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The British government has just “admitted” that its figures for foreign workers employed in the UK are wrong by more than 30%, or 300,000 people. Of course we don’t know that the new figures are right, either. But it has very satisfactorily illustrated they don’t matter in the slightest.
The Liberal Democrat spokesman is telling the truth when he says: “Getting these figures so wrong further undermines the credibility of the government’s claims to be able to deliver a well-managed system for foreign workers.” But the intent behind his statement is dead wrong. It is none of the government’s business to manage any kind of system for foreign workers, and getting these figures so wrong undermines the credibility of doing so at all.
This sort of thinking is just a version of the lump of labour fallacy. More workers doing more things for other people and supporting themselves means everyone is better off, not that others are deprived of something.
Nor – as the error shows – does government need to know who people are and what they are doing in order to carry on with its other activities untroubled. It just needs to respond to provide services as they are required (and self-supporting individuals don’t really require much). The conceit of planning and censuses is undermined here, too. Demand manages itself.
Meanwhile, in the unreal world, all politicians are piling onto the current bandwagon of jealousy of foreigners. David Cameron has signed on to the idiocy with gusto. The politics of virtual threat will actually be reinforced by the concrete evidence that there is nothing to fear.
“It so much worse than we thought, that absolutely nobody noticed,” they cry. Something must be done! Starting with more counting, more monitoring and more control so that we never fail to notice nothing untoward happening ever again.
For those who are inexplicably worried about Russia’s alleged ‘resurgence’ as a major world power now that it’s economy is about the size of Italy’s economy (albeit far less diversified), the following article should be unalloyed good news:
In the Russian Federation, a country where hundreds of companies are launched every year, the plans to create yet another one would not be particularly noteworthy. Except that Russian Technologies is to be very different from most of the rest. It will be no capitalist venture conceived by a profit-seeking entrepreneur, but a corporation established by a decree of the Russian Parliament. A giant conglomerate with the state apparatus behind it, its official mandate will be to ‘develop Russia’s heavy industry.’
The ‘money quote’ being “with the state apparatus behind it”…presumably because it was proven that “state apparatus” was the key to how the Soviets developed technology and business methods far superior to those in the capitalist west, became fabulously wealthy and as a result won the Cold War and… oh, hang on… In other words, the clowns who run the Kremlin are going to try an approach used in the West in the 1960s and 1970’s of creating large bureaucratic ‘national champions’. And that is because that worked soooo well for us, right?
So clearly those who feel “something must be done about resurgent Russia” can now relax and just let nature take its course. Putin and his entourage of economic ignoramuses are screwing Russia and crippling its ability to ever develop a dynamic market economy. This will weaken the nation far more effectively than anything anyone else could do to them. I just happen to think it is a pathetic waste of people’s talents and potential.
I wonder what conclusions French voters will draw from this:
Down in the Pays Basque, the young natives are disconsolate. Immobiliers (estate agents) with sharp English marketing techniques are sprouting like radishes in the towns. In the markets, one hears three languages: Basque, French and English. And, astonishingly, in a nation so protective of its culture, some houses this summer had signs advertising them For Sale instead of À Vendre.
It was my French niece who saw them, out on her travels as a veterinary surgeon, and she came home to her small, rented house and dropped her handbag with an exasperated clunk on the table. What hope do we have of ever being able to afford a house, she said, when the Brits are paying crazy prices and we can’t compete? It’s just so depressing.
Partly this is a story about French economic decline. Economic decline often happens without you realising it. And then, suddenly, you do realise it. That factory you thought you had a safe job in for life gets abruptly closed, because the government has decided that the subsidies to keep it going are becoming too huge. You suddenly realise that private education for your kids is going to be forever beyond you, that where you live state education is actually getting worse, and that also you can not afford to move to where it is any good. Multiply little dramas like that by a million, and you have an entire country in economic decline. Thus, economic decline often impinges upon an electorate not in the form of rather meaningless statistics moaned about by journalists even as life goes on happily, but rather in the form of dramatic vignettes like this one, of vulgar English people invading the formerly idyllic French countryside.
