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“What is the point of growing food if you let them get destroyed by pests? And another thing, if a sheep gets a headache, I’d give it an asprin.”
That was broadly the gist of a remark made this morning on a BBC food show by Gregg Wallace, the grocer and UK television presenter, who is not a devotee of organic food. Ah, I thought, this guy is prepared to pull the chains of the organic purists on live TV! But then he spoiled it all by going on, as a lot of prominent TV chefs seem to do these days, about the supposed evils of Britain importing food and hence the locals not developing what he regards as a strong national culture that appreciates food. He also criticised working mothers for forgetting how to cook. I must say I smiled at this point since all the folk cooking on the show were men. To be fair, Mr Wallace did not go quite as far as that over-exposed blowhard, Gordon “four letter word” Ramsay, whom Perry of this parish criticised lately.
This is nonsense, to be polite about it. For a start, Mr Wallace bashed the enclosure of UK open land as somehow playing a part in Britain’s historically drab cuisine. Funny, because I thought that the enclosure of farms, and the development of the four-course rotation system that went along with it, helped to make possible the vital leap in UK food production, and hence a surplus, that freed up capital to be used elsewhere: the Industrial Revolution. Up until the late 18th Century, remember, starvation was a regular feature of life in Europe. So much so, in fact, that Thomas Malthus’s prediction that population growth would always be checked by starvation and food shortages was a reason why economics got known as the “dismal science”. Well, the Irish were “self sufficient” by living on potatoes while evil imports of cheap corn from abroad were restricted by the Corn Laws, a situation that came to a terrible conclusion in the Great Famine of the mid-1840s, in which millions of Irish families emigrated to the US to at least have the chance of something to eat. Self-sufficiency, indeed.
All this talk about self-sufficiency by the affluent members of today’s media and entertaiment classes does make me wonder at their lack of understanding of basic economics. To begin with, what sort of geographical area does Mr Wallace think it is acceptable for trade in agriculture to occur in? A county, a parish, a region, a nation, a small street, what? Furthermore, surely the benefits of diversification in agricultural production around the world, made possible by rapid transportation, refrigeration, storage techniques and the rest, actually makes the world as a whole less not more, vulnerable to sudden shifts in economic conditions, or the climate, or even war, although during wars, of course, it may be necessary to build up food supplies, as happened in the UK during WW2.
If it makes more sense economically to grow tomatoes in Spain and fly them over to Manchester rather than for Mancunians to eat only what our foodie superiors deem to be “in season”, why should not such imports occur? For sure, if you want to patronise your local farmers’ market to ensure that local farmers make a living, that is your right. But why are “local” farmers more “deserving” of your wallet than a farmer in Kenya, New Zealand or Canada? At this stage, the Greens will say it is a “waste” to import food from afar if that involves gobbling up expensive fuels, but then in a free market, if the cost of importing food becomes expensive, then local farmers can and should be exploiting that cost advantage. This in fact may already be happening.
And in any event, if there has been an improvement in the quality of food produce and restaurants in the UK in recent years – and I believe there has been – then trade, globalisation and mass transport have driven much of this. A generation that now regards it as routine to fly off to France for a long weekend courtesy of Ryanair or Easyjet has raised expectations of what should be on sale in shops in the UK. We should not forget the significance of the abolition of exchange controls in the UK in 1979 in also driving this increase in travel, and hence a broadening of tastes.
I am sure Mr Wallace means well. He comes across as the sort of no-nonsense, food-loving East End Boy made good for whom I have a lot of admiration. By all means encourage folk to learn more about food, to cook and appreciate food and fine wine. But for goodness sake, TV chefs, spare us propaganda about the evils of imports and stick to what you do best. That’s the division of labour for you.
Right, time for lunch.
I do not bother to write articles attacking leftist stuff from openly leftist publications or broadcasters.
For example, it may irritate me that the BBC sneer at Sarah Palin as “close to the oil industry” when, in fact, the lady exposed corrupt links between oil and Alaska politics. And it may be annoying that the BBC sneers that Governor Palin made her speech with “her husband and children in tow”, when it did not say that Senator Obama had “his wife and children in tow” when he made his speech. But the BBC is the BBC… it is a leftist broadcaster and its job is to present a leftist view of the world – although it is irritating that people are forced to pay for the BBC.
