finally begin repaying the debt.

Although I remain firmly committed to balancing the books, I no longer believe we should attempt to repay 'our' debt. We should instead repudiate it.

The necessity of bailouts

2011-11-05T08:19:00.002Z

From a recent BBC News article:

Germany's banks have a heavy exposure to debt from Greece, Europe's biggest headache.

This means in the event of a Greek default, Germany would probably have to bail out its own banks.

It would seem that as far as the BBC is concerned, there's nothing more natural than taxpayers being forced to pay for the bad decisions of bankers. If the banks want a bailout, they'll get one.

It's a warped view, especially considering how much time they spend banker bashing.

Referendum retraction?

2011-11-03T20:53:00.004Z

Only yesterday, the BBC's Gavin Hewitt quoted George Papandreou as follows:

"We will not implement any programme by force," he said, "but only with the consent of the Greek people.

"This is our democratic tradition and we demand that it is also respected abroad."

Today it seems that he has been beaten into submission.

Finally, the Greek people have a good reason to riot. It will be interesting to see how they react.

Church and state

2011-11-03T19:45:00.003Z

In his latest post, Daniel Hannan rightly argues that there is nothing moral about higher taxes:

Now that Rowan Williams is intruding into the debate about a financial transactions tax, I'd like to ask him a question. Which does he consider more meritorious – to give your own money to good causes ... or to force your customers, clients and shareholders to do so in the name of 'corporate social responsibility'? Which has more virtue – to 'sell that thou hast, and give to the poor', or to be expropriated through the tax system?

The whole article is worth reading (though I am left wondering about Hannan's own religious beliefs). Regular readers will remember my previous blogs on the Tobin Tax and my distaste for 'corporate social responsibility', but Hannan nicely highlights the thoroughly un-Christian nature of Church's lurch to the left.

Allister Heath picks up the same themes in an excellent article for City A.M.

[The Church of England] has long since turned its back on its core competence of bread and butter theology and helping its members navigate life, preferring instead to turn itself into a politicised advocacy group. It is more interested in fighting capitalism, calling for ever more government spending and higher taxes and jumping onto every fashionable left-wing bandwagon (the most recent being banker-bashing and Tobin taxes), rather than talking about God (whom its clerics presumably still believe in), the difference between right and wrong in personal decisions, and how responsible individuals can do good themselves through their behaviour, choices and private charity.

Poverty is idolised, material gain demonised and envy rationalised. The collapse of the Berlin wall and the astonishing wealth-creation (for which capitalism and globalisation are entirely responsible) that has enabled scores of people in emerging nations to climb out of abject poverty has completely passed by the CoE’s establishment. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, sounds more like an anti-growth environmental radical or a traditional, pre-Blair socialist Labour politician, rather than a man interested in spreading the word of God. There is no longer room in his church for conservatives, free marketeers or capitalists – or even for mainstream folk who work hard and honestly to better the living standards of their families and don’t want to feel bad about it. This is not a dispute about ethics – it is about a weirdly ignorant rejection of the foundations of our modern, prosperous societies.

Williams professes to care about the poor, but he's hopelessly committed to an ideology that impoverishes in the name of equality. He professes to care about our 'immortal souls', but he would reduce free individuals to mere automata, serfs to philosopher kings who alone are empowered to make moral choices. He is a very bad man, and in the unlikely event that there is a hell, I hope he rots in it.

Delingpole: Why does the BBC so hate Britain?

2011-11-03T19:25:00.002Z

I've had a double dose of BBC today because I caught the 6 o'clock news in addition to BBC Breakfast.

The relentless drivel about Coalition Cuts, obesity epidemics, and our moral duty to bail out bankrupt governments left me about as enraged as you'd expect, so I was pleased to read this from James Delingpole:

It's long since time that the BBC was forced to recognise its responsibilities as our compulsory, near-monopoly broadcaster. If the only people who funded it were tofu-eating metropolitan anti-capitalist bien-pensants who all believed in renewable energy with the same blind ideological fervour as Chris Huhne then the BBC would be perfectly within its rights to broadcast this Spartist drivel. But they're not. The BBC's job is also to represent – or try to represent – the interests of people who are shocked by rising energy bills, who are desperately worried about Britain's economic future, who might benefit from a job working in or servicing the shale gas industry, who innocently believe (in their sweet but oh-so-naive way) that the British Broadcasting Corporation's true purpose is to broadcast for Britain.

I recommend the whole article.

Sadly, I think the BBC is beyond saving. Even if it were somehow possible to reclaim it from the radical lefties, there would always be the risk that they'd take it over again.

It's a shame, because they do produce some of the best television I've ever seen, Frozen Planet being the latest example. I like to think that the demand for such programmes, and the talented people that produce them, wouldn't suddenly disappear if we moved away from compulsory funding.

Hannan: Eurocrats are terrified of democracy

2011-11-02T09:25:00.000Z

An excellent article from Daniel Hannan:

Shall I tell you the truly terrifying thing about the EU? It’s not the absence of democracy in Brussels, or the ease with which Eurocrats swat aside referendum results. It’s the way in which the internal democracy of the member states is subverted in order to sustain the requirements of membership.

George Papandreou, the luckless Greek leader, is the latest politician to find himself being chewed up because he stands in the way of the Brussels machine. On Monday afternoon, Papandreou announced a referendum on whether to accept the EU’s bail-out terms. He had evidently had enough of the antics of the opposition party, New Democracy, which kept insisting that Greece remain in the euro, while opposing all the austerity measures necessary to that end – an outrageous stance given that New Democracy ran up the deficit in the first place. Papandreou hoped to force his opponents off the fence: in favour of the spending cuts or against euro membership. Perhaps he also hoped to put pressure on the EU to offer more generous terms.

