Samizdata

Here:

In a fascinating 36 minute interview, Cobden Centre Radio’s very own Brian Micklethwait speaks to James Tyler, the Chief Executive of Tyler Capital and a member of our Cobden Centre advisory board.

I’ll surely have more to say about this, but busy day today. So suffice it to say, for now, click on this to listen to the mp3, or follow the top link to find it as a podcast.

My main general impression of James Tyler was what a good and thoughtful person he is, very much his own man in how he thinks about things and goes about things, yet in no way scornful of or unsympathetic towards others who take the road more travelled. If the propaganda fence to be got over is that Austrian economics, once you’ve been told about it by your resident lefty, is an excuse for billionaires to piss on everyone, then a man like Tyler is just the sort to get you thinking that it’s a whole lot better and more intelligent than that.

His central point was that nobody should have the kind of power over economic life that our current powers that be (“crony capitalism”) do now have.

When in my teens, in the 1960s, I wondered what rules were best for governing the world, and the nations in the world. Comparisons like this (featured by Tim Worstall at the ASI blog today, he having come upon it here) helped me to decide:

As Tim Worstall notes:

[T]he countries are matched as to rough starting point before the communist armies marched, matched roughly as to culture and so on, and yet after that series of communist experiments we see the same result everywhere.

Exactly. It was the matching of like (to start with) with like that was most telling. And before 1990, we also had the damning comparison between East and West Germany (very near to my English home) to contemplate.

So, said contemporaries who were drawing more nearly opposite conclusions, you want sweatshops like they have in South East Asia? With growing confidence, I learned to say: yes. If people in South East Asia now have sweatshops, that’s a pity. They must be very poor. But how will shutting down those sweatshops make them any less poor? You’re saying poor with hope of escape is worse than poor with no hope at all. That sounds downright wicked to me.

That time proved me, and all who argued as I did, right was one of the big reasons for communism collapsing where it did collapse, and trying to insert capitalism into itself where it did not.

Some libertarians now live in dread of a time when such comparisons will no longer be possible, because the entire world will be equally stagnant, and nobody except them will be able to see this. Some people are determined to be miserable.

In the UK edition of Wired magazine is an article on the use of environmental markets in which, for instance, property developers or industrial users of water pay others, such as owners of wetlands or somesuch, if they want to make a development. The way the article is written gives the impression – at least in my eyes – of this being a great example of how capitalism and the Greens can work together. I am not so sure.

For instance, take the idea of “banks” of wetlands. Typically, what happens is that a government, such as the US one acting under legislation, will decree that there can be no net loss of wetland in given geographical area A, so if any area of wetland is destroyed, then the destroyers must offset this by paying to create another area of wetland somewhere. I immediately see a problem here: someone in authority has decreed that whatever happens to be the area of wetland at the time the new system is introduced is the area that must be maintained ad infinitum; but why not say that the area should be twice as big, or three times, or four times, or half as big? Also, the supposed “market” for such development permit trading depends on the existence of government regulations of certain areas, like wetlands, which might clearly go against the property rights of the folk who have owned those wetlands in the past and might have wanted to turn them into golf courses or whatever.

To be fair, though, the article does address the fact that property rights or markets of some sort represent a smarter way of addressing issues such as conservation, pollution and so on than traditional “lets just ban it” approaches used in the past. The article contains a great example of how the French mineral water industry did a deal with farmers over the latters’ use of fertilizer and pesticides in order to protect the water and keep the farmers happy. That is the kind of market transaction that works, and probably could have worked without government getting involved. My worry, though, is that a lot of such artificial markets in things such as environmental resources can become prey to corruption and mission creep of all kinds. Nigel Lawson, for instance, wrote dammingly about carbon trading in his recent book on the global warming controversy.