Another French vignette of decline is of clever sons and daughters, nephews and nieces, who can not seem to get jobs worthy of their obvious talents and superior educations, unless they go to vulgar England. Even there, they will have to start out as waiters and waitresses, but at least they’ll have a chance of better things soon. In France, education is obviously far better than in vulgar England, but in vulgar England, for some reason probably involving evil America, more stuff is actually being done.
Another force which I think France is on the receiving end of here is the enormous difference that the internet, e-mail, etc., has made to the nature of life in the formerly deep countryside, of which France has a great deal, but England relatively little. (In Scotland it is different.) Simply, you can now do a lot more with your life when physically cut off from everything than you could twenty years ago. Did Engels say something about the “idiocy” of rural life? Some smug townie did. Well, now, country life is not nearly so idiotic as it was. Outsourcing is not just taking work from Europe to India, it is taking it from European cities jammed with commuters to European rural escape havens. The big thing they now sell in the countryside of places like France is not what the countryside grows, so much as how beautiful and nice it is to live in, provided you don’t have to scrabble about in the rural mud for a living. Thanks to email and the internet, organising the switch from suburb to country has also got a lot easier.
Or, to put it another way, the suburbs just got a lot bigger.
So, will France’s voters try to make the symptoms of economic decline and of the new super-suburbanisation illegal? Probably. Good luck with that, mes amis. You will need it. A smarter attitude would be to stop fretting about these changes and to start profiting from them, as many French people are already doing, of course, not least by selling their rural shacks for silly English money.
In a recent visit to the local library I had a look at this week’s edition of the Economist. There was a forty page section on Central Banks (government, or government backed, authorities that control the money supply – such as the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Union Central Bank, the Federal Reserve system, and so on) and couple of other articles on the same subject.
In the few minutes I spent looking at the material there seemed to be little on the money supply. Neither proper definitions of the various measures of the money supply, or information on their growth rates in the various countries over time. Of course, as an arch reactionary, I do not support the existence of Central Banks, but if was to write about them I would give most space to the primary function of these things – rather than just writing about interest rates, price rises (the modern definition of ‘inflation’), unemployment and so on. Unsurprisingly the rate of growth in the money supply may well effect these other things, but to write about them, in the context of Central Banking, without much examination of the record of various Central Banks and Central Bank like institutions in controlling the money supply is rather like writing about a room without really dealing with the elephant standing in the middle of it.
Of course there were other things in this week’s edition of the Economist, but some of this content was also rather odd. For example, we were informed that the Democrats were presently taking a harder line on controlling government spending than the Republicans in the United States.
Now it is quite true that over the last few years the Republicans, led by President Bush, have increased government spending wildly. However the Democrats denounced them for not spending enough money on X, Y, Z, over the same period. Also the article was about now, not the last few years, and presently the Democrats are pushing for vastly more government spending. Not just the Democrat candidates for President of the United States, but the Democrat controlled Senate and House of Representatives as well. These demands for more government spending are far greater than what the Republican candidates for President of the United States or the Republicans in the Senate and House of Representatives are suggesting. The article said that the Democrats support a “pay as you go” rule. But this has nothing to do with limiting increases in government spending, all it means is that massive increases in government spending should be matched by massive increases in taxation, and, sure enough, the Democrats support both.
I can only conclude that the person or people who wrote the article either do not know very much about the current situation in the United States, or do not know what the “pay as you go” rule is about – or both.
There does seem to be a basic knowledge problem in the Economist, even on British matters. For example, only last week there was an examination of the pre budget statement. It was not really a big increase in taxation, the Economist declared, – for example there were “many winners” from the changes in Capital Gains Tax.
An examination of the facts should have told the writer or writers of the article that the changes in Capital Gains Tax would mean far higher tax for most payers of it – and that this and the other tax changes did indeed mean higher taxes overall.
Why does anyone buy the Economist when it neither understands the relation of Central Banks to monetary policy or understands the fiscal situation in the United States or even its home country?
There have always been rich leftists, people who have either inherited money or have made money in business, and yet choose to subsidize groups and individuals who wish to increase taxation, government spending and regulations – but there seem to me to be more of these rich leftists than there used to be.