AEP: Why the Greek decision means a complete unravelling of last week’s deal

2011-11-02T08:37:00.003Z

Via The God That Failed, I discovered this article by AEP:

GREECE'S astonishing decision to call a referendum – "a supreme act of democracy and of patriotism", in the words of premier George Papandreou – has more or less killed last week’s EU summit deal.
The markets cannot wait three months to find out the result, and nor is China going to lend much money to the EFSF bail-out fund until this is cleared up. The whole edifice is already at risk of crumbling. Société Générale is down 15pc this morning. The FTSE MIB index in Milan has crashed 7pc. Italian bond spreads have jumped to 450 basis points.

Unless the European Central Bank step in very soon and on a massive scale to shore up Italy, the game is up. We will have a spectacular smash-up.

If handled badly, the disorderly insolvency of the world’s third largest debtor with €1.9 trillion in public debt and nearer €3.5 trillion in total debt would be a much greater event than the fall of Credit Anstalt in 1931. (Let me add that Italy is not fundamentally insolvent. It is only in these straits because it does not have a lender of last resort, a sovereign central bank, or a sovereign currency. The euro structure itself has turned a solvent state into an insolvent state. It is reverse alchemy.)

This all sounds true enough, as far as it goes.

Britain is having less trouble with the markets because it can print money to buy government bonds, which is what QE is all about. But this is hardly a cost-free choice.

We might equally say that an accomplished counterfeiter is never 'insolvent', because he can always pay his bills with fresh forgeries.

AEP says "unless the European Central Bank step in very soon and on a massive scale to shore up Italy, the game is up". But for whom is the game up? Italy won't cease to exist, nor will any of the real goods and services within its borders. The game will be up for those who were foolish enough to lend to the Italian government. And following a default, the game will be up for those who rely on the Italian government continuing to live beyond its means (notably those in public sector employment).

On the other hand, if the ECB does 'step in' to shore up every overindebted state in Europe (by printing money to buy their bonds), it will be confiscating purchasing power from everyone who currently holds euros, and sowing the seeds for hyperinflation on a continental scale.

I'm with Detlev Schlichter: the nations of Europe should embrace default.

Let's wipe the slate clean, and give true capitalism a try.

UPDATE:

You do have to give AEP credit for this bit, though:

The Greek referendum – if it is not overtaken by a collapse of the government first – has left officials in Paris, Berlin, and Brussels speechless with rage. The ingratitude of them.

The spokesman of French president Nicolas Sarkozy (himself half Greek, from Thessaloniki) said the move was “irrational and dangerous”. Rainer Brüderle, Bundestag leader of the Free Democrats, said the Greeks appear to be “wriggling out” of a solemn commitment. They face outright bankruptcy, he blustered.

Well yes, but at least the Greeks are stripping away the self-serving claims of the creditor states that their “rescue” loan packages are to “save Greece”.
...
The debt has exploded under the EU-IMF Troika programme. It is heading for 180pc of GDP by next year. Even under the haircut deal, Greek debt will be 120pc of GDP in 2020 after nine years of depression. That is not cure, it is a punitive sentence.

Andy Duncan summed up the article nicely:

In his usual curate’s egg way of writing – with a mixture of the partly good and the partly bad – if you filter out the bad parts, AEP sums up the priceless situation in Greece, as the people there head inexorably towards Iceland-style default, regardless of what the Troika want.

Tebbit on the civil service

2011-11-02T07:46:00.003Z

Lord Tebbit writes:

Some very odd things are going on in the Civil Service. Until very recently it has been a model of integrity and (despite all the jokes), in its upper reaches in particular, more competent than almost any other. It owed its quality to the great 19th-century reforms which ended the practices of buying commissions in the Armed Services and promotion that depended on who you knew, or who your father was, in the civil service.

Tebbit asked

about the Government's policy to develop a civil service "representative of the community it serves", and was told that there is a strategy which "sets representation targets for the senior civil service covering ethnic origin, disability and gender" and that departments must report progress to the Civil Service Capability Board....
The strategy "also gives departments freedom to develop policies on representation covering religion/belief, sexual orientation, age, gender identity and educational/social background, but not educational attainment, criminality or physical attributes".

So much for meritocracy.

Tebbit concludes:

I am left wondering why it seems to be thought that quotas for Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and for that matter atheists and Jedi Knights of varying sexual orientation would lead to a better civil service than simply appointing the best person for the job. Or is it that the Government puts the excellence of the Civil Service second to juvenile social engineering?

If I were a fighter pilot or an infantryman going into battle, I think I would be happpier if the chap covering my back had been chosen as the best for that job rather than for his social background, religion, sexual preferences or the colour of his skin.

For my part, though I loathe this sort of 'positive discrimination', I wonder if it might be a good thing that the civil service is increasingly incompetent. After all, their interests do seem to run quite contrary to our own.

House prices rising?

2011-11-01T07:09:00.005Z

BBC News reports:

House prices increased year-on-year for the first time in six months in October, with a 0.8% rise, the Nationwide Building Society has said.

Prices went up by 0.4% in October compared with the previous month, the building society said, making the average home worth £165,650.

With inflation running at over 5% [1], that sounds like a significant real-terms fall to me.

The press release that serves as the basis for the BBC report is here (PDF). It confirms that "all changes are nominal and do not allow for inflation".
Lazy journalism from the BBC!

[1] 5.2% CPI, 5.6% RPI according to the September 2011 data from the ONS (released 18 October 2011).

Should private schools be abolished?

2011-10-30T14:30:00.006Z

Believe it or not, this ridiculous notion was recently debated at the illustrious Oxford Union.

Toby Young and Tom Paine have both blogged on the subject.

I don't know whether Toby was just playing to his audience with his opening remarks:

I want to start by agreeing with the honourable members on the other side. The fact that only seven per cent of the British population attended independent schools, yet 75% of judges, 70% of finance directors and 45% of top civil servants have been privately educated is iniquitous. Unquestionably, private schools have a good deal to answer for when it comes to the preservation of the English class system.

He went on to say

But what of the moral objection? Here, I think, is the nub of the issue. The issue doesn’t turn on the desirability of reducing the number of children at private schools – most of us agree about that – but on how far the state should be allowed to go in bringing about a socially desirable outcome.

Personally, I think he conceded too much. I commented on his blog as follows:

I find it disturbing that you accept their premise that there should be fewer children in private schools.