However, the Economist is different, it claims to be a free market magazine (sorry “newspaper”) dedicated to rolling back the state – and it simply is not.
The latest example is the front cover story “Bring back the real McCain“. When one turns to the article it turns out to be yet another Economist attack on the “irresponsible” policy of John McCain – the policy of trying to keep tax rates from being increased, and even reducing some of the absurdly high tax rates presently in place. The general tone of the article was both that tax cuts for “the rich” are immoral and that, on top of this, they must be “paid for”.
Contrary to what the Economist seems to believe, it was not the reduction of top rates of tax that was the problem under President Bush – on the contrary the revenue from the top rates of tax increased. It was the wild increase in government spending that has been the problem under President Bush.
Not just the mis-management of the Iraq war, although whatever one thinks of the judgement to go into Iraq in the first place the lack of planning for an insurgency meant a lot more blood and treasure being spent in the long run than would have been spent if more troops had been sent in the first place. There has also been all the subsidies, new entitlement programs and other wild spending and, again contrary to what the Economist thinks, the “earmarks” have been very important – for often Congressmen and Senators only vote for a spending bill because of the little earmark for some special interest buried on page…
And who in the Senate has been the most important voice of opposition to all this wild spending over the last few years – for all his faults, it has been John McCain. So for the Economist to claim he is not tough enough on spending to “pay for” his desire to make taxation less heavy is absurd, anti-earmark McCain is but it does not stop there – and, as stated above, the earmarks grease the wheels for the rest of the spending.
As for the idea that higher rates of tax at the top end will mean more revenue, the basis of the Economist claim that not ending the Bush tax rate reductions will cost X vast amount of revenue, this claim does not just ignore the reality of higher revenue from the reductions in the top rates of certain taxes under Bush, it ignores what happened under both Reagan and Thatcher, and under President Kennedy, and under every government that has reduced high top rates of tax since at least the Grand Duke Leopold II of Tuscany in the 18th century. Perhaps Grand Duke Leopold is too recent for the Economist writers, but to the horror of collectivists, “tax cuts for the rich” really do “pay for themselves”.
However, there is also another factor. On the very day the Economist hit the shelves, its sister publication the Financial Times reported that yet more companies were leaving the United Kingdom because of our very high rate of Corporation Tax.
Yes, you guessed it, the American combined State and Federal Corporation Tax burden is actually worse than that of the United Kingdom. “But lots of American corporations do not pay Corporation Tax” – the ones that make losses do not pay for they have no profits to pay tax out of (hint – this is not a good thing for the corporations concerned), other companies do not pay because they are not “corporations” at all – they are privately owned companies whose owners pay income tax on their profits.
Sadly ignorant of all of the above, the Economist specifically targeted John McCain’s proposal to reduced the rate of Corporation Tax as one of his “irresponsible” policies.
John McCain is no economic genius, but has shown the ability to learn. The Economist writers show no such ability, all they can do is to trot out the moronic collectivism they were taught at school and university. I know I have said this before, but it needs saying whilst the Economist still pretends to be a “free market” publication.
I like this, from a blogger I have only recently discovered, Will Wilkinson:
Climate eschatology really is the ultimate in big lie crisis politics. The far-left has failed so comprehensively to make the case for its vision of society and economy that the only thing left to do is to brazenly and repeatedly assert that the world will literally collapse unless we implement this otherwise indefensible vision.
Well said. The rest of Wilkinson’s blog, which goes by the name of The Fly Bottle is well worth a regular look also, in the event that you need telling.
One of the things that irritates me about propagandists on my side is that they are often reluctant to spot a great victory, even when they have just won one. Wilkinson’s point is not just that climate chaos-ism is nonsense, a claim that I increasingly find myself agreeing with completely, not least because the now undependable notion of “global warming” has been replaced by the idiotic phrase “climate chaos”, or, even more idiotically, “climate change”. When was there ever a time when the climate did not change? What Wilkinson is also noting is that the hysteria whipped up around the changeability of the climate was whipped up because these lunatics came to realise that they had no other arguments against a more-or-less capitalist, more-or-less-free-market world economy. They have now conceded – not in so many words, rather by changing the subject – that capitalism works, and the only nasty thing they have left to say about it is that it works so well that it ruins the planet.