To some extent this can be explained by the dominance the left have in such things as the ‘education system’, including most private ones, and the broadcasting and, in the United States anyway, the print media. If the political atmosphere is dominated by ideas supporting such things the Welfare State, high income tax rates, inheritance tax, endless regulations and so on, even some of the people most directly hit by such policies will support them.
It is also the case that some rich people will, in public, support such ideas hoping that, in private, they can avoid their effects. For example some rich people controlling powerful corporations supported the New Deal of President Franklin Roosevelt (although most wealthy people did not) hoping to both avoid high taxes personally and even to direct government subsidies to companies they controlled, and to direct government regulations to destroy their competitors – this has come to be known as “corporate welfare”. And this attitude can be traced back to those businessmen who supported ‘anti trust’ regulations (hoping to use them on their competitors) and, long before this, the passage of a ‘national bank’ for ‘cheap money’, ‘internal improvements’ (i.e. pork barrel road projects and the like) and a ‘protective tariff’ , which is to say a tax on competitors, that were suggested from the time of Henry Clay and before.
However, such wealthy business men did not tend to support high taxes on themselves or regulations that would hit their own companies – let alone a Welfare State to provide everything from ‘the cradle to the grave’ for the general population.
One can be cynical and point out that, for example, the Kerry family (Mrs Kerry having inherited the Heinz fortune from a her first husband) avoided the high taxes that they demanded others paid, and many of the billionaire backers of Senator John Kerry in 2004 also found one way or another to get collectivism to work in their interests (such as Warren Buffet’s use of the threat of inheritance tax to get family owned business enterprises to sell out to the corporation he controls). But there is not just cynical calculation here – many of the super rich really do seem to believe in the modern ever expanding tax-and-spend Welfare State and seem to believe that regulations (what they think of as laws) can make various ‘social ills’ better rather than worse. In these days of the ‘social gospel’ many very wealthy people seem to have a faith in government, as long as this government is in ‘Progressive’ hands, that many ordinary ‘Red Necks’ and the like think absurd. Unlike in Latin America, the American poor, at least the ‘Red Neck’ part of it, do not tend to look to government and ‘redistribution’ to make their lives less hard.
“It is the war stupid”. No, with respect, this was going on long before the Iraq war, and support or opposition to the Iraq war cuts across people who oppose or support ‘Progressive government’. Many ardent libertarians and conservatives oppose the Iraq war and some socialists, such as Christopher Hitchins in the United States or Nick Cohen in Britain, support the war.
If there was no Iraq war such mega rich people as George Soros, Peter Lewis and Marc Cuban would still be supporting every ‘Progressive’ group they could find, so “it is the war” will simply not do.
To some extent one can look at structural factors.
People who actually make things, what Marxists used to call ‘industrial capital’, are far less likely to be leftists than people in the world of banking and related activities…what Marxists used to call ‘finance capital’ – although many people in the financial world are certainly not leftists. Especially if the person one is talking about either built up or inherited a single manufacturing company in a certain line of work rather than just buys and sells companies that do anything or nothing – a Mike Dell is much less likely to give money to leftist groups than a Warren Buffet, and even Warren Buffet is not the same sort of person as a George Soros, perhaps being closer to actually making things has an effect. A Mike Dell is no more likely to be a leftist than the founders of Ford, Goodyear, Du Pont or the other manufacturing companies.
Manufacturing companies may indeed like ‘cheap money’ (i.e. low interest rates created by the credit money expansion of central banks) but they are less closely connected to the process that certain people in the financial world and the head of a industrial company is less likely to benefit personally from such things (at least not in a huge way) than a partner in a finance house. ‘Progressive’, ‘compassionate’ judgements from the Federal Reserve are not likely to give the head of a manufacturing company enough personal money to buy himself the Governorship of New Jersey – for a man who is a partner in a finance house it is a different story.
People do not tend to like to think of themselves as corrupt, so a person who benefits from ‘Progressive’ policies may hold, even to himself, that he supports them out of compassion for others – and show other ‘compassionate’ political opinions. But it is, as I mentioned above, much more than this. Many of these people really do support various ‘compassionate’ and ‘Progressive’ political policies even if there is no way at all these policies benefit them.
And nor is it just the people in the financial industry.
