We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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A couple of weeks ago I linked to a story about how the UK drugmaker Shire was planning to relocate offshore to avoid paying UK tax. The FT reports today that a large number of blue-chip firms are looking at following suit.
The problem, however, is that even if the UK government cuts corporate taxes to entice firms not to leave, a high-spending administration like this one is likely to recoup any loss of revenue by hiking taxes elsewhere. If it does, that will only encourage more people to leave.
Pah. Not only do I know of French Basque cheeses, I have eaten them with cider in a bar in St-Jean-Pied-de-Port while two tables of Basques on either side of me got on with serious drinking song competition, and I am presently in the Palermo district of Buenos Aires (which reminds me oddly of the French concession of Shanghai – slightly urbane areas in two cities with wide, leafy streets that were in their heydays around the same time, I suspect) while I decide in which of the many wonderful parillas I am going to wash down my evening steak with Mendoza Malbec. Americans are such provincial wimps.
And I don’t go in for any of that “Good liberal while lingering over the Sunday New York Times” crap, either. It was just great burning so much carbon to get here.
Shane Greer reports on his attempt to get Westminster City Council to recycle business waste. It turns out that the council, while willing to collect his office’s waste, will not recycle any of that waste – and will fine him if he puts his waste in recycling facilities aimed at domestic users. That sounds awfully like punishing businesses that try to be green.
The problem with councils running recycling services is that they are inefficient and fail to innovate. They use outdated methods that are expensive, and end up recycling in the same way as British Leyland used to make Austin Minis (at a loss).
In large parts of Ireland, a recent report by Gordon Hector points out, the state has let the free market deal with refuse collection: individual customers choose from private companies and pay directly, rather than through council tax. Competition has meant that technologies and methods unknown in the UK have been deployed. Greyhound, one of Ireland’s larger waste companies, recycles 87% of the rubbish it receives (because recycling is good for its profits). The best-performing council in the UK only recycles 55% of waste; the lowest 11%.
This might not compute with environmental activists, but yet again we see that the free market is greener than state control.
– Update: On another brain-dead environmental issue, have a look what the council at Basingstoke is doing to destroy the local environment and harm taxpayers simultaneously, by pushing development into the beautiful Lodden Valley, instead of on the bod-standard land it already owns in Manydown.
Bill Emmott has a marvellously sane piece on food shortages, agriculture, the credit crisis and the case for GM crops. He’s in favour of GM, wants free trade, and is unimpressed by the case for biofuels.
The comment thread attached to Emmott’s article reveals considerable fear and hatred of GM foods. I would like to ask some of the commenters how they imagine most strains of wheat, barley, soybeans or rice that have been staples of diets for centuries came along. They are, albeit through trial and error over eons, just as ‘modified’ as a Monsanto crop. And that I think is the kicker: it is the speed of scientific change, not the change as such, that gives people the heeby-jeebies about genetic modification. I am not sure how that can be easily addressed without massive improvements in popular understanding of science.
It is wrong to make sweeping assumptions about certain media outlets. I came across what was actually a pretty decent defence of open borders and the benefits of allowing people to migrate between countries over at the Guardian’s “Comment is Free” site, which in my experience often has decent columns but absolutely gobsmackingly bad comment threads, particularly if the subject of the Middle East and specifically, Israel, comes up.
Phillipe Legrain has this pretty good argument in defence of immigration, challenging the recent House of Lords report on the subject. It revives a few of the points I also made here. In that Samizdata thread, one issue that came out in the comments was the idea, which is weird if you think about it, that residents who are lucky enough to be born in a country X are entitled to tell outsiders that they are not entitled to move around. Take the logic further: am I, a British citizen, entitled to ban my fellow Brits from moving abroad if such people are, say, incredibly skilled or rich? What right do I have to do this? (None). But if we are entitled to use some sort of “quality of life” consideration or economic calculus to say that we should ban or cap immigration, then does not the same argument cut the other way when it comes to emigrants?
I ask this question because, like a good classical liberal, what ultimately counts is liberty. The ability to get out of a country is a crucial check on the ability of the rulers of such places to act badly.
By the way, if you read the CiF thread linked to here, it is hard not to be depressed at the sheer, groaning economic illiteracy in evidence. As I keep stating, there is no argument against the influx of immigrants that cannot be used to advocate strict population controls, shorter working weeks to “create jobs”, and other lump-of-labour nonsense.
One caveat: Legrain makes a couple of bad points amid the good ones. He dismisses the House of Lords report on the grounds that it has some Tory members on the panel, such as Lord (Nigel) Lawson. Lawson is a pretty robust advocate of free trade and the descendant of immigrants himself, so Legrain made a cheap shot. Also, immigration may alleviate the coming pension problems by adding to the workforce, but ultimately, that problem will require a long-term rise in savings, and immigration is not a permanent fix for that.