The less influence the state has in education, the better.

If we must subsidise education, let's at least allow full and unrestricted competition. Free schools should be truly free: to choose their curriculum, their entrance policies, and their fees. If they want to make a profit, and they can, good for them -- it shows they're meeting market demands efficiently.

Ideally there would be no subsidy at all. The whole system should be voluntary.

As for charities, I suggest we abolish them, along with corporation tax. Too many of them are fake anyway, paid by governments to astroturf.

Too extreme for the students at the Oxford Union, I'm sure. I don't know what Toby really believes, but if he was simply making a rhetorical calculation with a view to winning the debate, it was probably a sensible choice. Such a shame, though, that this is necessary. That state education is accepted as normal and desirable.

I refined my position slightly in a subsequent comment at The Last Ditch:

I actually have mixed feelings about how much say the government should have in taxpayer-funded schools (I don't want my money spent on creationism or madrassas).

Most likely, it [full freedom with the risk of misspent money] would be a price worth paying, but I can think of a couple of alternatives that might mitigate the impact:

1) Push education funding and oversight down to the local level. People in a community are more likely to agree about what should be taught than people across the entire country. Unfortunately, the socialists would kick up a stink about deprived areas, and the policy risks further balkanizing our country into Muslim and non-Muslim areas.

2) Give tax rebates to parents who put their children in private education (equivalent to the cost of state education), so they don't have to pay twice, and leave those private schools completely free to teach as they choose. State schools could remain pretty much as they are today. The policy would still distort the market by introducing a price floor, and non-parents would still be effectively subsidising parents, but it seems like an improvement on the status quo -- only those reliant on the state should have to accept education on the state's terms.

Of course, what the world really needs is a newly-discovered, mostly-unpopulated continent, where we can set up a libertarian society on an opt-in basis ...

You'll sense the despair in that last sentence. I firmly believe that a libertarian society would be both morally and materially superior to our current statist mess, but it's very difficult to see a path from where we are to where I'd like us to be. Too many people have bought into the current order. Too many have given up thinking for themselves.

But the fight goes on.

What's so great about an ever closer union anyway?

2011-10-30T11:55:00.004Z

Hoping to find some historical references, I recently googled for "ever closer union" [1]. What turned up was an article in Time Magazine from Wednesday, Mar. 14, 2007.

I've reproduced their 20 points in full below, for the sake of posterity, and for your amusement.

The author's name isn't given, so we must assume this is the official voice of Time.

Can you imagine this being written today?

1 | No Kidding, Peace
It was the Americans — with the Marshall Plan, and then nato — who laid the groundwork, but the E.U. has helped to give Western Europe its most peaceful 60 years since records were first kept. Here's the big picture: France and Germany had fought a war in each of the three generations before the Treaty of Rome. Twice Europe's wars had sucked in the rest of the world. By locking together economies, societies and political structures, the E.U. has made such horrors unimaginable. For that alone, give thanks.

2 | The French Countryside
There has to be something to be said for the Common Agricultural Policy, and indeed there is. The timeless contours of la France profonde — at least south of the wheat and beet belt — are a testimony to the long subsidy of French farming. The cap may offend free-trade purists, but on a summer morning somewhere in the Dordogne there's something to be said for impurity.

3 | Easier Travel
The Oresund Bridge between Copenhagen and Malmö; the Channel Tunnel; high-speed rail links snaking out from France — all have done their bit to knit the Continent closer together than ever before. But perhaps above all it is the growth of budget airlines — stimulated by regulations that came into force in 1997, allowing an airline from one member state to operate a route in another — that has made easy travel around Europe available to all.

4 | Ireland's Revival
E.U. structural funds aren't the only reason that the Emerald Tiger roars, and Ireland isn't the only place where money from Brussels has helped build a modern infrastructure. But there's something about the scale of the transformation of Ireland's economy since membership in 1973 that boggles the mind.

5 | That Burgundy Passport
Remember the days when your passport got scrutinized by some suspicious official on even the most straightforward trip from Innsbruck to Bolzano? Some of us do. But since the signing of the Schengen Agreement in Luxembourg in 1985, the free movement of people has become more than an aspiration — and an attribute of modern Europe, remarkably, that has survived the struggle against terrorism of the last decade.

6 | GSM
You may not know that it stands for Global System for Mobile communications, but the E.U.'s decision in 1987 to adopt a common standard for digital mobile telephony gave both the telecoms and handset manufacturers like Ericsson and Nokia the security of knowing that there was a huge single market for their products. The consequence: a whole new appreciation for the virtues of the opposable thumb.

7 | Work Where You Want
It took years for the Treaty of Rome's dream of a single labor market to come to fruition, but now — cue joke about Polish plumbers — the right to live, work, and indeed retire, in another Union country is established, and such freedoms will gradually be extended to citizens from the 12 countries that joined since 2004. This means working to the same rules, too; though national legislatures had taken the lead, the Treaty itself enshrined the principle of equal pay for equal work for men and women, while the 2000 Charter of Fundamental Rights proclaims workers' entitlements on issues from labor mobility and collective bargaining to equal opportunities.

8 | Good News for Galicia
And Wales, Sardinia and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. For regions on the periphery of their nations, with proud cultures and traditions of their own, the E.U. has been a godsend. The Committee of the Regions provides a political voice while the E.U.'s regional policy has channeled funds for projects aimed to tackle economic and social disparities within member countries. The consequence? Not a Europe homogeneously harmonized, but one that is more diverse than ever before.

9 | Cern
Since 1954 the European Organization for Nuclear Research on the outskirts of Geneva has been in the forefront of advanced particle physics, figuring out what stuff we're made of. Bonus: Tim Berners-Lee was on the staff there when he developed a new way for scientists to share information over the Internet — the World Wide Web.

