It’s not capitalism when private individuals stand to gain from their actions but the taxpayer carries the risk. When risks are socialised and potential profits huge, individuals are bound to be reckless: why be responsible? It’s no good agonising about the culture of banking without considering the astronomical moral hazard endemic in the system today. Of course people who do not have to bear the negative consequences of their actions behave badly.
|
|||||
|
The answer to a market where the participants compete to make things worse by following bad incentives is to ask what is creating those bad incentives and to stop doing that, not to impose a monopoly. That thought is my response to, and my almost entire agreement with, an ASI blog posting by Anton Howes, which is critical of Education Minister Michael Gove’s plan to replace competing examination boards with a state monopoly examination board. Gove says these are now racing each other to the bottom, racing each other, that is to say, in lowering standards. But, says Howes:
Howes is spot on in identifying one of the biggest reasons why state action is so frequently resorted to, even by politicians generally inclined to favour free market solutions. To start with, state action sometimes seems to improve matters, definitely so to many eyes. Only later does the arrangement revert to brazen, monopolised incompetence. Markets, on the other hand, often start out as a bit of a shambles, and only yield their benefits to politicians who are prepared to be patient. In the long run, markets are incomparably superior, and some politicians do know this. But politics mostly happens in the short run. Howes also notes that “free marketeer” Lizz Truss MP supports Gove in this move towards state monopoly. Alas, Howes himself gets a bit confused in his final paragraph:
Excuse me! Now who is putting his faith in a government monopoly? But before even the next full stop arrives, Howes corrects himself.
Quite so. But lose that “even”. June 27th, 2012 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
 A few days ago I nearly photoed someone wearing one of those idiotic Che T-shirts, but I missed the shot. This is the kind of thing such T-shirts ought to be saying:  Although, I’m not quite sure about the wording, the bit at the bottom I mean. Truly, I’m not sure. It looks to me somewhat like an admission of defeat, rather than an assertion of victory. It’s like the bad guys really have succeeded in burying the truth about this appalling person, and the good guys are conceding this. But the first bit digs up that truth and proclaims it, and that’s good. I found it here. More about the real Che in this earlier posting here. June 26th, 2012 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have just been reminded by a spam commenter that long before denouncing Jimmy Carr was fashionable, I denounced Jimmy Carr, in September 2008. Quote:
Indeed not. Don’t bother following the link to read the whole thing, because you just did. More seriously, on a related note to the one sounded by me in para 2 above, here is a posting at Guido’s about how Laurie Penny threw some mud at David Starkey, calling him a racist, and he then threw some more mud back at Ms. Penny. Two short video clips show both bits of mud flying through the air. This is the first time I have ever see Laurie Penny in action. I definitely prefer her beauty to her brain. Time was when the original mud thrown by Ms. Penny would have stuck, and Starkey would have been muddied for ever, even in the minds of those who would have sympathised with what he said, on account of the original performance by Starkey on Newsnight that was the basis of Ms. Penny’s accusation not being available for anyone to check, even if they saw it first time around. But the game no longer plays out like that. As is further illustrated by the fact that, in trying to recover her position with subsequent tweeting following the debate shown in those video clips, Ms. Penny only dug herself deeper into her hole, also exposing her original racism accusation to yet another audience and enabling commenters to clarify the whole spat still further. The complete video of the event over the weekend is still, alas, stuck behind the Sunday Times paywall. It will surely emerge soon. June 25th, 2012 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
I just read this piece by Jeff Carter about how Germany is doing all the productive work for the entire EU. This bit in particular:
Which made me say to myself the phrase “Germany shrugs”. Which I then googled, and I got to this by Andrew Lawford:
And he ends by saying:
I am surprised that “Germany shrugs” (most of the google hits had an “off” bolted on to the end followed by whatever it was that Germany was shrugging off) is not a more common phrase. It certainly will be, Real Soon Now. Trouble is, the whole world, including us here, have been wondering for ages when “Germany”, by which I mean the people of Germany rather than their EU District Commissioner rulers, will finally demand that their leaders stop leading them into an economic morass and put their economic interests first. I’m now inclined to think that I got it right at the end of this, where I said that the EU will only collapse when it has entirely run out of all its money and all its power, and all of it will then collapse. June 25th, 2012 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
