Happy Canada Day?

Besides a superabundance of not very nice lager and 146 years as a country, Canadians have something practical to celebrate this Canada Day: Mark Carney is now our problem.

BBC Breakfast's segment on Carney this morning was predictably fawning. The only question, it seems, is whether this incredibly brilliant man - "the outstanding central banker of his generation", and a George Clooney lookalike! - will be quite as brilliant as everyone expects, or only moderately brilliant.

I don't share the BBC's faith in central planning. Carneys confidence doesn't inspire any confidence in me; it fills me with dread.

Watch this programme, and decide for yourself. His interviewer had the temerity to question aggressive money printing and ultra-low interest rates. Carney turned on him, smirking: “Is this all about you, Neil? Is it about the money you’ve saved and the return on that in your bank account?”

Clearly our wise and beneficent central bankers must disregard such quaint concerns, for the greater good.

A happy day for Canada, perhaps, but things are looking even worse for Britain.

Have legislators gone mad?

From the Institute for Energy Research:

The Drax plant in Yorkshire, England is one of the biggest coal-fired power plants in the world with an almost 1,000 foot-tall flue chimney, 6 boilers, and 12 very large cooling towers. It consumes 36,000 tons of coal each day, providing 7 percent of the country’s electricity. Starting next month, the plant will be converted to burn millions of tons of wood chips a year, costing £700 million ($1.085 billion).

Most of the wood chips will travel 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean, coming from trees downed in the United States. Drax is building 2 plants in the United States that will turn the wood from trees into chips that can be transported by ship to Yorkshire and then hauled to the power station by railway trucks. In order to prevent spontaneous combustion, the wood chips must be stored in domes where the humidity is controlled before they can be pulverized into powder. (Wood is 1,000 times more prone to spontaneous combustion than coal.)

Despite the fact that coal is the least-expensive source of electricity generation in England, the owners of the Drax plant realized that a recently instituted carbon tax on fossil fuels would put them out of business if they continued to burn coal eventually making their electricity become twice as expensive. The political incumbents in Britain decided last year to give any coal-fired power station that switched to ‘biomass’ the almost 100 percent ‘renewable subsidy’ that owners of onshore wind farms get.

The authors ask: have legislators gone mad?

With credit to Sir Bernard Ingham, we might recast that as: cock-up or conspiracy? Are our legislators so utterly inept that they think converting Drax to burn wood chips is a good idea, or are they so corrupt that they knowingly put the corporate interests of the 'green' lobby before the interests of British citizens.

I have a hard time believing that the ministers are quite so incompetent, so I must assume they are corrupt. MPs at large may well be so stupid as to think this policy is sane. Or, more likely, they haven't bothered to consider the question at all.

Whichever way you look at it, it's a damning indictment of our representatives, and the fools who elected them.

Fade to black

This sequence has been making the rounds on Facebook:

A good point, well made.

The trouble with fraud

Libertarian philosophy is often summed up by the non-aggression principle: people should be free to do as they please, so long as they don't initiate force or fraud against others.

Unless you're a philosopher, the 'force' bit is easy enough to understand.

The 'fraud' aspect has always struck me as more problematic. Human language is inevitably vague, and the semantics change through space and time. There is a spectrum of deception, from deliberate outright lies, through subtle mistruth, to the omission of salient truths and even accidental (but avoidable) confusion. What background knowledge is assumed? When things are unclear, whose responsibility is it to seek clarification?

Advertising provides some good examples, food labels in particular.

Consider this "ice cream":



Not just any ice cream, this is "Simply 100% dairy ice cream with real Cornish cream".

But what does that actually mean?

The ingredients sound rather less delicious:

Reconstituted skimmed milk, water, sugar, glucose-fructose syrup, Cornish cream (6%), whey solids, glucose syrup, butteroil, emulsifier (mono and di-glycerides of fatty acids), vanilla extract, stabilisers (locust bean gum, guar gum, carrageenan), colour (mixed carotenes), flavouring.

At what point in our history did butteroil, locust bean gum, and glycerides of fatty acids become acceptable ingredients for ice cream?  If this counts as "100% dairy ice cream", what adulterations would require a softening of the claim to 99% or 50% "dairy ice cream".  Is there such a thing as 'non-dairy' ice cream? Which other countries would consider this "ice cream".

There are countless other examples.

Some M&S roast chicken slices I bought at the motorway services contained potato starch - useful for preserving the product, perhaps, but not something you'd naturally expect to find in roast chicken.   Maybe these days it's accepted that packaged food will contain some additives, and at least the potato starch was there for me to see in the ingredients list.

Often the deception is more subtle.  Consider the case of Canthaxanthin:

Canthaxanthin is widely applied as a feed additive delivering red pigmentation. In poultry pigmentation, canthaxanthin is used to impart a red color to egg yolks and to broiler skin. Used in conjunction with yellow pigments, canthaxanthin increases yolk color intensity to meet market demands for golden-orange yolks. In the pigmentation of salmonid fish, canthaxanthin is supplied inn the feed in order to impart a desirable coloration to flesh.