10 | The Euro
The single currency — introduced on Jan. 1, 2002, and now used by 315 million people in 13 countries — did more than eliminate those tiresome collections of small coins that we used to bring back from vacation. By making prices transparent, the euro made the single European market a reality.
11 | Airbus
Sure, we know, the jewel of European industrial collaboration looks pretty scratched these days as the aerospace company's management weaknesses are exposed. And yes, "launch aid" for new planes is a taxpayer subsidy by any other name. But the weirdly cobbled together planes — wings made in Britain, tail fins in Germany — have at least ensured that there's some competition in the global commercial aviation market, and forced Boeing of the U.S. to raise its own game.

12 | Better Football
Started as the European Cup in 1955, dominated by Real Madrid in the early years, the Champions League now gets audiences from Minsk to Munster watching the same images, and the final each year has become Europe's Super Bowl. Plus: the Bosman case in 1995 — where the European Court ruled that players at the end of their contracts could move freely between clubs — enabled top teams to become the collection of international talents they are now.

13 | Erasmus
Since 1987, over 1.5 million university students have benefited from the Erasmus European exchange program and taken comparative knowledge of local beers to unimagined heights. The E.U.'s Lifelong Learning Programme has a $9 billion budget for the next seven years to develop areas such as cooperation in education policy, student exchanges and adult learning.

14 | Tabloid Heaven
British Euro-skepticism may irritate others, but let's be fair — it has much contributed to the gaiety of nations. What would the London red tops do without the constant supply of stories — most of them urban myths — about European standardization of everything from cucumbers to condoms? Our favorite: the widely reported claim that E.U. safety rules required circus tightrope walkers and jugglers to wear hard hats.

15 | The Fourth Movement of Beethoven's Ninth
To tell the truth, we find the "Choral" a bit crass, as symphonies go. But at least since Beethoven's tune was adopted as the E.U.'s anthem in 1985, kids learn at least one bit of classical music. It would be even nicer if they knew the words of Friedrich von Schiller's Ode to Joy. Plus: as flags go, those gold stars on a blue field make a pretty decent one.

16 | Clean Beaches
In 2005, 96% of Europe's coastal beaches were deemed clean enough for swimming, thanks to the 1976 Bathing Water Directive — toughened up last year — which set binding minimum water-quality standards. More than 200 pieces of E.U. environmental law, aimed at staunching toxic fumes, eliminating dangerous pesticides, phasing out cfcs, protecting birds and creating the European Environment Agency have generally made the place more pleasant.

17 | Safer Food
In 2005 French President Jacques Chirac was recorded unawares by a French journalist joking with the then German Chancellor and Russian President, "the only thing [Britain has] ever done for European agriculture is mad cow disease." His point, surely, was that food scares such as bse had the salutary effect of speeding moves to set basic health and labeling standards. The European Food Safety Authority was established in 2002, and in 2006, food-labeling regulations were tightened to substantiate nutritional claims like "low-fat" and "lowers cholesterol."

18 | Taking Climate Change Seriously
Al Gore has been the Cassandra of global warming, but the E.U. was the driving force behind the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. As part of the Kyoto process, the E.U. set up its Emissions Trading Scheme, a market to trade pollution permits for carbon dioxide emissions. In recent months, Europe has aimed for even lower emissions standards through initiatives on cars and aircraft exhaust, and has already set minimum biofuel targets.

19 | A Reason to Go to Brussels
We would not go so far as to say that we love the place, but the Belgian capital deserves more respect than it gets. The food and beer are great, it's developed a nicely cosmopolitan flavor and it's more green than almost any other European capital. It is also the home of Magritte, Bruegel and Tintin, is a center of Art Nouveau and has enough Gothic architecture to do you for a lifetime.

20 | Eastward Look, the Land is Bright
There were times when it seemed bogged down in bureaucratic technicalities, but the decision after the fall of the Berlin Wall to offer membership to the former communist nations of Eastern Europe was a courageous and generous act of leadership. There are now 11 former Soviet republics and East bloc states in the E.U., and the boundaries of democracy and free markets have been decisively moved East.

[1] My recollection was correct. The phrase appears at the very beginning of the Treaty of Rome: "DETERMINED to lay the foundations of an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe".

Absolute and relative poverty

2011-10-29T16:08:00.012+01:00

Daniel Hannan writes:

Here's a bit of good news: we can look forward to a sharp decline in poverty over the next two years. No doubt Polly Toynbee is even now composing a paean of praise to David Cameron for achieving what Labour never could.

Oh, hang on. On closer inspection, it turns out that things aren't quite so straightforward. The reason fewer people will be poor is that poverty, these days, is defined as earning less than 60 per cent of median income. Although downturns are bad for everyone, including the destitute, wages are depreciating in real terms faster than state benefits. People dependent on welfare payments will be worse off in absolute terms, but their incomes will fall more slowly than those of working people. As the median wage drops, the poverty line drops with it.

Thus we see the absurdity of the Joseph Rowntree/IFS measure of poverty – the measure uncritically accepted by the BBC and most other media. I've remarked before that, by these metrics, policies that shift people from dependency into productive jobs are defined as 'regressive'. Now we see that, by the same token, an absolute decline in Britain's living standards means a reduction in poverty.

Here's what the IFS report itself (PDF) has to say on the matter:

the living standards of low-income families are set to fall over the period - which will increase absolute poverty - but they are forecast to fall by less than the living standards of families at median income, and so relative poverty is forecast to have fallen in 2010-11. Indeed, at its low point, real median household income is forecast to be 7% lower in 2012-13 than it was in 2009-10, and to remain below its 2009-10 level until at least 2015-16. This unprecedented collapse in living standards is chiefly due to the (actual or forecast) high inflation and weak earnings growth over this period. As families in poverty get much of their income from state benefits and tax credits, which are typically increased in line with inflation, a fall in real earnings closes the gap between them and families around median income, who get much of their income from earnings.

But that doesn't quite capture the full absurdity of their definitions, because it turns out that "absolute poverty" is also relative:

The Child Poverty Act, passed with all-party support in 2010, commits successive governments to the eradication of child poverty by 2020. The Act lists four measures of child poverty, each with their own target which needs to be met for child poverty to be said to be eradicated, but this Commentary concentrates on relative and absolute poverty, as the other measures cannot yet be modelled. The Act defines an individual to be in relative poverty if his or her household’s equivalised income is below 60% of the median in that year; and he or she is in absolute poverty if the household’s equivalised income is below 60% of the 2010-11 median income, adjusted for inflation.