America currently has the worst political class in its history. But if Europe doesn’t, it’s only because of how very bad it’s been in the past. June 23rd, 2012 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last night I attempted to describe what I thought of this (which I photoed about an hour before photoing that Pedibus):  But I feared that my efforts of last night might get Samizdata sued for libel by Santander, so I had to start again. Maybe Santander really do practise all that they are here preaching, on this bloke’s back. But, Santander aside, what is it about corporate proclamations of this sort that makes them so vomit-inducing? (See what I mean.) I mean, you don’t have to run about London in a T-shirt like this, do you? Nobody pointed a gun at this bloke, or I do not suppose so. And if you really hate having to endure this kind of verbiage at work, you can always get some other sort of job, can’t you? Maybe not. Maybe if you are an office worker, in a city like London, of a certain rank, doing a certain sort of work, then insincere verbiage exuding fake enthusiasm and moral ambition that is relentlessly out of line with what they actually reward you for doing and fire you for neglecting to do is something that cannot be avoided, no matter where you work. Besides which, moving from one job to another, although perhaps possible, is quite an upheaval. For many, another job that covers the outgoings would be hard to come by, in times like these. Now I entirely realise that a T-shirt that I don’t like does not register very highly on the evilometer. It is nothing, for instance, compared to the kind of skullduggery that Johnathan Pearce’s piece earlier today, about Fast and Furious, alludes to. Nevertheless, I’d be interested if readers here are as put off by this kind of thing as I am. I don’t think it’s just me. I have a number of friends who are, right now, being driven almost insane with suppressed rage by employment which (a) they would prefer to hang on to, despite it (b) involving lots of the usual tiresome crap that you have to put up with when you have a job, but which also includes (c) occasional bouts of psychological torture when, often at vast expense and involving huge amounts of travel, everyone is subjected to interminable out-of-hours company propaganda – propaganda that cannot simply be screened out, because it demands “involvement”, the content of which is insultingly disconnected from the daily grind. It’s a kind of spiritual bullying, and yet my friends just have to put up with it. If they said what they really thought, they’d be fired for insubordination on the spot. I’m out of all this now, but my own most memorable experience of this kind of psychobabble company bullshit, so to speak, was actually very positive. But that was a long time ago, before this kind of stuff got way out of hand. And the person doing it to us really knew what she was talking about, did so with total honesty and lack of waffle or of third-hand verbiage she had got from a book that she didn’t understand, and she knew how to make it stick. And she was in general the absolute opposite of the kinds of bosses from hell who combine being mediocre with being mad that my friends now complain about. June 22nd, 2012 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
If the ten day London weather forecast is anything to go by, and I think it is, yesterday was the last day of nice weather that London will see for quite a while, again. So yesterday, thus forewarned, I made a point of going out and about in London, photoing. (Longer range weather forecasts are an entirely different matter.) Sure enough, the weather was excellent, except at the end when it started clouding over. And one of the more diverting things I observed and photoed was this, on London Bridge:  Yes, it’s a Pedibus. Even though Transport Blog is now in a state of permanent repose, I acquired the habit of photoing any strange form of transport I observed, so that I could feature it there, in among all the droning on about rail privatisation, and the habit of taking weird transport photos whenever the chance arose stuck. Also, the above photo is yet another in my now vast collection of people taking photos. Although, I really should have videoed it to do it justice. The people actually powering that particular Pedibus look suspiciously young, attractive, healthy and gender-balanced to me. I suspect they are promoting the thing, rather than actually paying to use it. (Peddling it as well as pedalling it, you might say. (See first two comments.)) But I reckon that if that is mere promotion, it ought to work. The Pedibus, it seems to me, unites a number of modern obsessions all into one activity, obsessions such as: – Sitting at a table with friends, shouting nonsense. – Showing off by doing something very weird in public. – Drinking alcohol. – Pedophilia, i.e. taking exercise by sitting on some sort of pedalling device, perhaps a bicycle of some sort but often just a thing with only pedals. – Greenery. You can imagine yourself not having not such a big carbon footprint as you might have, while doing this. I also think that it may appeal to all those who favour pedalling but who are reluctant simply to be pedalled around by someone else, because that seems just too Third Worldish, and who are reluctant to pedal around London alone because it seems too scary. Best of all, because (although you can’t see him in my picture) there is a person at the front steering, you get to do, sort of, drunk driving. Perhaps Londoners will rename this contraption the Pub Crawler, because it would be ideal for that. Even bester, it would seem that you don’t have to wear a helmet, which will surely rile all the cyclists, either because the cyclists wish they didn’t