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Well, continuing in my theme of talking about folk heading off to mountainous nations with more sensible tax laws than in the UK, I see that Sir Simon Jenkins thinks that Britain would be well rid of the thousands of financiers and other folk who are threatening to leave the UK because of high taxes. Jenkins is a rum fish: he is often quite astute in pointing out, for example, the damaging impact of regulations on certain industries and in some ways his instincts are quite liberal in the old, proper use of that word. But he also thinks that tax rates don’t really matter. To hell with ’em, he says: these bankers are just bluffing:
“There may be someone out there outraged at paying 10 per cent more in tax from an enormous income, and equally outraged at his firm being taxed on his enormous bonus. Of these a few may be so outraged as to uproot their families, desert their friends and go into exile — before they find that a £2 million London house costs £9 million in Geneva. If they can do their business entirely online, why be in London at all? But I doubt if there really are 9,000 such sad, migratory souls.”
Jenkins needs to get out more. There are indeed thousands of people who are not amused at the prospect of having their wallets so comprehensively lifted. In my travels and through work in the media and wealth management sector, I can tell Sir Simon that the exodus of folk is not a mirage. It is happening. Note the lazy assumption that because these evil bankers are paid so much, it will not make any difference if the state seizes another 10 per cent of their annual income. In fact, once changes to pension allowances, thresholds and National Insurance are taken into account, the top rate of income tax in the UK will be more than 60 per cent in marginal terms for anyone earning more than £150,000 a year. That tax bite is higher than will be the case on top earners in France, if my memory serves. Way to go, Mr Brown! But what is objectionable about Jenkins’ reasoning – if we can dignify his comment by such a word – is the idea that such folk have no right to be outraged at having almost two-thirds of their income above a certain level seized, at source. The assumption is that no-one really “needs” all that filthy lucre and should be jolly grateful that they do not have to surrender even more. The unconscious collectivism is all too evident.
The consider this classic:
“We used to get the same tax-dread from the British film industry, howling at being taxed like ordinary mortals. Yet the last time Britain made really good films, in the Sixties and Seventies, marginal income tax was 80 per cent. In 1986 the Big Bang transformed the City of London, leading to German, Swiss and American banks pouring into London. It ensured that the City, then languishing under competition from abroad, would flourish. At the time, marginal income tax was not 40 per cent or 50 per cent but 60 per cent.”
That is a silly argument. No-one is claiming that if taxes rise, that the economy collapses overnight – the damaging effect can take quite a while to have its effect. But have its effect it did. Many of the stars of 1970s films, such as Michael Caine, Peter Sellers, Sean Connery, Richard Burton, Roger Moore, did not live in the UK for part of the period that coincided with confiscatory tax rates. Sellers, for example, ended his days in Switzerland.
“It was not until two years later, in 1988, that the chancellor, Nigel Lawson, cut the tax to 40 per cent. By then Margaret Thatcher was so fearful of over-heating the economy that she pleaded with him that 50 per cent was enough. It was not Thatcher who cut the tax, as Johnson keeps saying, but Lawson. It led to inflation, boom and bust.”
Well, if Mrs Thatcher really did think that 50 per cent was “enough”, then all I can say is that I am glad Mr, now Lord, Lawson, prevailed. If the state takes a smaller chunk of a person’s income at source, that does not necessarily fuel inflation – since before the tax was cut, presumably the money being seized from such taxpayers was being spent on something else. In fact, I would add that one of Mrs Thatcher’s faults was her support for mortgage interest tax relief, which encouraged people to over-extend their borrowing on property and helped fuel the housing boom of the late 1980s (UK regulations restricting house building did not help either, but that is another story).
Finally, there is this:
Bankers can drift around the tax havens of the world while we are stuck in London but I don’t see why I should pay off their gambling debts with my taxes when they will not pay them too. If they storm off in a huff, good riddance. I don’t want such people investing my money.