Wow.

I couldn't quite believe it, so I decided to look up the text of the Act:

The absolute low income target:
(1)The absolute low income target is that less than 5% of children who live in qualifying households live in households falling within the relevant income group.
(2)For the purposes of this section, a household falls within the relevant income group, in relation to a financial year, if its equivalised net income for the financial year is less than 60% of the adjusted base amount.
(3)“The adjusted base amount”, in relation to a financial year, is the base amount adjusted in a prescribed manner to take account of changes in the value of money since the base year.
(4)In this section—
“the base amount” means the amount of median equivalised net household income for the base year;
“the base year” means the financial year beginning with 1 April 2010.

I'm not sure whether the actual figure is available yet. The latest ONS report I was able to find, Social Trends 41 - Income and Wealth (PDF), has the data for 2008/09:

It shows a mean weekly household disposable income [1] of £507 per week (£26,364 p.a.) and median of £407 per week (£21,164 p.a.). That puts 60% of median at £244 per week (£12,688 p.a.; £1057 per month).

Now, that's not a huge amount of money to play with, but it's more than enough to cover the essentials — food, shelter, clothing, and housing. It's a far cry from a dollar a day! And the numbers already take into account the challenges of larger families [2].

To put this in context, let's look at the ONS figures for household income over the last 40 years:

There we are, then. Although 'relative poverty' will never disappear, all we need to do get rid of 'absolute poverty' is to drive median incomes back down to where they were in the mid 80s.

I'm sure Caroline Lucas could arrange that.

[1] "Disposable income is the amount of money that households have available for consumption expenditure or savings and is calculated by taking total income from all sources and deducting expenditure on taxes, social contributions and other expenses such as insurance premiums" — it all seems a bit arbitrary to me, and I'd prefer to have details of the "other expenses", but hey ho.

[2] Note that these are 'equivalised' values, assuming a childless couple as a baseline, with some arbitrary weights for spouses and children of different ages to fudge the values. Appendix 5 of Social Trends 39 (PDF) explains the details.

Labour resurgent; let the polls be wrong!

2011-10-29T14:48:00.012+01:00

I don't know how I missed the news reports at the time, but it seems Labour are actually ahead of the Conservatives in the polls, and have been for some time:

I can imagine very few things worse than our current government, but a Labour majority would surely be among them, especially since we'd be stuck with it until 2020!

I can understand people abandoning the Conservatives. What I can't understand is them turning to Labour. And yet support for that party, which did so much to destroy Britain over its 13 year reign, has risen from 34% in May 2010 to 42% today.

The only potentially encouraging sign is that those intending to vote small has doubled, from 7% shortly after the election to 14% today. The bad news is that as many people seem prepared to vote Green as UKIP.

Source: Reuters/ Ipsos MORI October Political Monitor; Fieldwork: 22-24 October 2011 (PDF)

We have just 3.5 years for the electorate to come to their senses.

Tebbit on the way forward for Europe

2011-10-29T14:06:00.007+01:00

In light of our greatly diminished sovereignty, and our almost total lack of influence in the EU (detailed in my previous post), Lord Tebbit considers the best way forward:

There are three possible ways to resolve the matter. One is to surrender our remaining independence, join the euro and advance to political union. Another is to simply leave the EU and stand back as it is engulfed in economic and political crisis, not next week, perhaps not next year, but inevitably because political union over such disparate nations will not work. We would however be badly harmed by that collapse. The third is to at least try to develop an alternative European architecture to preserve open and free markets in our mutual interest, ready for when even the eurocrats are compelled to face reality.

Tebbit discussed this third option in a previous post:

we should begin to draft the outline of a new European Treaty which would create a wider EFTA like structure with better provisions for trans-border controls over matters such as pollution, and would allow those states wishing to achieve total integration within a single state to do so. There might be such a state centred on Germany, and perhaps one on the north coast of the Mediterranean, and they could inherit the Commission without charge. Thus the integrationists could have their way to ever closer union between nations who may want it, and the rest of us could simply be individual nation states, all as members of the super-EFTA.

It would be an attractive formula for many in the Baltics, the central European states such as Poland and the Czech and Slovak Republics, not to mention Ireland. Here we could have a referendum to give the Government a strong negotiating mandate, and if Brussels was obstructive, to call a European Conference (a new 21st century Concert of Europe) to convert the draft into a new Treaty which would annul the Treaty of Rome.

Tebbit is under no illusions that transforming the EU into a more sensible arrangement would be easy:

At present that looks to be formidable, perhaps an impossible, task. However, the history of this kingdom has been one of having to intervene in our own interest to save the masters of Europe from their follies. So now once again it may be our future.

Personally, I am among those who want to exit first, and then re-engage, but Tebbit sets himself apart from our Coalition overlords by his clear expression of his objectives, and his firm statement of what we should do if these are not met.

It will be very interesting to see what role Europe plays in the 2015 general election:

1285 days to go!

Who rules Europe?

2011-10-29T12:36:00.006+01:00

I've written before about how difficult it is for British MEPs to influence anything in the European Parliament:

If 51% of MPs wanted to reverse the UK smoking ban, they could do it tomorrow. But if 100% of British MEPs wanted to reverse an EU smoking ban, they wouldn't be anywhere close to a majority in the European Parliament.

British MEPs control just 72 seats out of 736 (9.8%). Even if they were united on an issue, they would need to convince 297 of their European colleagues. For 60 million Britons to re-allow smoking in British pubs, we would need to consult the representatives of 440 million foreign residents, many of whom will never even visit Britain, much less live and work here.

It's actually worse than that, since the European Parliament doesn't have the power to initiate legislation. They only 'debate', and occasionally seek to amend, the legislation handed down to them by the Commission.

