A report in the Daily Telegraph today over the Group of 8 gathering of political leaders in Japan carries this:
Mr Brown will call for the creation of a new international panel of experts – mirroring a similar panel for climate change – which will examine long-term trends in food supplies and offer advice to individual countries.
A panel of experts? Surely, the best judges of long term trends are those investors who have been putting their own and their clients’ money on the line. Those evil people – speculators – have a strong vested interest in getting these long-term trends right. I would rather listen to the famed investor and commodities writer Jim Rogers than a bunch of academics hired to form some form of panel.
He will also pledge to increase investment in agricultural research and push for an increase in aid to agricultural projects in the developing world. In total, Britain’s contribution to tackling higher food prices has now cost the Government more than £500m.
How about not spending taxpayers’ money on such ventures and instead, removing trade barriers and other trade restrictions, such as production quotas and the like?
As for encouraging research, there is no need for states to do this. Large companies in the agricultural sphere, such as Monsanto and Bayer do oodles of research already. These governments would do better to resist attempts to outlaw GM foods and other “frankenstein” technologies.
In response to this and the post below, all I can say “bio fuels – an object lesson in how not to do things”.
How about not spending taxpayers’ money on such ventures and instead, removing trade barriers and other trade restrictions, such as production quotas and the like?
Insane talk Johnathan. Insane 😉
Old Samizdatistas will remember the Great Socialist Administration of Clement Attlee, which deliberately retained, and indeed increased the severity of, rationing of food and basic necessities using a dubious mercantilist justification (if we starve the population and clothe them in rags, imports will be reduced thus improving our balance of trade). They may also remember the architect of this great economic miracle was the champagne communist Stafford Cripps who, like most champagne communists, thinks denial and poverty strengthen the character.
Expect a continual worldwide plunge into severe austerity for our own good, the good of the economy, the good of the planet, whatever. Of course these expletive deleted puritans want world bodies managing it. In the old days they only got to inflict their malignity on one country at a time. This is what transnationalism is for. This time there is to be nowhere to hide.
Damn, it appears my HTML-fu let met down there 🙁
The real cause of this food crisis is Global Cooling.
Summers world wide overs the last 10 years have been cooler than average, hence the lower food production.
Socalists aren’t going to like that of course, global warming is a great stick to hit captalism with, so you won’t hear it being mentioned how enspite of man made carbon emmissions never being higher, tempatures are going down.
Ian B:
Sir Stafford Cripps was many things, but surely not a champagne communist? He was an austere vegetarian, who would probably have regarded an extra carrot with his dinner as a wicked indulgence. Not a fun guy to go out on a pub crawl with, though he would have been an excellent designated driver.
Sorry John, yes it was a bad term to use. “Wealthy communist” would have been better. The champagne was meant to imply wealth and privelege, not hedonistic jollity 🙂
Does Brown not realise there is already a worldwide panal of experts deliberating on what food to produce, take to market and consume? It is a very large panel as it includes all farmers, all retailers and all consumers who are free to buy what they want (ie, it excludes those unfortunates who can only eat what their governments allow them).
This panel even includes government “advisors” and “experts”, but only in their capacity as consumers, where their view counts no more than the views of every other consumer. This is, of course, what upsets Brown.
Summers world wide overs the last 10 years have been cooler than average, hence the lower food production.
Tosh. The toshiest tosh since Hazel Blears last gave a speech.
Food production isn’t lower. And the predicate of ‘global cooling’ is someone being even more selective with the data than (say) the Worldwatch Institute.
I’ve just been arguing in another place with a bunch of socialists of various types (ranging from mild third-wayers to out and out marxists) and while, like all arguing, especially on the internets, it’s been entirely pointless, it does however act as a reminder that they fundamentally do not believe as a matter of faith that the market actually works. They genuinely believe that any market without wise overseers will concentrate all the money in the hands of a few Evil Corporations and leave the masses entirely destitute. Gordon and all his friends in power, and that includes nominally conservative people like Mr. Cameroon believe this, and nothing will change their mind. Or if something will, I haven’t found it yet, at least.