Here he is confusing good arguments – no bailouts for failed bankers – with a sort of vengeful “fuck-you!” spite against bankers in general. If Sir Simon wants to make the case against “too big to fail” bailouts of bankers, argue for a genuine free market in banking rather than the statist, moral-hazard disaster we have now, and insist that the Keynesian madness now in vogue be challenged, I will be cheering him on. I suspect I might have to wait a while.
My blogging activities have been a bit patchy of late – possibly my enthusiasm or ability to come up with topics to write about has run a bit dry after doing this gig for almost nine years. But one reason for my lack of output has been my business travels, since after a busy day heading around from place to place, it takes a bit of effort to crank up another posting. Anyhow, in one nation I visited in the past few days on business – Switzerland – I could not fail to be struck at how folk in that nation feel a sense of being under seige. Under siege, that is, from various financially ruined nations such as the US and UK who are becoming increasingly aggressive in chasing after taxpayers. And although Switzerland is far from perfect – they have their own bureaucratic foibles and petty rules – I generally like the cantonal system, which means that if the canton of say, Zurich, decides to impose some dipshit rule, another one might take a more liberal view. And on the issue mentioned by Perry de Havilland of the totalitarian tendencies of certain medical lobbyists, I’d argue that Switzerland falls pretty well near the liberal, if not libertarian, end of the spectrum. Take the issue of smoking in privately-owned places. Yes, there are bans in some places, but I noted, for instance, that at Zurich airport, there was a rather smart-looking cigar bar. (Smokers are treated fairly well on the whole). In the hotel I stayed in, folk were smoking in one part of it without provoking any kind of anguish from anyone else.
I occasionally write about this nation because it is useful to have an example out there of a nation that has managed to resist the siren songs of being a “good European” and joining the EU behemoth, and because its people seem to still have a sort of cussed independence of mind that is a pleasing contrast to what I come across elsewhere. No doubt the Eyeores in the comment thread will tell me otherwise.
As an aside, I find the Swiss accent of German as hard to understand as ever, and I thought my German was quite good.
“It says something about our prospective future prime minister that when he decided to respond to accusations of being a lightweight, he did so by granting privileged access to the “most fashionable man in Britain”, and that the subsequent book that was produced (for which he was paid £20,000) and the subsequent articles that continue to be produced (Jones recently wrote a 3,288 word piece on Cameron for The Mail on Sunday), have resulted in revelations such as the fact that Cameron doesn’t really like Pot Noodle, that he needs six or seven hours’ sleep a night, that he has “small flecks of grey in his thatch” and that his karaoke song of choice is A Hard Day’s Night by the Beatles, because “even I couldn’t muck up a song like that”.
– Sathnam Sanghera
The news out of Haiti today has been uniformly grim. As I watched the TV footage of people trying to find survivors from underneath the rubble, it was natural to wonder whether we haven’t been rather pathetic here in Britain to carp about the harsh winter, since, although the winter snows have not been a ton of laughs, it has not meant the kind of devastating loss of life and wreckage of homes that happens in an earthquake event.
Rand Simberg makes the point that while there is never complete protection for any kind of country against natural disasters, it tends to be a pretty useful rule of thumb that richer countries, with superior building standards and better means of rescuing those in danger, tend to fare better when nature strikes. Maybe he is right – I think the Japanese, for instance, with their almost constant experience of earthquakes, are in a better position, due to the wealth and technical prowess of that country, to deal with such events than a miserably poor, conflict-riven nation such as Haiti.
But frankly, even the richest, most technically savvy nation on earth is going to be clobbered hard by a high-category quake. Let’s hope help can get to those who need it most. Here is a site that seems to be offering shrewd advice and links to those involved in the relief efforts.
I am always struck, whenever I take the Eurostar train to Paris, as I did this morning, at how much graffiti there is on the walls near the railway tracks and on the sides of the often ugly buildings that sit next to the tracks near Gare du Nord. Some of the graffiti is in fact rather well done, even rather amusing. Here is a collection of the sort of stuff you can come across in the French capital.
