First you pay income tax. Then they pay some of it back as child benefit. Then you pay some of the child benefit back as the higher income child benefit charge.
That really is how it works.
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It is difficult to accept the sincerity of the professed free market beliefs from the kind of Tory who rails against the permissiveness of our age; even on the purely economic side, the supposedly laissez-faire beliefs of some extreme Tory activists are barely skin-deep. – Samuel Brittan, in 1969 reviewing ‘Freedom and Reality’ by Enoch Powell for ‘The Spectator’.* As true today as it was 40 years ago, sad to say. He goes on: There is no evidence for putting Mr Powell in this latter category. But his economic liberalism is allied uneasily with an attachment to the nation state as the absolute political value. Most economic liberals, on the other hand, while conceding that Englishmen would naturally have a greater feeling for other Englishmen than Peruvians, regard the national interest as a function of the interests of the individuals who compose it, and are highly suspicious of supposedly superior collective entities. Indeed, once the supremacy of overriding national goals is admitted it is difficult to see what arguments there are against Mr Wilson, having been elected by a national majority, decreeing that an excessive consumption of candyfloss is against his conception of the British idea. The latter was merely a philosophical fancy in 1969. Mr Wilson went out of his way to be photographed smoking. O tempora! O mores! ![Let us revive the permissive society! [pic: Allan Warren]](http://www.samizdata.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/766px-Lord_Harold_Wilson_2_Allan_Warren-350x274.jpg) Let us revive the permissive society! [pic: Allan Warren] * [Reprinted in his 1973 book ‘Capitalism and the Permissive Society’ whose 40th anniversary calls for a series of quotations. Let us revive the permissive society!] January 6th, 2013 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The point is that recessions are not caused by a lack of demand. They are caused by people making the wrong things (i.e. destroying wealth). We know they are because enterprises make losses and sometimes go bust. Recessions end when people start making the right things. All that money printing does is keep people making the wrong things. All that state spending does is encourage people to make even wronger things. – Patrick Crozier comments, in a discussion sparked by his own posting about Keynes for the Cobden Centre, here. I am finding the many jokes I hear about people going out shopping and thereby “rescuing the economy” less and less funny, and more and more stupid and tragic. These jokers seem really to think that this is how it works. January 5th, 2013 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
From about 1990 until about 2005, I held speaker meetings at my home in London SW1, on the last Friday of each month. I began them because I was a libertarian and we wanted such meetings, and because, having acquired a settled home, I could. And I ended them because their main purpose for me had been to stir up writing for the Libertarian Alliance, which by 2005 I was no longer doing. When the internet arrived as a mass experience, available to anyone with a computer, a telephone line and a few quid a month to spare, around the year 2000, I ceased being an editor of paper writings for an organised group, and became instead a citizen of the blogosphere. Most especially, I became a regular contributor to Samizdata. Suddenly, the blogosphere was where the action was, where the big opportunity was, and it supplied more than enough food for thought and for writing. But now, my Last Friday of the Month meetings are to resume. Partly, I have discovered that their incidental benefits to me personally were more real than I had realised. Basically, I felt that, very gradually, I was losing touch with people who were in that vital social hinterland between friends and strangers. But there is also a more public – altruistic, you might say – reason for me to crank these meetings up again. In retrospect, I think we can now see that the arrival of blogging was a most unusual time for us libertarians. Libertarian notions had spread rapidly during the years just before the internet and then blogging arrived among us. But because the number of libertarian enthusiasts involved was small compared to the population at large, these ideas had found few outlets in the late twentieth century mass media, which meant that we libertarians reacted to blogging like drowning sailors encountering a lifeboat. Meanwhile, our statist adversaries, many of them comfortably ensconced in what were clearly now the old school media, could at first only grumble about how their seemingly God-given intellectual hegemony had been so insolently challenged. At first, these hegemons behaved as if enough bitching by them about the new media, in the printed pages and on the TV chat and comedy shows of the old media, would send us amateur upstarts back to the oblivion from which we had so rudely emerged. When that didn’t work, they tried linkless fulminating in their, at first, very clumsily electrified newspapers. Only when it became clear even to them that the “new media”, and the new voices enabled by them, were here to stay, that anyone could say to anyone whatever anyone wanted to say, did at least some of the old school journos and organs start seriously adapting. → Continue reading: A libertarian meeting at my home on the last Friday of this month January 4th, 2013 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