That's according to BASF ("The Chemical Company").

Is it simple fashion that drives "market demands for golden-orange yolks"?  Do consumers want this colour for its own sake, or because it has traditionally been suggestive of a well-nourished chicken and a nutrient rich egg?  Is the preference for "desirable coloration" of salmon flesh likewise fickle? Or might the "pallid pinkish grey" of uncoloured farmed salmon be suggestive of a less-than-lovely product.

I honestly don't know where the lines should be drawn, and I don't know the proper role for government here.  Most people will be familiar with the great UK-EU chocolate debate, which apparently goes back to 1973.  A BBC News article from 2000 suggests it was resolved when

European MPs ... voted to allow chocolate made with up to 5% vegetable fats or up to 20% milk content to be sold in all 15 member states.

Personally, I'm with the continentals on this one: what passes for chocolate in Britain (and worse still, in America) is not real chocolate.  But who controls the definition?  And when boundaries are clear, aren't they are largely arbitrary? (much as I respect the Reinheitsgebot)

I'd like to leave food labelling entirely to the free market.  I don't think labels for salt, calorie, and fat content should be compulsory (though I'd want to know if my food was laced with arsenic or heroin).  I have nothing but disdain for religious imperatives regarding the slaughter of animals, but I don't think halal labelling should be compulsory.  It is reasonable to expect those who care to do their own research, to spread the word, and to exert market pressure on retailers for voluntary labelling.

But what of the bizarre practices that no normal consumer would suspect, like feeding ground-up animal matter to cows?  Is a tomato with fish genes still a tomato?

Would a libertarian society allow Elmea to be passed off as cream? How far would caveat emptor extend? Would all English words become vacuous, defined by the user, so that Tesco 'cream', Sainsbury's 'cream', and Waitrose 'cream' could be radically different substances?  Would it be left to juries to decide, with inevitable inconsistency, that 'cream' made from cow cells in a lab is ok, but 'cream' made from vegetable fat is not?

I can't be the first to have wondered this. Recommendations for further reading would be most welcome.

A ban on external accountants working inside government

BBC News reports:

A ban on external accountants working inside government, to stop them telling clients about tax loopholes they have found, has been urged by MPs.

To Labour MPs it seems that wherever there's a problem, a ban is the answer.

As usual, their scheme is not only illiberal and heavy-handed, but doomed to failure. As long as there are loopholes, accountants will find them and assist their clients in exploiting them.

The obvious answer is to simplify the tax code to the point that nobody needs tax accountants.

Abolishing corporation tax would be a good start.

Margaret: Death of a Revolutionary

Last night I watched Martin Durkin's excellent documentary 'Margaret: Death of a Revolutionary'. The whole thing is well worth watching. If you're short on time, an article on Martin's site lays out his thesis:

The reason the Left hates Thatcher so much is that she stole the working class from them. And she was able to do this because she understood and shared their aspirations.

Behind the bluster about her death this week are two very different visions of the working class. According to the Left, the proles are oppressed, and the source of that oppression is economic freedom. The Left wants the working class living in state housing, travelling on state transport, working in state-controlled jobs, receiving a state education. The Left fights not to change, but to preserve working practices and “working class communities”, as it offensively calls them.

Mrs Thatcher had a sneaking suspicion that people wanted to own their own home, perhaps in a leafy suburb rather than a council estate. She had the idea that “working class” people wanted the things she wanted – to leave money to their children, to own a few shares, maybe start a little company, go on foreign holidays, own a car – maybe even two cars! She was right. They did want this, which is why ordinary working people voted for her in huge numbers.

Brilliant stuff.

RIP

I heard of Margaret Thatcher's death through Tom Paine's post at The Last Ditch.

Sadly, he first heard from a jubilant lefty:

My tour of my local brewery is rather spoiled by our tour guide punching the air with glee at the news of Margaret Thatcher's end. What kind of human glories in another's death?

I felt compelled to reply:

To be fair, I probably would have celebrated the deaths of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin.

The real question is how people can possibly view Thatcher that way.

The sad fact is that far too many of my compatriots are misguided or downright malevolent. Blinded by tribalism, indoctrination or self-interest, they can't see all the good that Thatcher did for Britain.

To my surprise, and to their credit, the BBC's documentary 'Margaret Thatcher: Prime Minister' was really quite respectful.

DK's brief obituary is worth quoting in full, as it nicely sums up my own view:

No, Mrs Thatcher was not a libertarian. But she at least understood that the money that governments' spend is sweated from the toil of the individuals who earn it.

And no, Mrs Thatcher was no infallible goddess. But compared to what came before and (most especially) after, she may as well have been.

And no, Mrs Thatcher did not do everything right: but she had a vision that rose above that of merely lining her own pockets, and she had the balls to see it through.