Of course, graffiti is an assault on property – the assault is part of the thrill for those who do it – so beyond issues of whether the daubs are ugly or not, it is something that a liberal respectful of property and boundaries will be interested in. Even if I see a clever piece of graffiti, it makes me angry that someone’s property, on which attention might have been lavished, has been defaced. In the case of privately owned property, the offence is clear and obvious: spraying graffiti on the side of your house, say, is the same, in terms of the assault on what is yours, as spraying paint on your face. With public buildings paid for by taxpayers, my view is that taxpayers are entitled to expect that, assuming they have to be forced to pay for buildings at all, that the buildings are respected and kept in good condition, and not disfigured. I suppose some folk of an anarchist type might feel that defacing public buildings is a way of protesting against such things, although I have never seen a piece of graffiti with any slogans on it that might have appealed to an individualist anarchist like Lysander Spooner or Benjamin Tucker, say. If I see an item of graffiti saying that “taxation is theft” or that “the state is not your friend”, I’ll be sure to try and photograph it.
On a related point, I have to say that the Eurostar terminal at King’s Cross St Pancras in London knocks the spots off its Paris counterpart. What a magnificent building. For once, old London town has its French rival beat when it comes to sheer architectural magnificence.
Elvis would have been 75 today. I remember the day he died, and he was a megastar way before I was a twinkle in my mother’s eye. But I watched a couple of TV shows last night about him, featuring some of his performances, and even with the grainy old TV, some of that amazing charisma comes across.
Anatole Kaletsky still inhabits the mental world where debt-driven crises are cured by more debt, where the damage inflicted by madly cheap money can be cured by, er, even cheaper money. And in the process, he dismisses anyone who might demur from this fantastical notion as mad ideologues or right-wing troublemakers:
“These unabashedly Keynesian policies, which Mr Brown did not just implement in Britain but proselytised around the world, are now almost universally acknowledged to have contributed to economic recovery, not just in Britain, but also in the US, Europe, Japan and China. It might well be argued, therefore, that the Tories discredited themselves as potential economic managers by choosing the wrong side of the debate over fiscal stimulus, aligning themselves with right-wing Republicans, German neo-Marxists and anti-Keynesian academic ideologues, all of whom insisted that you cannot cure debt with more debt and that government stimulus plans would prove counter-productive.”
So perhaps Mr Kaletsky can explain why, if Brown was such a great man, he presided over a situation as finance minister when the UK ran a budget deficit even when the economy was – according to official statistics – growing reasonably strongly before the crisis. And maybe he can explain why, in previous historical episodes, such as in Britain during the early 80s or in the early 1920s in the US, the economy recovered from recession without massive government spending and oodles of cheap central bank money.
Of course, Kaletsky is right to point out that this massive pile of public debt that has now been built up will have to be reduced, and probably far more severely, than the UK’s opposition Conservatives have been willing to let on. But then such a process is bound, by the logic of Mr Kaletsky’s own neo-Keynesian macro-economics, to drag on any future recovery, since such a debt reduction programme is bound to involve tax rises as well as public spending cuts.
By “anti-Keynesian academic ideologues” – as opposed to sober-minded sages such as himself – Mr Kaletsky is presumably referring to what can be loosely described as the Austrian school of economics, a school that regards money not as a metaphysical abstraction to be manipulated at will by a handful of central bankers and their political overlords, but as a claim on real resources, which cannot be simultaneously used by different people at the same time. Instead of sneering at such views, it would be more edifying if Mr Kaletsky, and those who share his views, could address them cogently.
Here is a decent article on a related theme.
“I think that people can legitimately complain that the educated class that dominated Wall Street and Washington first made the mortgage mess and then railroaded through a bailout in which a transfer of wealth from main street to Wall Street was marketed as a benefit to main street. The educated class is losing the respect of the rest of America for reasons that are well deserved.”
– Arnold Kling. The quote is equally applicable to the UK.