They believe that businesses are nothing but pirates, that the masses they flatter themselves they care about are ignorant buffoons; they fundamentally disbelieve that market forces as an emergent phenemenon will produce a self-regulating system, and this is based fundamentally in their utter despising of everybody (as Mr Brown has been described as being; utterly cynical about humankind). They thus can’t believe that anyone can be trusted to make their own decisions because we will all make the wrong decisions. They thus believe that they will be forced to suffer because of mass stupidity and it’s thus their duty to save everybody from themselves. This is what we’re up against.
Sorry, I’m in a bad mood today. I’m busy preparing my tiny business’s paperwork for my accountant to work out how much I’m going to have to had over to Brown and his thuggish gang just for daring to try to run a productive business, lawks, I’m exploiting the stupidity of the masses and everything. I really resent having to tell the state I bought a poxy network cable from Maplins, I really do, on days like this.
Oh, and while I’m ranting, I just this minute got an email from the Conservative Party (yes sadly I seem to be on their mailing list). Talking about Osborne’s “radical tax plans” we are told-
How about when prices drop, not putting the duty up again, you asshat?
Any comedians in the house? This calls for a punchline.
Oh crap. You know what this means. Whatever lunacy it comes up with will become holy writ, and anyone advocating free trade will be a genocidal war criminal.
“No, free trade causes poverty. How dare you have the audacity to argue with the 15 squillion economists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Food Prices? Who do you think you are? Are you an economist?”
I take it the irony of this is considered too obvious to point out?
knock your self out with the stats if you like
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/02/19/january-2008-4-sources-say-globally-cooler-in-the-past-12-months/
else just look out the window and look, its freezing out there.
even the die globalwarmists don’t deny it, they are now ‘revising’ their figures to include blips before the dips.
lol
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7329799.stm
Under this radical proposal…
To be fair, it is. No government I’m aware of has ever created a self-lowering tax, whether it is also self-raising or not. Strikes me as at least an interesting idea. Not sure whether it is a good one.
What made me ask the Conservative Party to stop emailing me was this effusion:
While I can see it is important to the party to tell the public at every opportunity that it really, really lurves sacred cows, and it might be considered plain bad luck to hit a skeptic at random, I’m a member. It doesn’t need to ‘detoxify its brand’ for me.
It sounds pretty awful to me. It can’t be very good for the law of supply and demand. If the producer lowers the price of their product, the government holds it high by taking more tax. So, there’s no incentive to reduce cost, since that won’t increase your sales, it’ll simply transfer profits from yourself to the government. That’s economic madness.
Ian B wrote:
To put it more bluntly, why is $7 a gallon (or $10 a gallon or whatever other figure you want to conjure up) gas so wicked if the money ends up in the private sector, but it suddenly becomes virtuous if the money ends up in the government sector?
Sadly there is a long history of governements trying to prevent speculation.
For example various Classical Greek city states passed all sorts of crack brained regulations – and went into decline, in part, because of them.
And the Roman Empire did the same thing – with much the same results.
So much for speculation and other aspect of market interaction by human beings being “modern” or the result of a particular “stage” of human society (as the Marxists and neoMarxists who have, in large part, taken over the study of the Classical world would like to pretend – good luck to Sean Gabb in fighting folk whose wretched books were already given pride of place in university libraries even in my student days).
In the 18th century the anti wholesale trade (sorry anti “speculation”) regulations were called anti “engrossing and forstalling”.
Edmund Burke successfully worked to repeal all the statutes involved.
However, “compassionate” judges continued to try and enforce an anti speculation position till the middle of the 19th century – when a Act of Parliament stopped their antics (at least for a time).
Common (judge made) law is not always a good thing.