My friend Patrick Crozier often writes about the harmful impact of planning restrictions on the housing market. If he has not already read this posting by Virginia Postrel, and this article of hers that she links to, he should.
A key paragraph in the article, which she recycles at her blog if only to ensure that it may continue to be read after the article as a whole has disappeared behind some Old Media Wall, goes thus:
Dallas and Los Angeles represent two distinct models for successful American cities, which both reflect and reinforce different cultural and political attitudes. One model fosters a family-oriented, middle-class lifestyle – the proverbial home-centered “balanced life.” The other rewards highly productive, work-driven people with a yen for stimulating public activities, for arts venues, world-class universities, luxury shopping, restaurants that aren’t kid-friendly. One makes room for a wide range of incomes, offering most working people a comfortable life. The other, over time, becomes an enclave for the rich. Since day-to-day experience shapes people’s sense of what is typical and normal, these differences in turn lead to contrasting perceptions of economic and social reality. It is easy to believe the middle class is vanishing when you live in Los Angeles, much harder in Dallas. These differences also reinforce different norms and values – different ideas of what it means to live a good life. Real estate may be as important as religion in explaining the infamous gap between red and blue states.
And here is the concluding paragraph of the article:
The unintended consequence of these land-use policies is that Americans are sorting themselves geographically by income and lifestyle – not across neighborhoods, as they used to, but across regions. People are more likely to live surrounded by others like themselves, creating a more-polarized cultural map. In the superstar cities, where opinion leaders congregate, the perception is growing that the country no longer has a place for middle-class life. Yet the same urban sophisticates who fret that you can’t live decently on less than $100,000 a year often argue vociferously that increasing density will degrade their quality of life. They may be right – but, like any other luxury good, that quality commands a high price.
My only tentative disagreement would be to ask: unintended? If you are inclined to read this entire article, do it soon.
The more I think about the Green Belt that surrounds London, the more I find myself loathing it. I agree that greenery is nice to live near, very nice (I live quite near to St James Park, London SW1, and very fine it is too. It is what you might call the Buckingham Palace front garden, which maybe it once was for real, approximately speaking). But considering how huge the Green Belt is, hardly anyone lives in or near it. That is the whole idea. Judging by what the Green Belt looks like from the train when I go to visit my mum, who lives just outside it, it consists mostly of boring fields that only farmers have anything to do with or would want to. What would be nice would be lots of big parks, like Richmond Park or Wimbledon Common, surrounded by more houses.
If that makes daily commuting into London even more unpleasant than it is now, well, just put up the train and road use prices at the point of use. This would encourage people who now commute either to work nearer to home, or even to stay at home and do (more of) their work from there (maybe they could take a laptop into a nearby park). Plus it would encourage more and better railways and roads. The economy would adjust happily, if only all the economic signals were responded to rather than merely the signals that say that an ever growing number of people, from all over the world, are chasing a heavily restricted number of London houses.
Pondering some of the recent stories about changes to UK inheritance taxes (the government’s ‘cut’ is in fact less impressive than it first appears), it occurs to me that there is one fairly respectable argument for worrying about huge inheritances, namely, that if people who work incredibly hard watch as other folk sail into positions of power and business wealth through the pure luck of having a rich family inheritance rather than through merit, it can be demoralising and encourage resentment against the broader capitalist system. Hence, so the argument goes, even though inheriting wealth per se is not wrong – it is the right of X to transfer legitimately acquired property to whomever he or she wants, period – it is sensible to foster an economic environment in which people feel they get a fair shake at what life has to offer.
I once was quite attracted by this idea of taxing inheritance to encourage some sort of ‘level playing field’, but I am no longer so sure. For a start, if an economy is expanding rapidly, it is hard to see how the presence of rich kids really demoralises less fortunate people. The economic process is not a zero sum game. Arguably, a sense of anger (“I’ll show those rich bastards”) may even spur the latter group to work incredibly hard to overtake the former. Rich kids may find they have to work harder, too, to impress people in certain ways who resent their wealth, and so on (I have seen this in action).
If a society is a closed one and the state controls most, if not all, of the key parts of an economy, then the existence of a small but influential case of rich people able to pass on their wealth without hindrance might also be a problem, but the solution to that is not to tax inheritance, but shrink the state.