Another writer who is good on the subject is Chris Dillow. He points out that if immigration is so terrible, why not take controls down to a local level, so that people in say, Essex are banned from moving to Hampshire, or Wales, or whatever? No doubt someone will claim this is a “straw man” argument, but it is not. If you believe national boundaries are in fact just lines on a map, then there are other lines, too.
Yesterday morning I posted, on my personal blog, some anodyne remarks about how economic trouble strikes. They included this:
Speaking of Paul Marks, …
… as I was …
… someone should really dig out him ranting away three or four years ago about the fact that the British economy is doomed, doomed. Now everybody is talking like this. They are merely telling us so, now. He told us so, years ago. With luck, it will be possible to find an entire Samizdata posting, from way back, in which this last week’s cursings are all there.
I scratched about for a while in the Samizdata back catalog, but could find nothing entirely suitable. I suspect that Paul may have posted a lot of his best doom-mongering in comments, both following up on his own postings, and on the postings of others. However, commenting at my posting this morning, Peter Briffa supplied a link to this posting at conservativehome.com, dated June 14th 2005. The posting itself concerns some fairly anodyne remarks from Shadow Chancellor George Osborne, about such things as a “modern, integrated transport infrastructure”, a reduction of the regulatory burden, a “strong macroeconomic environment” and “simplification of taxes”. But then, comment number two, quite long, turns out to be from a certain Paul Marks. It includes this:
On the Bank of England: Well the British money supply is expanding at least as fast as the Euro money supply (see the back pages of the “Economist” any week for the stats) – so even I would not make a jingoistic claim that all things in Britain are fine. Of course joining the Euro would mean even lower interest rates for central bank credit-money (hardly a good idea).
Sadly the notion that “expanding the money supply” is good for long term economic prosperity has been an article of faith for many decades (whenever there are problems the cry goes up “cut interest rates”). Once it was believed that this credit money expansion should be linked to the general “price level” (in order to prevent, horrors of horrors, falling prices), but at least since Keynes the doctrine has been to issue more money (by various clever means)as soon as there is trouble – whether the “price level” is going up, down or sideways.
I do not expect to convince anyone here that credit money expansion is the cause of the “boom-bust cycle”, but for anyone who thinks (along with Mr Blair and Mr Brown) that this cycle has been “abolished” I would advise them to watch and see.
So, not only did Paul Marks predict the trouble ahead that we have now crashed into. He also predicted what would be wrongly said about how to deal with it when trouble did in due course strike. I’m sure that there is similar stuff to be found here. Paul? Anyone?
I have a lot of time for Chris Anderson, the top editor at Wired. His book, The Long Tail, ought to be on the reading list of anyone who wants to understand how the massive reduction in the costs of searching for stuff online has changed the economics of businesses as varied as retail to travel. But in his latest essay on how businesses are moving to give stuff away for free, he over-reaches.
Here’s this paragraph:
Milton Friedman himself reminded us time and time again that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But Friedman was wrong in two ways. First, a free lunch doesn’t necessarily mean the food is being given away or that you’ll pay for it later – it could just mean someone else is picking up the tab.
But if someone else pays for my lunch at my favourite pizza joint, it is not free. It has not mysteriously come out of the sky.
Of course, Anderson makes a lot of great points about how the structure of how things are paid for has been massively changed by technology. He is also right to emphasise how a lot of businesses “give away” goods and services for free as gifts, but they still charge for their output at some point. Otherwise, what Anderson is talking about is not business, but philanthropy.
Sorry, but Friedman’s, or Robert Heinlein’s logic is unbreakable. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
CityAm, the freesheet newspaper in London, has this cracking scoop:
Shire Pharmaceuticals, the FTSE 100 drugs giant that focuses on treatments for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, is to re-register its head office outside the UK for tax reasons.
The group, which is valued at around £5bn, has been consulting the accounting group PriceWaterhouseCoopers on the merits of a move and is set to inform investors today. Shire’s headquarters are currently near Basingstoke. The news will come as a further blow to the UK economy.
The story ends with a quote from Matthew Elliott, head of the lobby group, The TaxPayers’ Alliance:
“This disastrous news confirms that Britain’s competitiveness has suffered a series of blows from misguided tax hikes.”
I am glad to see that the influence of CityAm’s newly-appointed editor, Allister Heath, who has written on the flat-tax issue in the past for the Taxpayer’s Alliance and at the now-defunct weekly, The Business, is making itself felt. Far too many journalists at places such as the FT, for instance, seem to operate in a corporatist cocoon. Allister will not make that mistake.