Read the whole item. It contains interesting commentary on a new book by Thomas Sowell. By the way, the question of the influence of an “educated class” begs the interesting question as to whether this class is all that well educated in the first place. Surely one of the hallmarks of a traditional, liberal education was understanding certain lessons of history, such as the dangers of concentrations of power in a few hands with few checks or balances. Just a thought.
This story is a fairly nice summary of the icy conditions affecting bits of North America, Asia and Western Europe. Here in London and the Southeast, we are getting snowed on quite a bit; other parts of the UK have been hit even harder.
This time last year, I had cause to snigger at some of the Man-made global warming folk out there and I suppose I was being a bit mischievious, in that AGW alarmists would argue that one or two bad winters hardly undermines their argument, which is true, but then a couple of sizzling summers cannot, by the same logic, be used as confirmation of AGW, either. But much more of this in the next few years, and I would not be at all surprised if public skepticism about the whole AGW issue deepens yet further. One by-product may be changes to transport and the types of cars people use, with more four-wheel drive vehicles coming along (and no, not necessarily SUVs, but smaller ones). And expect sales of these things to rise.
And maybe, this book might get more readers, too. The story, “Fallen Angels”, is about what might happen when governments succeed in massively cutting C02 emissions. Be careful what you wish for.
“The sexual conservative’s true hypocrisy is that he doesn’t really believe in his own idealisation. Men will be inflamed by the sight of hair, women will bear other men’s children at the fall of a veil, boys will suddenly cast off the tedious ways of heterosexuality and put on the gaudy garb of gayness. In truth, sexual conservatives wants to make everyone else pay for their own dark thoughts.”
– David Aaronovitch.
I pretty much endorse this list, over at Big Hollywood, of the 10 worst films of the past 10 years, although I am sure Samizdata readers will come up with some more for their own lists. I did not see No Old Country For Old Men, which is one of the derided films on the list, but the way that certain reviewers wrote about it, meant I just knew it was the sort of pretentious, nihilistic waste of several hours that the writer in the article I have linked to said it was. Plus I happen to think the Coen brothers are a bit over-rated anyway, although I quite enjoyed Fargo.
As for the best 10 films of the past decade, name your choices. For my part, I would say that two films I saw last year – The Wrestler and Gran Torino – deserve to be on such a list. Here are my other choices:
The Aviator – the biopic of Howard Hughes.
Serenity – Okay, it helps to have seen the Firefly TV series first, but even so, a fine film.
Casino Royale – Despite some flaws, it marked a triumphant reboot of 007 on the screen. Ian Fleming would have approved.
Sideways – A funny comedy set in California’s wine country. My tour of Napa and Sonoma was not quite as eventful.
Spirited Away – Proof that Miyazaki remains one of the world’s greatest animators and film artists.
The Incredibles – I loved this film and much of its sense of life. The “designer” character is a hilarious combo of fashionista and Ayn Rand.
Gladiator – “Upon my signal, unleash hell”. The film that made Russell Crowe a megastar.
The Lives of Others – Brilliant film set in former East Germany, demonstrating the utter evil that is done in the name of the “surveillance state”.
Reason magazine’s Nick Gillespie – writing in the WSJ – has a nice article up about how the ‘Noughties (sorry, I cannot think of a better term) have been generally miserable ones for those concerned about liberty and constraining government. He also has a few predictions for the next 10 years. Even leaving aside the response to 9/11 attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, governments have lost few chances to find reasons, or excuses, to tax, monitor and generally annoy us. I love this paragraph:
“As a sadly appropriate parting gift to this grim first decade of the 21st century, a period so debased that the Boston Red Sox managed to win not just one but two World Series, we can thank Nigerian would-be suicide bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab for robbing us of our inalienable right to use a cramped bathroom at 30,000 feet. Indeed, we can only await Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano’s directive that all frequent fliers must now go commando as a condition of air travel.”
Nudity as a condition of air travel. There’s an idea to conjure with on this cold Sunday afternoon.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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