I do not want to suggest that this is a dazzlingly original observation. I merely thank Wilkinson for clarifying something that most of the regular writers of and readers of this blog all know, in the sense of agreeing when they are told it, but which they might not have said to themselves with absolutely clarity before. One of the reasons I noticed this posting of Wilkinson’s was that I had made precisely the same point in something else I was recently writing, about how well I think capitalism has been doing lately, both in practice and in the ideological enthusiasm sense.
Wilkinson continues:
I think the point is that the clock really is ticking. If we don’t “do something” soon, we’ll probably see that we don’t really need to do anything really dramatic, and then the window for radical social change will be closed. So I expect the volume to get much louder.
Exactly. As and when it comes to be agreed that capitalism is not now ruining the planet, that will be another huge victory for the forces of sanity. Two-nil to us, that will make it. What idiocy will the lunatic tendency think of next, I wonder (comments welcome), to take everyone’s minds off that huge defeat?
I know I know. The incorrigibly pessimistic part of our commentariat will now want to say that the damage has been done, etc. Maybe so. But although ideological shifts do not necessarily have immediate consequences, they do have consequences, and these shifts will have good consequences. They already are, I would say.
However, I do agree with the point that Johnathan Pearce makes from time to time that it would be good for us to ponder what would be the least-worst arrangements for if and when capitalism ever does start ruining the planet for real. I favour technical fixes rather than global regulations, but then I would, wouldn’t I?
As a fairly regular user of Heathrow Airport and other UK airports such as Gatwick – the former has suffered all manner of problems due to loss of baggage, massive queues – this, on the face of it, looks a good development, but I have my reservations, as I will explain later:
Aug. 20 (Bloomberg) — BAA Ltd., the owner of London’s Heathrow airport, should be broken up and its Gatwick and Stansted terminals sold off to foster competition in the U.K. capital, antitrust regulators said.
The unit of Spanish builder Grupo Ferrovial SA provides a poor service to airlines and passengers and has shown a lack of initiative in planning for additional capacity, the Competition Commission said today, recommending that the company should also be stripped of either Glasgow or Edinburgh airport in Scotland. BAA said the analysis was “flawed.”
Hmm. The problem partly stems from the fact that when BAA was originally privatised by the former Tory government, it was sold as a monopoly. That is not, in and of itself, a terrible thing so long as there are other competing transportation businesses. But there were not other big airports owned by non-BAA businesses to compete, especially against the crucial hub of Heathrow. In a previous Samizdata posting on the Snafu of the opening of Heathrow’s Terminal Five, one commenter pointed out that one issue that is sometimes overlooked in issues like this is restrictions on new airport builds by the planning authorities. Well indeed. I think there is a good case for building an airport to the eastern side of London, on the flat lands that sit to the north of the Thames (it is not as if this is an area of outstanding natural beauty). It would relieve some of the air traffic now coming over the capital, which would be good for abating noise as well as removing a potential safety and security issue of thousands of aircraft flying into land over the middle of London.
Getting planning permission for a new airport is, under the current system, very difficult. Yes, there are, in the UK, a lot of old, disused military bases left by the RAF and the USAF, such as in Oxfordshire, Lincolnshire, and East Anglia and bits of Kent. However, the trouble is that such bases were deliberately built miles away from major urban centres, to prevent the danger that an attack on such a base would hit a large city. So you have th situation of huge runways turning into rubble in the middle of Suffolk but of no real use to commuters in London. So we would need something a bit closer. Another matter to bear in mind is that southern England is not very large: airspace is at a premium and already crowded, if not quite so bad as during the Cold War, when the UK was covered in airbases.
I am not, as a free market purist, at all happy to see a private business broken up at the behest of a state regulator, but then we should recall that BAA was originally put together as a state business and sold as a monopoly as a matter of state policy. When its current owners, the Spanish firm Ferrovial, bought BAA, they must have known that failure to sort out the problems might have incurred the wrath of the regulator. It would be nice in a total free market not to have to bother about such things, but it would have been failure of basic due diligence for Ferrovial’s lawyers not to have warned their managers that competition issue might arise. Well, it jolly well has arisen at last. We would not, as the old joke about the Irishman giving street directions to a tourist, want to start from here. But here is where we are. If there is a chance of putting a large, competitive fire up the backsides of BAA’s management, there is a chance, however slender, that the experience of coming to and from the UK by air might be a tad more pleasant in future.