A final point worth repeating over and over is the old example provided by the late Robert Nozick, the Harvard philosopher. He famously trashed egalitarian attacks on inherited wealth by rejecting the model that egalitarians use of society as a justification for their views. He said, if memory serves, that egalitarians tend to view life as a closed circuit, like an athletics track, and that if a person inherits a fortune, it is like an athlete starting a race 10 yards ahead of his fellows. But there is no fixed end to which people in society are racing, as they are in a 100m sprint. Instead, society is simply the short-hand term we use to describe the network of relationships between people exchanging things with each other to get what they want. To say that if I inherit my father’s dashing good looks or wealth means I have an “unfair” advantage over X or Y is meaningless in the context of an open society.
There are many practical, utilitarian reasons to object to inheritance tax (although other taxes are arguably even worse). But the moral case against it also needs to be made and the collectivist, zero-sum assumptions on which anti-inheritance views are made also need to be challenged for the errors they are. We cannot expect that job to be done by George Osborne.
(Update: over at the left-wing blog Crooked Timber, a contributor argues that the focus for inheritance tax, which is regarded as a good thing, should be on the beneficiaries, not the bequesters. But of course; if you are an egalitarian, it is natural to want to push the focus away from the right of people to dispose of their property to those that receive it. But the comment makes no reference whatever to why inequality that may arise from inheritance is in and of itself a bad thing. Such inequality is just assumed to be a bad thing, period. No actual argument, from first principles, is given as to why).
As Brian pointed out recently, when the Tories proposed raising the threshold at which Britons pay inheritance tax on an estate to £1m from the current £300,000, it would be denounced by the usual suspects as grossly unjust, etc, and once the initial furore had died down, the Labour government would copy it, up to a point.
So it has.
This proves a general sort of point that David Cameron, the Tory leader, should now pursue with all due vigour (although I doubt many of us crusty cynics will be convinced that Cameron has suddenly turned into Nigel Lawson, not that Cameron gives a damn about what a blogger like me thinks). It will have proved a general point that arguing for tax cuts, even supposedly middle class ones, is smart election strategy and can force the government of the day to respond. Frankly, if a politician like the Chancellor, Alastair Darling, acts cynically but it means people do not have to go through contortions to avoid paying some tax, that is progress.The government’s financial plans come with costs: the government intends to get rid of some old reliefs for capital gains, which could hit private equity, but at least it has simplified the tax code somewhat, which has become one of the longest and most complex in the western world.
Real progress, of course, will come when inheritance tax, along with other taxes, are reduced or in some cases, hopefully eliminated. And the situation will really improve when the next stage comes along – a general shrinkage of the state and the vast payroll of people living on public funds. Well, we can all dream, can we not?
This reviewer plainly does not care much for Naomi Klein, scourge of the supposed evils of global capitalism. I plodded through some of her writings once just to see what the fuss was about and the economic illiteracy of this woman surprised even a jaundiced observer like me. She has achieved the rare feat of making the late JK Galbraith look like a great sage by comparison, which is quite a feat, given that many of his predictions were wrong, although he was a witty writer at times, which I suspect explains a lot of his appeal. And yet it is all such a shame: I think we free marketeers need to be challenged by high-class criticisms in order to sharpen our own defence of the market order; the problem is that if the anti-capitalist types out there become self-parodies, we can fall into a sense of false security. It never fails to surprise me just how bad a lot of anti-market writing often is.
On the issue of anti-capitalism, this old gem by Ludwig von Mises is a must-read, as fresh now as when he wrote it decades ago.
The decision of the British government to rescue Northern Rock, the mortgage lender, with billions of pounds of taxpayer’s money, represents a terrible long-term blunder, in my view. It may also put the UK afoul of EU law, for those that care about such matters. Of course one feels very sorry for the people who have savings with NR and I suppose many of them are mightily relieved at the turn of events. I am sure I would be relieved if I were in their position.
But hard cases make bad law, and bad policy. Consider what has happened: a company gets itself into a pickle because its funding policies are up-ended by a sudden rise in short-term interbank borrowing costs; fears grow that the firm cannot make good all its commitments and a bank run occurs. Before the days when financial institutions of a certain size were considered too large to be allowed to fail, the collapse, however tragic, of Northern Rock would have been seen as a necessary if very nasty reminder that capitalism has its risks.