The EU's Europa website explains their "unique institutional set-up":

Setting the agenda

The European Council sets the EU's overall political direction – but has no powers to pass laws. Led by its President – currently Herman Van Rompuy – and comprising national heads of state or government and the President of the Commission, it meets for a few days at a time at least every 6 months.

Law-making

There are 3 main institutions involved in EU legislation:

the European Parliament, which represents the EU’s citizens and is directly elected by them;
the Council of the European Union, which represents the governments of the individual member countries. The Presidency of the Council is shared by the member states on a rotating basis.
the European Commission, which represents the interests of the Union as a whole.

Together, these three institutions produce through the "Ordinary Legislative Procedure" (ex "co-decision") the policies and laws that apply throughout the EU. In principle, the Commission proposes new laws, and the Parliament and Council adopt them. The Commission and the member countries then implement them, and the Commission ensures that the laws are properly applied and implemented.

I don't know whether "in principle" is a tacit admission of the fact that the Eurocrats don't respect their separation of powers, but if anyone's leaning on the unelected Commission to propose new laws, it's not the people's representatives in Parliament, but rather the ministers on the Council of the European Union and the heads of government on the European Council (two different but similar-sounding councils, there's also a third: the non-EU Council of Europe; the confusion is deliberate, I'm sure).

Lord Tebbit's latest blog highlights a worrying feature of these executive Council gatherings:

Last Monday, I asked in the House of Lords whether an agreement by the seventeen eurozone member states to make agreements outside the Council of Ministers and then to vote in the Council as a bloc for such agreements would constitute a transfer of powers sufficient to trigger a referendum here. Lord Strathclyde, the Government Leader in the Lords, understood my point clearly enough. That was that the eurozone group can always outvote the remaining member states. What we said or how we voted would have no effect on the decisions which they reached.

Tom Strathclyde confirmed that as no treaty amendment was involved, no referendum would be triggered. Now it seems that the Prime Minister has understood the problem. We and the other nine states outside the eurozone have been disfranchised on many of the key questions of taxation and commercial regulation.

The British are powerless on the EU Councils, powerless on the EU Commission, and powerless in the EU Parliament. Is that the way our leaders in Westminster like it?

Whoever rules Europe, it's not us!

If not now, when?

2011-10-26T23:27:00.003+01:00

As Labour and the Liberal Democrats conspired to deny the public a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, David Cameron insisted that one was appropriate:

Where you stand on the referendum says a lot about your politics. It says a lot about how much you value trust between the government and the governed.
...
Gordon Brown's flip-flopped on this before. First he was against the Constitution, then he was for it; one day he promised a referendum, the next he backtracked. While he has chopped and changed, our position has remained exactly the same. We are the only major party to have consistently said that it is up to the British people to decide on our future in Europe.

Cameron recognised that the EU post-Lisbon would be a fundamentally different beast from the EU pre-Lisbon. But with the metamorphosis complete, he now denies us a referendum on our relationship with the creature. It says a lot about his politics, and how much he values trust between the government and the governed.

Daniel Hannan's latest blog post is well worth reading:

No one has yet answered Charles Walker's question. 'If not now, when?' asked the amiable and popular MP for Broxbourne during Monday's referendum debate, before promptly sitting down. Flawless brevity; flawless pertinence.

We used to be told that a major renegotiation would be inappropriate because the EU wasn't a pressing issue; now we're told it's inappropriate because the EU is a pressing issue. In fact, of course, the dégringolade of the euro offers us a unique opportunity. The 17 eurozone countries have rather bigger things to worry about at the moment than whether the UK is in the Common Fisheries Policy, the financial services framework or the employment directives. They need our permission to make treaty changes in which we have little direct interest. Any other member state in our situation would exact a price for its acquiescence.

Ministers are making vague noises to the effect that we might seek to repatriate jurisdiction in the event of a future treaty change, but almost no one is convinced. MPs know that there is already a treaty change before Parliament: the one-paragraph modification which will retrospectively authorise the bailouts. They know that the Government did not seek to recover powers from Brussels in exchange and that, despite all the verbiage about referendum locks, there was no question of putting the amended treaty to the voters.

Where do we go from here? Hannan has a sensible suggestion:

The way out is to set a date for an In/Out referendum as an agreed end-point of any renegotiation talks. It doesn't have to be tomorrow, or next month or even next year. If the Government is genuinely worried about the timing, it could declare that the referendum will take place on, say, 7 May 2015, the date of the next general election. Supporters of EU membership would then have every incentive to improve our membership terms in advance of the poll.

Hard to argue with, if you respect logic and democracy. Sadly, Cameron and his ilk respect neither.

Betrayed by our political class

2011-10-25T16:16:00.007+01:00

As Daniel Hannan has often noted, mainstream political pundits make much of the 'Tory split' aspect of the EU referendum rebellion, but the question we should really be asking is why so few of our elected representatives, across all the major parties, are prepared to give the people a say on who governs this country.

The DUP and the Green Party both gave 100% support to the referendum proposal (8/8 and 1/1 respectively). Lady Sylvia Hermon (Independent) also backed it.

By contrast, only 26% of Conservatives MP backed it (81/307), along with just 7% of Labour MPs (19/258) and one lonely Liberal Democrat, Adrian Sanders, out of 57 (less than 2%).

And it's not as if the people are indifferent on the matter. A recent Guardian poll found:

There is a clear majority for staging a referendum in all social classes and regions of the UK. Men and women are similarly keen, although rather more Conservative (71%) than Labour voters (65%) are calling for a poll.
Overall, just 23% of all voters say they would be against a vote that "could ask the public whether the UK should remain in the European Union or pull out instead".

That's 77% of the public in favour of an in-out referendum, compared with 17% of MPs (111/650).

All parties broke previous promises for a referendum on the ~~EU Constitution~~ Lisbon Treaty, but the Lib Dems win the hypocrisy prize:

When our elected representatives refuse to represent us; when they break their promises with impunity; when the only say we get is a 5-yearly multiple choice, and whoever gets in continues to hand our money and our sovereignty to foreign bureaucrats; you have to wonder whether we pass that most basic test of a democracy: the ability to remove our government without violence.