With all the troubling economic news that has come out of late, such as the UK Northern Rock fiasco, or the US housing and mortgage crunch, there has been a fair bit of headscratching on how bad it could all get. Amity Shlaes has an item looking at the mistakes made in the 1920s and 1930s around the time of the Wall Street Crash and the subsequent depression. In a nutshell, she says that errors on monetary policy, a disastrous ratcheting up of protectionism and intervenionist economics turned a bad but temporary situation into a catastrophe. This book also comes to the same conclusion and points out how much of Roosevelt’s New Deal failed, even on its own terms, to work, since unemployment actually was worse by the outbreak of WW2 than when FDR was elected.
Meanwhile, to keep us in a jolly mood, the Daily Telegraph highlights some recent economic data from those old-style monetarists at Lombard Street Research, pointing out that there has been a dramatic contraction in the “broad money” measure of the US money supply, known as M3. The Fed stopped publishing data on this in 2005, on account of it not being reliable. That sounds a bit fishy to me. Anyway, the author of the piece, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, points out that sharp moves in his measure presage significant changes, either inflationary or the opposite. He is surely correct. For much of the ‘Noughties, the world was awash with cheap money, much of it in the form of recycled savings from Asia. To a degree, the spigot has been shut, with an obvious impact on asset prices.
My only caveat here is that Pritchard has tended to be a bit of a permanent “we are all doomed” voice these days. If I earned a pound every time he had predicted the demise of the euro, for example, I’d be able to retire to the South of France. But he may be right this time.
This story will not come as a surprise to the techies that read this site, nor many other bloggers, but I was still struck by a report from TowerGroup, the research firm, that says that the day is approaching when millions of people on low incomes living around the world will be able to switch funds to their relatives and friends over the mobile phone with as much ease as downloading tunes on to an MP3 player.
This is big money, when gathered together. The market for remitting money is worth about half a trillion dollars, although goodness knows quite how one quantifies this accurately. Existing middlemen will be cut out of the equation.
“Ultimately, TowerGroup expects mobile phones will do for financial services what Apple iPods did for music – spur a sea change in the way consumers access services and suppliers deliver them,” one of executive said.
Just think what this will mean to parts of the world like Africa, already a continent where it has been easier to put in mobile phones than bother with the traditional wire-based stuff.
As far as I can see, the key issue to get right is security. But then that applies to Internet banking already.
The New Yorker has an interesting article about the risk that excessive granting of patents and copyrights can reduce, rather than increase, the potential level of goods and services. The article is very fair-minded and worth a look.
The issue of patents and IP generally remains a really tough one for me to work out what my own views are. I tend to take the view that state-granted patents are a bad idea, and think it is entirely arbitrary to work out whether a patent should run for X or Y number of years before expiry. But notwithstanding the arguments of the likes of Lessig and other “open source” folk, I can see the case for giving people some financial incentive for coming up with an idea and trying to make money from it. This seems particularly so in areas like drugs, where the costs of research and development are very high, for example.
Thinking about the recent not-so-smart observations on men’s magazines by Tory politician Michael Gove, it is useful to recall that our so-called moral guardians have for a long time got themselves all hot and bothered about the prospect of biddable young chaps getting an eyeful of the fairer sex:
“The French rulers [the Bishop informed the House], while they despair of making any impression on us by force of arms, attempt a more subtle and alarming warfare, by endeavouring to enforce the influence of their example, in order to taint and undermine the morals of our ingenious youth. They have sent amongst us a number of female dancers, who, by the allurement of the most indecent attitudes, and most wanton theatrical exhibitions, succeed but too effectually in loosening and corrupting the moral feelings of the people.”
Quoted in Decency & Disorder, by Ben Wilson, page 16. The comments were made by a Bishop sitting in the House of Lords in 1798. The late 1790s were a frightening period for the British ruling classes – as well they should have been. But it seems strangely comical that a Bishop should imagine that pretty French girls showing a bit of leg were more dangerous than the armies of Napoleon. Even at the time, I suspect that the likes of your average British sailor who was in the front line of defending Britain from attack would have thought this prelate to be a bit of an ass.
