The current tax rate as a proportion of net national income (according to the Adam Smith Institute) is 44%. See if you can guess what it was in
a) 1924 and
b) 1913.
Answer below the fold.
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But moving away from the obvious and serious to something more jocular.
And, no, really, just no. Yes, yes, we all know what they’re saying but it doesn’t work as a construction. Think of the average nutter – the average socialist but I repeat myself – who’ll scream the house down about the power of The City, of “the market”. This is to make a category error, it is to reify the markets. Those markets are not, for all the linguistic ease of our saying so, “a thing”. They’re just you and me and the folk holding our chequebooks, that’s all. There’s no thing there, no market view, no market control – either control of the market or the market controlling other things. Just that interaction of 8 billion people each counting their own pennies. The markets – as opposed to the market – do not impose borrowing costs upon anyone. They don’t impose anything at all. There’s a price at which people will lend you their pennies, a price at which they won’t. That changes over time. And, erm, that’s it. This is not an imposition. October 3rd, 2024 | 14 comments
 #Just_Stop_Toil is best anti-Luddite hashtag ever. Use it. September 30th, 2024 | 9 comments
Why does it work? Because, as it turns out, the profitable level of a fish stock is above the sustainable level. More fish around, less diesel and time used to catch enough to feed the market. Profits are thus maximised at stock levels substantially above sustainable levels. That means more fish to gawp at while maximising profits. Or, alternatively, George Monbiot has got the neoliberal capitalist attitude to fisheries entirely and wholly the wrong way around. The reproductive rate of money, within that neoliberal capitalism, is more fish in the sea than there are currently. Therefore, having neoliberal capitalism running the fisheries (some to many fisheries perhaps not all) would increase the number of fish to gawp at. Exactly and precisely the opposite of what George is claiming. The problem is about George. For someone who keeps insisting that he’s just critiquing the neolberal capitalist attitide to the environment he knows fuck all about the neoliberal capitalist attitude toward the environment. But then that’s such a strange thing in public intellectuals, isn’t it? Ignorance? September 30th, 2024 | 5 comments
Shocking news from today’s Sunday Telegraph:
September 15th, 2024 | 21 comments
[…]
I doubt this idea would scale up, but if growing food to give to others gives people pleasure, go for it. I cannot bring myself to feel outraged about the odd unauthorised carrot in a municipal flowerbed. And long have I waited to see lines like those I have put in bold type appear in the pages of the Guardian:
September 14th, 2024 | 32 comments
I have just returned from a holiday in Switzerland, where I often go to do deplorable things. While visiting a country, I try to keep an eye on which news stories are trending there. The almighty algorithm has observed my interest in things Swiss and even after my return keeps sending stories from the “swissinfo.ch” website my way. I am sure you can guess what it was about the following story that struck me as odd:
If it were not for the way that every museum in the Western world has scrubbed out and re-written the labels on its displays to be “anti-colonialist”, I might consider this exhibition to be a welcome corrective. The Swiss are an admirable people, but they do have a slight tendency to think that their neutrality and their benign absence from the indexes of history books are entirely the results of virtue rather than geography. As the exhibition points out, many Swiss were happy to profit from slavery. Then I read further:
Why are traders in colonial commodities, missionaries and migrants lumped in with slavers, as if trading with other peoples, trying to persuade them to believe in the same things you do, or moving to a place you thought was uninhabited were evils in themselves? It looks to me as if this exhibition is less about telling the stories of the forgotten victims of Swiss oppressors than about classifying the Swiss as an oppressor people, or, to be more exact, about making sure the Swiss know that little things like never having had any colonies are not enough to acquit them of being members of a colonialist race. * Related post: “N star star star star, not N star star star star star”. September 13th, 2024 | 9 comments
Media reaction to the National Wealth Fund has, in general, been positive, though (predictably) The Economist was critical. Interestingly, The Guardian did not appreciate the fund’s misleading name. Probably the most glowing responses came from the Financial Times. Many might think that this, as well as the various big names involved in the formulation of the policy — including former Bank of England governor Mark Carney and the Chief Executives of Aviva, NatWest, and Barclays — reflects the fact that this policy is well-formulated and fundamentally sensible. They would be wrong. As we have seen, there is nothing sensible about the majority of the ‘preliminary’ sectors chosen. August 22nd, 2024 | 15 comments
Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) controlled more than $11.8 trillion in 2023, beating hedge funds and private equity firms combined, up from $1 trillion in 2000. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) had assets worth $45 trillion in 2020, the equivalent of half of global gross domestic product, up from $13 trillion in 2000. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development calculates that half of the world’s 10 biggest companies and 132 of its 500 biggest are SOEs. The state is not only back. It has burrowed into the heart of the capitalist economy — running companies (often across borders) and shaping capital markets.” – Adrian Wooldridge, Bloomberg ($) I would argue that this issue is as big, or more serious, than the usual complaint that boards of large, mostly listed, companies have gone “woke”. Because as we have seen, as interest rates have risen to curb inflation, some of this wokery has gone into retreat. But sovereign wealth funds are a different kettle of fish. With a few exceptions (Norway), nearly all the countries operating SWFs are commodity-rich autocracies, such as those of the Gulf, of varying levels of opacity. As Wooldridge says, this creates a big problem because the healthy “creative destruction” of free market capitalism cannot so easily work its brutal, if necessary, magic. Recently, there was an attempt – since thwarted, as far as I can tell – by an Abu Dhabi-backed fund to buy the Telegraph Group, owner of titles including the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph. That caused a political storm. But many other acquisitions, such as of ports, sports clubs and infrastructure, go on and are routine. A question I have is whether the current Labour government, full of managerialist/statist types with no feel for entrepreneurship and the healthy ups and downs of capitalism, will be tempted to do something similar, although the UK, unlike the oil-rich potentates of the Gulf, is short of funds. But even so, the Starmer government might be tempted, maybe in concert with other countries, to try and get into the state capitalism act. It is probably already doing so. The question is whether any of the opposition parties have the fortitude and discipline to mount a coherent takedown of all this, and perhaps join it with a similar assault on the growing spread of the “administrative state”. In many ways, the rise of this state, and SWFs, are part the same, troubling trend. August 9th, 2024 | 5 comments
The first piece is how pensions work, and what’s gone wrong with them. In our state pension (I’ll say a little about private schemes at the end), we don’t “save up for our retirement”. When we started the system after the war, we needed to pay retirees immediately. Pensions have therefore always been met each month out of taxes paid by workers that month. At any given moment, there is only a week or two of funds in the government’s “State Pension account”. While that arrangement solved an immediate problem, it created an enormous structural problem. When the pension scheme was started, life expectancy was about 68. Now it’s about 82. And birth rates started falling in the 1960s, meaning that more and more pensioners incomes are being funded by fewer and fewer workers. The result is that the average person born in 1956 now takes out around £290,000 more in retirement income than she paid over her working life. The plan for addressing that problem was to grow the economy each year by an amount sufficient to generate enough tax receipts to keep funding the expanding retirement bill. And for most of the 20th century, while we benefitted from a global hydrocarbon and nuclear energy system that for decades doubled in size every 7 years, that plan worked. “Net Zero” puts an end to that. July 30th, 2024 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Steve Baker, the former Conservative MP (he lost his High Wycombe seat in the 2024 general election), ex-RAF officer, and a business figure in the IT sector, drops some solid truths in his new Substack:
Read it all. As Mr Baker writes, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, is due to address parliament on Monday (29 July) on the state of the UK public finances, claiming that they are so much worse than originally thought (which is disingenuous, to be polite), and hence pave the way for even more tax hikes. Mr Baker’s essay contains some fairly eye-popping charts and data points about where the UK is in terms of its total tax burden. July 28th, 2024 | 57 comments - (Comments are closed)
As I keep saying jobs are a cost not a benefit. We do not want to go around the world – or even our own country – creating costs now, do we? No, no, jobs really are a cost, they are not a benefit. Think on it. We have some amount of human labour available to us. So, if we use that labour to do this thing here then we cannot use it to do this other thing over there. The cost to us of using the labour to do this thing is therefore losing the opportunity to do that other thing over there. Yes, I know, people like to be able to consume. For most of us that means having an income with which we can purchase our consumption. But even to us that job is a cost. The work we’ve got to do is the cost of gaining the income. And, obviously, a job is a cost to the employer – the production is what they desire, the job is a cost of gaining it. It’s entirely true that renewables require more human labour than other forms of energy collection and or generation. But that means they make us *poorer*. July 25th, 2024 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
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