A BMW with lasers!

2011-10-25T14:34:00.003+01:00

Recently seen at an airport:

It turns out this is the i8 concept car. I've always been a sucker for such things, and even though this one panders to the eco-mentalists, it does look quite stunning.

Under the bonnet:

At the front axle is the electric motor adopted from the BMW i3 Concept and modified for use in the BMW i8 Concept's hybrid power train, while a 164 kW/220 hp turbocharged three-cylinder petrol engine developing up to 300 Nm (221 lb-ft) of torque drives the rear axle. Together, the two drive units take the vehicle to a governed top speed of 250 km/h (155 mph). Like the electric motor, the 1.5-litre three-cylinder petrol engine was developed entirely in-house by the BMW Group and represents the latest state of the art in conventional engine design. Acceleration of 0 to 100 km/h (62 mph) in under five seconds combined with fuel consumption in the European cycle of under three litres per 100 kilometres (approx. 94 mpg imp) are figures currently beyond the capability of any vehicle powered by a combustion engine of comparable performance.

They also claim:

all-electric driving range of approximately 35 kilometres (20 miles). The battery can be fully recharged in two hours at a standard power socket.

But what really got my attention was this:

For the first time BMW introduces as part of the BMW i8 Concept the newly developed Laser Light.
...
The intensity of laser light poses no possible risks to humans, animals or wildlife when used in car lighting. Amongst other things, this is because the light is not emitted directly, but is first converted into a form that is suitable for use in road traffic.

Finally, a car with laaaaasers!

It will be interesting to see what eventually reaches the road.

Labour MP votes sensibly

2011-10-25T13:35:00.004+01:00

On Thursday I blogged about my most recent letter to my MP:

Dear Mr Smith,

When I wrote to you in March, you replied that you are "sympathetic in principle to our membership of the EU being subject to a further referendum at some point, given in particular it is now so long since the original one on the Common Market, and so much having changed since then".

I see that you have not yet signed the People's Pledge.

...

How do you intend to vote on Monday?

The proposed referendum question seems perfectly reasonable to me, and long overdue.

I was delighted to receive the following reply yesterday:

Thanks for this. I see I got your name wrong in our previous email exchange; please accept my apologies for that.

I voted this evening in favour of a referendum.

Best wishes,

Andrew Smith MP

And indeed, the BBC's coverage shows that Mr Smith was one of only 19 Labour MPs to put country and constituents before party:

Meanwhile, David Cameron wins the PR-man prize for the boldest truth inversion of 2011:

Some Conservative MPs were annoyed that the party imposed a three-line whip on a backbench motion.

Asked whether he regretted the order - which meant any Conservative MP who voted against the government would be expected to resign from government jobs - he said: "No I don't, in politics you have to try to confront the big issues, rather than try to sweep them under the carpet and that's what we did yesterday."

So by refusing to allow the people a say on the EU, Cameron claims he is not sweeping a big issue under the carpet. Amazing.

This parliament will finally debate an EU referendum

2011-10-20T08:10:00.007+01:00

I recently tweeted about some good news. The latest post from Daniel Hannan has the details:

On Monday, in response to a popular petition, the House of Commons will divide on the following motion:

This House calls upon the Government to introduce a Bill in the next session of Parliament to provide for the holding of a national referendum on whether the United Kingdom:
A) Should remain a member of the European Union on the current terms;
B) Should leave the European Union;
C) Should re-negotiate the terms of its membership in order to create a new relationship based on trade and co-operation.

Cameron and Clegg must be furious, and will no doubt be instructing the whips to deny the people a say. Will our supposed representatives show backbone?

I have sent my MP another email:

Dear Mr Smith,

When I wrote to you in March, you replied that you are "sympathetic in principle to our membership of the EU being subject to a further referendum at some point, given in particular it is now so long since the original one on the Common Market, and so much having changed since then".

I see that you have not yet signed the People's Pledge.

http://www.peoplespledge.org/mp/andrew_smith

How do you intend to vote on Monday?

The proposed referendum question seems perfectly reasonable to me, and long overdue.

I eagerly await a reply.

UPDATE

I've just seen James Delingpole's latest blog. He quotes a Telegraph article that confirms my suspicions:

Even as MPs agreed to hold a Commons vote on a referendum, government sources made clear that the Tories would be whipped to vote against a poll.
Mr Cameron's decision to impose a three-line whip has angered many MPs, since the vote was called under rules the Coalition promised would give backbenchers more freedom.

Toby Young on Ricky Gervais

2011-10-20T08:04:00.004+01:00

Toby Young's latest blog post is worth quoting in full:

I'm torn over the Ricky Gervais story. On the one hand, I'm delighted he's getting it in the neck. He's a conceited, vainglorious, self-aggrandising little tick whose carapace of ego is so thick it could take a direct hit from an Exocet missile and still remain intact. Yet, at the same time, I cannot join the hordes of hand-wringers who are tut-tutting over his use of the word "mong" on Twitter. Yes, it's offensive and, no, I don't buy for a minute his excuse that he was just using it as a synonym for "dopey" or "stupid" and had absolutely no idea it was short for mongoloid.

But as a libertarian Tory I don't think any group should be out of bounds when it comes to making jokes, however innocent or vulnerable. If we ring-fence people with Downs as a protected species on the ground that they've done nothing to deserve their disadvantages shouldn't we also ring-fence the stupid and the ignorant and the Welsh? (Okay, I added that last category to be provocative, but you get the idea.) If we confined those we made jokes about to just those who deserved to be the object of ridicule, life would be pretty dull. The best jokes are unfair, cruel, offensive … you name it. That's what makes them funny.

So carry on Ricky. You're an odious little man, but you're entitled to make jokes about whomever you like.

I couldn't put it better.

Two today

2011-10-13T19:24:00.011+01:00

This blog is two today*.

Time flies!

Somewhere between eking out reasonable living and having a bit of fun, I've found time for 542 posts and 918 tweets.