Banks and other institutions that lend money must not lend to people without being sure of the latter’s credit worthiness. But that caution has been thrown to the winds in recent years: in the US and Britain, for example, borrowing covenants have been relaxed, and pretty much any sentient lifeform has been able to get a mortgage. Some financial institutions are to blame for their plight although in mitigation, the price signals that are the essential feature of markets have been distorted by a long stretch of cheap money. The ultimate culprits, as I said the other day, are the central banks and their historically low interest rates. With so much cheap liquidity, the sort of returns investors made on safe investments were peanuts and so they took greater risks for often only a slightly higher reward. We are now moving to a position where risk is more realistically priced. The Northern Rock bailout undermines that move.
The rescue of Northern Rock also shows that the supposed success by Margaret Thatcher and even John Major in rolling back socialism is itself an exaggeration. It proves that if a company is big enough, it can call on the public purse. Northern Rock, based in Labour Party heartland of the north-east, has been effectively nationalised by the government, and inevitably, the clamour will grow for more and arguably more deserving groups of people to be bailed out. I can think, for example, of the hundreds of thousands of people who face retirement without a decent pension because Gordon Brown, when he was Chancellor, helped to shaft private sector pensions by changes to how equity dividends are taxed. They are arguably far more deserving of some form of recompense.
Of course, if the Tories had any moral or political backbone – and they most certainly do not – they would have denounced this state of affairs, rather than take the easy way out of playing to the gallery by supporting the tax-funded bailout of Northern Rock. Back in the mid-1990s, when Barings went down due to dodgy trades in the derivatives market, the collapse was seen as a harsh but necessary lesson about the realities of risk. For a while, Barings served as a useful warning, far more useful than any group of regulations. With the rescue of Northern Rock, careless financiers will now regard the state as an easy touch.
Neil Cavuto (of Fox news) to Alan Greenspan.
“Did you keep interest rates too low for too long, creating a bubble?”
Mr Greenspan to Mr Cavuto.
“Collapse of communism in Eastern Europe… [blah, blah, blah]… the Third World… [blah, blah, blah]… the rise of investment in China…”
Draw your own conclusions.
This is a pretty good yarn explaining to the layperson how exactly we moved from a period when the financial markets only ever seemed to go up to the time, now, when there are long queues of anxious customers trying to pull their money out of mortgage lending and savings firm, Northern Rock. Hedge funds have lost money. Weird-sounding entities called ‘SIV-lites’ have lost cash (the absurd jargon of financial markets never fails to amaze me). I do not share the view of some Jeremiads that this saga will bring about a recession – although I do not discount that possibility – but the pace of the UK economy is bound to slow down. Suddenly, this present government is going to find it a lot harder to pay for all those new public sector sinecures it has created over the past 10 years – possibly as many as a million public sector jobs. Slower growth will cut into revenues.
The Northern Rock saga has jolted financial markets so much that the US equity market today fell because of the situation. Normally, the UK stock market takes its lead from the US, not the other way around. By coinidence, meanwhile, Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has been plugging his memoirs and airing his views about the current problems. Like a lot of people, I take a less than reverential view of Greenspan, although I can see his many fine qualities too: he is a good economist, pretty sound on markets as such folk go, but he abandoned his old, gold-bug principles a long time ago and was a pretty “seat-of-the-pants” sort of Fed head, making up economic doctrine almost, it seemed, on the hoof. It is a bit rich, frankly, for Greenspan to bash Bush for the tax cuts (one of the few good things that Dubya did as President, actually). Greenspan operated a relatively loose interest rate regime and this fuelled the lending practices that have come back to haunt us, especially the whole sub-prime debt Snafu. Cheap money that is detached from economic reality begets trouble. As a man who once learned his economics in the circles of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises, it is a shame that even he could not understand this, or if he did, act upon it.
I have said it before but I repeat it here: it is high time that the cult of the detached, Olympian central banker setting interest rates for whole land masses was ended. Here is the classic statement of why central banks with monopoly rights of currency issuance keep coming a cropper.
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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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