“I just think to get under Piers Morgan’s skin you don’t tell him he’s “snooty” — he aspires to be snooty. You tell him he’s a shallow-thinking tabloid clown who’s mistaken himself for an intellectual, and someone that CNN only hired due to its own deep intellectual and cultural insecurity. He’s Jerry Springer with upper-middle-class English accent, but not particularly articulate.” The blogger, who is right on substance, of course, makes the still-contested allegation that Morgan wiretapped, or encouraged others to wiretap phones. Has that been conclusively proven to the extent that Pc Plod is going to extradite this stoat from the US back to Blighty? I am not sure it has. (A recent programme makes similar claims.) Otherwise, my only other query would be the use of the word “articulate”. Being articulate is not the same as being intelligent. George Monbiot, Richard Murphy, Morgan and Polly Toynbee are “articulate”. Whether they show a command of logic, insight or respect for evidence and data is another issue entirely. January 4th, 2013 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Times (behind a paywall) reports:
Emphasis added. Boldly and without fear, favour or concern for mixed metaphors, I sing of arms and the editor: (To the tune of Brave Sir Robin Ran Away) Brave Dame Caryn hired a gun You see, it doesn’t count as being armed so long as you are rich enough to hire someone else to hold the gun. Anyone can see that morally that is completely different to actually, you know, touching the thing yourself. January 3rd, 2013 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Civilization is not just about saving labor but also about “wasting” labor to make art, to make beautiful things, to “waste” time playing, like sports. Nobody ever suggested that Picasso should spend fewer hours painting per picture in order to boost his wealth or improve the economy. The value he added to the economy could not be optimized for productivity. It’s hard to shoehorn some of the most important things we do in life into the category of “being productive.” Generally any task that can be measured by the metrics of productivity — output per hour — is a task we want automation to do. In short, productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring. None of these fare well under the scrutiny of productivity. That is why science and art are so hard to fund. But they are also the foundation of long-term growth. Yet our notions of jobs, of work, of the economy don’t include a lot of space for wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring.” The article nicely challenges the idea that the “Third” industrial revolution (the Internet and so forth) has been far less transformative and productive than the Second one (electricity, etc). January 2nd, 2013 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Sports is remarkably cognitive. I think it’s underrated just how smart it is. Actually, if I had more time, I would spend more time with sports. Watching it, reading about it, I think it’s oddly underrated.” – Tyler Cowen, being interviewed about himself and his interest in things such as where and how to find good, tasty food. As to his remark on sports, I guess that one of the benefits of watching it – say if you are into baseball or cricket – is improving your basic maths. It does not surprise me that Samizdata’s Michael Jennings is a PhD in maths and a cricket fanatic. One of my favourite books is this one, Creative Destruction, which Cowen published a few years ago now. January 2nd, 2013 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
I like this:
It’s Simon Gibbs of Libertarian Home, greeting the new year and looking back over the old one. The posting contains many things of interest, but allow me in particular to draw your attention to one of Libertarian Home’s projects that Gibbs lists as having done well, in the year 2012:
The push in question being this. A reminder, if any of us Samizdata contributors need it, that our blog can make quite a difference, in this case to the morale of a fellow libertarian, with a bit of linkage that consumed only a fraction of the time and effort that went into the item being flagged up. When I did that Samizdata posting I had no idea how definite would be the boost supplied to Libertarian Home’s traffic. Good. And here is a mention of another libertarian whose links can make a huge difference to whoever and whatever he links to. Says Gibbs:
As I am sure Gibbs realises, at any rate in his more pessimistic moments, Libertarian Home is probably not daily reading in the White House. But, politicians do react to the opinions of others, even if their own opinions and ambitions remain unchanged by mere analysis. Every little helps. January 1st, 2013 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Two men dressed as Oompa-Loompas – characters from Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory – are being sought by police in Norwich after an attack in the heart of the city.
Look, I know that folk from East Anglia – where I come from – are used to being abused for being “in-bred” or having “webbed feet” and other silly nonsense, but to be accused of trying to commit crimes while dressed as Willy Wonka’s employees is a bit much. (Just in case anyone wonders, I am not making light of what might be a serious crime.) Mind you, Norwich did used to have several chocolate factories. Oh well, it makes a change from reading about the US “fiscal cliff”. I promise to be a bit more productive on this site than I have been in recent months. 2012 was effing busy. January 1st, 2013 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
The main problem with monetary policy today is that there is such a thing as monetary policy. – This is buried deep in a not very recent (December 11th) blog posting by Detlev Schlichter (recycled at the Cobden Centre a day later). But it deserves pride of place here as our first quote of the day of 2013. It is the second sentence of the paragraph just above where it says: “If only the euro was golden!” In far too many matters, when you look at Anything and what is going wrong with Anything, you find that the main problem with Anything policy today is that there is such a thing as Anything policy. January 1st, 2013 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
… a prosperous and subversive new year.
Expect some new voices and views here soon. And some confusion over names…
January 1st, 2013 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
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