This time last year, I resolved:

to put aside my daily rage and produce more posts that I can be proud of, even if that means producing fewer overall.

That October resolution was about as successful as the usual January kind.

I also vowed to read more books, but though I've bought a copy of the excellent Libertarian Reader, and more recently a signed copy of The Art of Suppression, I haven't got very far with either. On a recent flight to Toronto, however, I found time for Nigel Lawson's An Appeal to Reason: A cool look at global warming. I recommend it to everyone.

Last year my blog had received visitors from 40 countries. It's now up to 69, including one from Iran.

Last year saw visits from 77 different UK cities. The total is now 204.

Oxford still tops the list, and much as I'd like to claim a substantial local following, I think it's still mostly me.

My most popular post by far was one about aardvarks, and my follow-up piece about the strange aardvark traffic itself saw many visitors, so I introduced a special aardvark filter to Google Analytics. It sounds like the work of bots to me, but who knows? Maybe I do have a following among aardvark aficionados.

My blogroll isn't so different from last year. I still follow DK and Tom Paine, though both blogged less in 2011 (for different reasons). I still look to The Cobden Centre for voices of sanity in the economic wilderness. I still enjoy the posts from Daniel Hannan and Norman Tebbit, though they seem increasingly to repeat themselves (I can't really blame them; I do the same).

For a bit of variety, I've added Toby Young and James Delingpole to the list. There was a time when I was put off by the strident tone of the latter, but I'm now a fan. I'm not sure whether this signals enlightenment or madness. I'm certainly more firmly sceptical of AGW than I was a year ago, as my environment blogs attest.

My latest blogroll addition, and one of my favourites, is Christopher Snowdon's Velvet Glove, Iron Fist. His cool analysis and sharp wit are the perfect antidote to neo-prohibitionist stat-fudging and nanny state hectoring.

For my part, though lacking in both time and talent, I will blog on. It will be interesting, one day, to see what my grandchildren make of it.

Thanks again to those who've taken the time to read here, and especially to those who have commented.

* 'today' being the 13th of October, 2011, when I started writing this post, not the 31st, which is when I finally posted it!

Boxed into a corner

2011-10-13T19:19:00.004+01:00

Every once in a while, you see a speech in Hansard that tells it how it is:

It seems to me that we are now boxed into a corner. We know that we have got into this mess through low interest rates, yet we cannot now afford to allow interest rates to rise—far too many people are far too indebted.
...
The Chancellor is correct, and has been for some time, to call for an economy based on “save and invest” and on real productive savings. It does not do to expand the money supply in excess of real savings, by which I mean prior production and consumption that is less than that production. The accumulation of capital is the only sustainable way to raise real wages for normal people.

Hannan: The EU will never reform the CAP or anything else

2011-10-13T15:21:00.002+01:00

With the possible exception of the CFP, nothing better sums up the corrupt corporatist collectivism of the EU, and our self-destructive relationship with it, than the CAP.

Daniel Hannan's latest blog puts it beautifully:

Seven years ago, Tony Blair surrendered a large chunk of Britain's EU budget rebate in return for a radical overhaul of the Common Agricultural Policy. Brussels trousered the money, but the promised CAP reform never materialised.

Now the Commission wants the rest of our rebate, but isn't even pretending that CAP reform is on the agenda. Agriculture will continue to absorb nearly 40 per cent of the entire EU budget, and spending will in fact increase slightly in absolute terms. Nor is it just Eurosceptics who are protesting: the Euro-enthusiast greenie pressure groups are every bit as angry.

We shall carry on, as we have for the past 40 years, subsidising wealthy French farmers at the expense of poor African farmers. Those self-styled Eurosceptics in Britain who talk of reforming the EU should ponder the story of the CAP and search their souls.

Suboptimal Planet

Give peace a chance

Democracy and property rights

Rioters 'felt inferior'

60 years of currency debasement

The VDARE effect

Alcohol Concern at the BBC

Heating, eating, drinking, smoking and breeding

See also

Bailouts and bonuses

Schlichter on cash

Tom Paine on feminism

The Samizdata effect

Bashing the bishops

Whyte on Polynesians and female executives

Our anachronistic aunt

Hannan on capitalism and ethics

Obama to shrink government?

Public or private downgrade

Europe's great ventures

France downgraded

Was Cameron's veto for nothing?

Gabb on defending the indefensible

HS2 pushed ahead - cui bono?

What currency for an independent Scotland?

Paine on clichés

Divide and rule

Andrew Marr on repression and coercion

Charities and public health experts

Summary

Details

Is Sean Gabb a racist?

Is Dianne Abbott a racist?

Condell on Christmas

Gabb on disabled parking spaces

Smell smoke, get lung cancer!

The denormalisation of tobacco continues

Thoughcrime in Britain

Crackberrys for factory workers?

The demise of the dollar

What's half a trillion between friends?

Thoughtcrime in France

Gabb: Free Yourself from the Lefty Ghetto

The UK's 950% debt-to-GDP

Friday's EU summit headlines

Olympic overspend

How 2012 budget has changed

Clegg: treaty change does not require referendum

Democratically elected Islamofascists

Heath: Media is failing public in many ways

Interest payments vs education

An unjustifiable strike

NUTs

The bond bubble is bursting

A racially-aggravated offence

How many countries in the eurozone?

The Lib Dems and Oxfam

Gerald Warner on forced funding for political parties

Janet Daley: try doing less

Toby Young on The Debt Delusion

Deutschland über alles?

We are the 60%

Human rights

Plain packaging?

Force-funded broadcasters of Europe

Euro or democracy

Fight SOPA

Snowdon: We should stop panicking about Boozy Britain

Has Hannan lost the plot?

Allister Heath on Communism

MEPs insist on above-inflation budget increase

Cameron the money printer

The Torygraph?

HS2

£40bn IMF backdoor euro bailout

The labour laws induce sloth, indolence

71 percent of Germans want referendum on Euro

More subsidy, Gromit?

Halal vs animal rights

FT: Capitalism need not be about greed and gambling