have to wear helmets, or because they think everyone else doing anything at all similar to them (walking along the pavement for example) should also be compelled by law to wear helmets. Bestest of all, the Pedibus annoys the hell out of pompous git licensed taxi drivers. Next, Pedibus racing. I googled those two words to see if that was already happening. Apparently not, but I did learn that “pedibus” is the Latin for something or other to do with ancient Roman chariot racing. Although I couldn’t be bothered to work out what. I love London. June 21st, 2012 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’ve just been listening to an interview, conducted by recently acquired Samizdatista Patrick Crozier. His inteviewee is John Butler, and they talk about the contents of Butler’s new book, The Golden Revolution. Access this interview at the Cobden Centre blog. It lasts just over forty five minutes, but to me it felt less. I have not read Butler’s book, but judging by this interview, my immediate impression is that Butler’s strength as an economic commentator is his combination of an unswervingly market based understanding of economic reality with a far more detailed grasp of the recent history of the twentieth century’s big economic events and big economic policy decisions, more detailed than is usual among your typical unswerving market based understander of economic reality. Butler understands why the great policy mistakes of the twentieth century were indeed mistakes. But he also knows the detail of the circumstances that made these mistakes so attractive to the people who made them. I won’t try to retell the story Butler tells. Suffice it to say that, like many of us here, he attaches great importance to the decision, by President Nixon, to abandon the gold convertibility of the dollar. As for the resulting mess and what to do about it, Butler considers that a return by the world to gold as the basis of its currency arrangements is not only desirable, but possible and even likely, and he reflects on the various ways in which this change back to monetary sanity might soon be accomplished and by whom. A strongly recommended listen, to anyone who has three quarters of an hour to spare and a desire to understand the state of the world somewhat better. June 20th, 2012 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
While rootling around in my personal blog archives chasing up something else, I recently found myself looking again at this 2007 posting, about what looked like being a really cool tower, in Chicago. So, I wondered, did they actually build it? Indeed they did. Here is a good photo culled from amongst these, which I found here:  I also particularly recommend these photos, which say “^John Picken- flickr/cc license” in among them, so I’m guessing that means don’t copy without asking, so I didn’t. But that needn’t stop you looking at the photos where I found them. LATER: Wrong. “cc” means (see comments) creative commons. (I thought it meant copyright only more so.) So here’s another picture:  It’s called the Aqua Tower. Likes and dislikes in architecture are very much a personal matter. One man’s masterpiece is another’s mediocrity or worse. But I liked the idea of the Aqua Tower when I encountered it five years ago, and judging by the photos I’ve seen, I would like the reality of it now, if I were to see it in the flesh. It is truly remarkable how similar the photos of this building are to the imaginary pictures of it when it was first announced, which is not always how it is, to put it mildly. Says this:
Which is a more detailed version of what I said in 2007:
I also learned, here, that the Aqua Tower is the tallest building in the world designed by a woman. Her name is Jeanne Gang. Meanwhile, the men have not stopped trying to outdo each other. You suspect that with that building, we are back with “impractical interior spaces for the honor of architectural aesthetic”. And speaking of impractical interior spaces, at any rate towards the top, here in London, the Shard is nearly done, and is looking very good, or so I think. I entirely realise that this latest phase in the history of architecture has been fuelled by silly money. But when you consider what else this money has also been spent on, I say thank heavens we at least have some good looking stuff to show for all the agony. June 18th, 2012 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
News can travel fast these days, but this particular bit of news took its time reaching me. It started in Covent Garden, then went to Oddity Central, then to here, in Canada, and from there to here, which is based somewhere (I think) in a southern state of the USA, where I read it, I being about two pleasant little walks away from Covent Garden. And now it is here:
According to this, this gun is still perfectly legal here in Britain. Nevertheless, my first thought was (hence that link): isn’t there some kind of law here against replica guns? Call it the chilling effect. Would you prefer me to be more serious about guns in Britain? Not tonight thank you. The subject is too depressing. June 14th, 2012 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Could Brussels have been taken over by saboteurs, a secret army of eurosceptic infiltrators and spies masquerading as officials? I only ask because it now almost seems as if Spain’s bailout was deliberately designed not merely to fail but to inflict maximum damage on the Spanish economy and the entire Eurozone. Rarely have I seen such incompetence. June 14th, 2012 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||