I have linked to Tim Worstall quite a bit lately and make no excuses for doing so again. He has a good piece about the current economic issues and ponders whether the latest risk factor is that of carbon-reducing measures worsening the economic outlook. It is afactor to consider, for sure. If the EU or other groups of countries slap tariffs on “naughty” carbon emitters, it could have quite a severe impact.
Former UK Chancellor Nigel Lawson has a new book out on global warming issues. For all that he made some errors during his time at 11 Downing Street, his sharp analytical brain is rather more impressive than that of the current office-holder. This looks like a good study of the subject.
This commodity supercycle has led to an increase in the prices of wheat and rice. Governments have predictably undertaken a perverse policy of raising prices on the exports of crops to ensure their own supply (and take advantage of higher prices for revenue), removing incentives for farmers to cultivate more land or increase their productivity. Argentinian farmers on the pampas are now milchcows for Kirchner.
The reinforcing inflation of higher prices and bad policy leads inexorably to unrest amongst the poor. Was this not the overriding concerns of all elites in a subsistence economy? Now that age-old conundrum has returned?
Sir John [Sir John Holmes, the undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and the UN’s emergency relief co-ordinator] said: “The security implications should also not be underestimated as food riots are already being reported across the globe.
“Current food price trends are likely to increase sharply both the incidence and depth of food insecurity.”
As well as the riots in Egypt, rising food costs have been blamed for violent unrest in Haiti, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Mauritania, Mozambique and Senegal. Protests have also occurred in Uzbekistan, Yemen, Bolivia and Indonesia.
China, India, Pakistan, Cambodia and Vietnam have curbed rice exports to ensure there is enough for their own people.
The phenomenon has even acquired its own term, ‘food insecurity’, though I prefer older and simpler terms: famine and starvation. Since the United Nations has stated the obvious, there is the unspoken assumption of “somthing must be done”. When one looks at the speech, the outstretched hand appears:
But I fear we are also going to need more global resources to tackle these challenges, to find innovative ways of raising these vitally-needed additional funds, and to make sure that these extra resources are spread evenly across the sectors. Allocations must not be devoted exclusively to the most visible aspect of this new demand i.e. meeting immediate food needs, but also to health, emergency education, etc. So the UN, NGOs and donors – both public and private – must continue to work together to increase the level of resources coming from both new and broader sources of funding, not least from the private sector, and to set appropriate priorities. We also need to continue to work on the diversity of funding mechanisms, in addition to core contributions to agencies and NGOs.
Holmes was talking at a conference in Dubai and, despite the denial of scaremongering, painted a picture of crisis (including the usual bogeyman, climate change) to demand more resources co-ordinated and spent by the UN, presumably.
UN spots crisis and pleads cash is not such a good headline, though more truthful.
Obama’s speeches frequently include passages that flatter their listeners who aren’t quite intelligent enough to realize how shallow his thinking actually is into thinking that they are more intelligent than they are.
– Stephen Bainbridge. Ouch.
There has been a lot of comment this week about a House of Lords report on the benefits, or otherwise, of mass immigration to the UK as far as the economics is concerned. It did not address the cultural aspects, such as the influx of large numbers of people from fundamentalist Islamic states or people with other, very different traditions to those of the existing population. It talked about the impact on the economy. The general conclusion is that in the long run, there is a very small, positive impact on growth but no real impact overall on GDP per head. And for some parts of the existing workforce, the impact is bad: lower wages, or no work at all.
The Sunday Telegraph, in its leader column, broadly endorses this analysis. What bothers me, however, is this: if immigrants are ‘taking’ a certain number of jobs (our old friend, the Lump of Labour Fallacy, is at it again), why not recommend say, a drastic pro-emigration policy for say, 25 per cent of the population, or even half? I mean, if there are “too many” people in the UK, why not go for a massive reduction? Indeed, if you take the argument to extremes, you could argue that we would be fabulously rich if the population were reduced to say, 100,000 or one million.
But that would remove all the benefits of a large population, which the immigrant-bashers overlook: the skills, or ‘human capital’ that a large population makes available. The silliness of the complaints about all those foreigners ‘taking’ ‘our’ jobs is not just the Lump of Labour Fallacy, however, which by extension is part of the closed-system thinking one associates with socialism and many other collectivistic doctrines.. It is also the unspoken assumption, rarely explicitly spelled out, that there is some sort of optimum, or “just about right” level of population for a given geographic area. But how do the noble Lords or even a mere economist figure out how many people in a country is right or wrong? And as a commenter said, I believe on this site, some months ago, you do not hear about Tescos or Vodafone moaning about “too many customers” putting pressures on their services.
Of course, some commenters will insist that the cultural implications of mass immigration from the Islamic world, say, outweighs what economic benefits there might be, but that is a separate issue.
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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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