But however silly the Bishop’s comments were, they do point to something that is actually quite important: soft power, as foreign policy strategists like to call it. Yes, force of arms can subdue a weak nation. But any part of a “conquest” of a culture must take heed of the power, not just of tanks, guns or aircraft, but of ideas and preferences. When the Soviet Union collapsed, we tend to forget that the sight of Western advertisements for goods and services, occasionally glimpsed by people living in the Soviet empire, must have been a shock to anyone told that state central planning was the inevitable course of economic history. And when young people the world over – of whatever religion or of none – get to enjoy greater freedoms, most of them, from what I can tell, rather like them. Of course, religious extremists recoil in horror at such freedoms, just as the bishop I quoted did more than 200 years ago. Such folk may even use moral panics about such things to inflame opinion in reaction. But most people welcome a more liberal culture, which is why religious and other ideological puritans get so angry about it.
Maybe the Bishop was actually being quite wise after all. He need not have worried though, since those ladies’ men, Nelson and Wellington, dealt with the Corsican tyrant in the end, with a bit of help from a lot of Russians and Germans.
Is Russia now doing well, economically? Here’s a quote which suggests that it is. It is from classical music commentator Norman Lebrecht, writing with his usual over-the-topness about the young Russian recently installed as conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Vasily Petrenko. According to Lebrecht, he is doing very well. Here is what Petrenko says about his recent Russian past.
Petrenko’s grandparents endured the siege of Leningrad; his parents grew up under communism. He is among the last to have enjoyed the elitist benefits of the Soviet education system, getting fast-tracked through specialist schools after being spotted singing in a choir from the age of four. ‘People around me were being trained to direct choruses in Siberia,’ he remembers. ‘There were 200 professional choirs in the country, now there are nine. Those times are over. Parents don’t want their kids to be musicians any more. They make more money as bricklayers, not to say bankers.’
Whatever your opinion is about people being paid to sing in choruses – mine is that if audiences won’t pay, such singers shouldn’t be paid – it surely says something about the Russian economy that now you can make proper money laying bricks. “Banking” could mean anything, from proper banking to legalised thievery. Merely getting rich being a construction worker would be similarly ambiguous, economically speaking. But there is something reassuring mundane about bricklaying, suggestive of real people wanting to hire you for good reasons, to build buildings that actually make sense.
I remember vividly what Soviet bricklaying used to be like. I attended a Libertarian jamboree in Tallinn, Estonia, in about 1990, and I recall seeing the wall around the local Soviet military base (I think it must have been). It was by far the most badly constructed wall I have ever seen, then or since, and had I not seen it, I wonder if I could even conceive of such constructional badness. Try to imagine the most spectacularly incompetent bricklaying that you can, and then halve its quality. Then halve it again. That’s approximately half as bad as this brick “laying” was. It looked as if it had been done by six year olds, who had been alternating that with drinking Vodka.
Russian walls are now, I surmise, getting a lot better. Which I agree may not be wholly good news.
My dad was a newsagent, I went to state school, I’m Asian, I work in the city and I earn loads of money. I do it so my parents and future children can have something close to the only kind of life Toynbee has ever known. Me explain my position? How about she explains her right to speak for the poor?
– Peter Hoskin singles out that comment by Raj Chande on an excerpt from Polly Toynbee and David Walker’s book entitled Unjust Rewards
If you can speak and write mandarin Chinese to the extent that you can also teach it, then chances are that this is going to be one hell of a lucrative career right now, according to this report.
I fear that this is a trend I am going to miss out on. Even if I had a flair for languages – and I speak French and German a bit – Chinese is a whole different ball game. And at my age – 42 – it would be probably far too late to start anyway. Mind you, an old colleague of mine who is in his 40s had been learning for several years and is how working in China, in the media business. So it is possible if one is determined enough, I guess.
Consider the fact that the Federal Reserve is a central planning committee. We are lucky, I think, to have intelligent, highly professional planners, but there are in-principle limits to what they can do with limited information, and so there is no way they are not going to get it wrong sometimes, or a lot of times. The housing “bubble”, which has turned out very badly for a lot of people, and the historically high price of gas, which is to a large extent a function of the low value of the American dollar, probably has had a lot to do with the policies chosen by our monetary central planners. Failures of government planning don’t discredit free markets. Rather, they suggest free markets might be worth trying some time.
– Will Wilkinson, of the CATO Institute, on their blog.
But of course, blaming the credit crunch, or high oil, or expensive bread and rice prices on evil speculators is soooo much more satisfying!
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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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