…“some stories stand out. The one that confuses me is the call for Britain to trial some form of ‘universal basic income.’ What exactly do people think we’ve been doing for the past two years?”
– Sam Ashworth Hayes, in the Daily Telegraph (£).
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August 24th, 2023 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The good folk at The Cobden Centre have put together a very good documentary to explain how the fiat money system works, and has some suggestions as to what to do about it. At the instigation of the Sage of Kettering, (full disclosure, his cousin made it), here it is. I have watched it and it is very good. Ex Nihilo: The Truth about Money. My only quibble is that it repeatedly refers to banks creating money out of thin air, but there is some substance to ‘thin air’, which, after all, can sustain respiration and hold up aircraft. August 5th, 2023 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
I thought of Kipling’s poem Arithmetic on the Frontier when I saw this picture:  “Russian navy ship appears to be heavily damaged in Ukrainian sea drone attack” – Sky News. Here and now, I am glad to see an expensive defeat inflicted upon one of Putin’s warships at little cost to the Ukrainians. But the new arithmetic of war will not always give results that I like. August 4th, 2023 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
A British bank helped repress dissent in Hong Kong, and British banks help repress dissent in the UKAs reported in the Telegraph,
Before it decided it would be trendier to be known only by its initials, HSBC was the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, reflecting its historical origins. Despite its name and its subservience to a foreign government, it is a British bank. (British banks are meant to be subservient to the British government, dammit.)
As Patrick Crozier posted about yesterday, several UK banks and building societies have looked upon what their HSBC colleagues did in Hong Kong and found it worthy of imitation in their home country. And not just to famous people like Farage: the Daily Mail reports that when the Yorkshire Building Society sent an Anglican vicar an email asking for feedback and he responded criticising the presence of material on their website that talked about LGBT and gender issues, the YBS closed his account. The fact that the Rev. Richard Fothergill did not initiate the correspondence but merely gave his opinion having been asked for it is somehow particularly galling. Tim Worstall sarcastically commented on the Hong Kong story:
Mr Worstall is undoubtedly right about the insidiousness of the banks’ strategy, but I have some hope that he will be proved wrong about it staying undetected. The Yorkshire Building Society sounds thoroughly defensive in this tweet, which has been viewed three quarters of a million times:
July 1st, 2023 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
When you lose the big match, try to get the result declared void and run the match again. If you can’t get a rematch, try another game entirely and say that’s the one that matters. “Citizens’ juries can help fix democracy”, writes Martin Wolf in the Financial Times.
Thus far, I agree with him. For a moment I thought he was going to defend the rights of individuals against the tyranny of the majority. At one point in his life he would have done.
If your aim is to bypass professional politicians and improve representation, there is a better way than that to do it. With this method you don’t have to worry about how well or badly your representatives represent the population in terms of age, class, sex, race and so on. You can have perfect representation by cutting out the middleman and asking the voters themselves. It’s called a referendum. We have had several. The only slight caveat is that people expect the government to abide by them.
Experts chosen by you.
Who could have seen that coming?
Evidence supplied by you. This fad for citizen’s juries started six years, eleven months and ten days ago and will last as long as they can avoid convening one to give its verdict on what to do with illegal immigrants. With astute management, that might be years. We might be able to celebrate the triumph of the shiny new Citizen’s Juries and the abolition of the nasty, bigoted old sort of jury simultaneously. June 2nd, 2023 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Labour willing to force pension plans to invest in £50bn ‘growth fund’”, reports the Financial Times.
Confidence in the British economy is not likely to be improved by the woman who will probably be the next Chancellor of the Exchequer announcing that she has so little confidence that pension funds will invest in it voluntarily that she thinking about making them do it by force. It would be unfair to call this the Walter Ulbricht strategy. Unlike Comrade Ulbricht, who said “No one has the intention of erecting a wall!”, Ms Reeves has sportingly given pension funds warning of her intentions so they can get out before the wall goes up. Investments can go down as well as up. The record of the state in “picking winners” is particularly poor. British workers are not going to be happy bunnies if their pensions lose value because a Labour government forced them to put some of their pot into risky start-ups that venture capitalists wouldn’t touch. May 24th, 2023 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Flexible working is not a new phenomenon. It has been around for decades, with varying degrees of success depending on the companies and industries that have implemented it. You do not need to be a working-from-home (WFH) evangelist to realise that working patterns have changed in recent years. Certain jobs, such as lawyers or journalists, can tolerate a level of WFH without a noticeable impact on performance. However, it is important to note that prior to Covid, its uptake amongst businesses has been very limited. The only reason it is plaguing our economy now, is not because businesses and start-ups across the nation have realised the phenomenal improvement in productivity. Far from it. It is simply because government-directed WFH orders, subsidies, and now policies have created a false sense of normality as well as a false labour market. And it is doomed to fail, like many so many state interventions, created far away from business reality.” – Andrew Barclay, businessman. I was at a banking conference in Monaco (tough job, and someone has to do it) and this seemed to be the view of a lot of the folk present. Mind you, for a lot of my working life, my “office” is a table in a hotel business reception, airport lounge, cafe or my home. But I have done this for decades, and in my younger years (20-40) had the benefit of the cameraderie, mentorship and “culture” that comes with being in an office as part of a team. I follow a more “hybrid” approach these days, and it seems to work. (I actually think I work longer hours than when I was in an office.) I don’t see any reason for the State to intrude into this, either by penalising one form or working or encouraging it. A neutral approach is best. And what definitely should not happen is enshrining this or that way of working as a “right” beyond obvious constraints to protect life and health, both physical and mental. As ever (here comes the libertarian drum-roll sound), it is competition and vigorous enterprise that provides the best ways of people figuring out working patterns that suit them best, be they youngsters, middle-aged farts like me with or without children and dependents, etc etc. April 24th, 2023 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Those were reportedly the last words of General John Sedgwick at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House in the American Civil War. (Wikipedia boringly says that he did complete the sentence. Just.) General Sedgwick was a brave man to stride along the front like that. He sought to encourage his men, some of whom had been seen to flinch as the Confederate bullets landed all around. I hope our Scottish readers will forgive me if I say that, though all the hearts that beat under Scottish skies are brave, not all of them are quite as brave as General Sedgwick. But some are: “Deficits are nothing to be afraid of”, writes Jim Byrne for Bylines Scotland. You see, taxes don’t fund spending and a sovereign government can create new money to pay off its debts whenever it likes and so all Scotland needs to do make its deficit disappear is declare independence. This is called “Modern Monetary Theory”. Mr Byrne posts a link to a 14-page Bank of England document that, he says, shows that the Bank agrees with him. Which does make one wonder why the Bank doesn’t just declare “the deficit is nothing to be afraid of, let the rejoicing commence”. Unless it’s a case of “Gary, no”? April 10th, 2023 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
As a “lukewarmer”, I am more of a believer in climate change than many here. One thing that pulls me towards scepticism is the habitually dishonest language used by advocates of measures against climate change. Take this BBC article: “Climate change: UK risks losing investment in net-zero race, MPs warn”. It says,
The BBC article makes me want to riff on Mary McCarthy’s famous quip about Lillian Hellman – every word in it is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’. In particular, the words “race”, “investment” and “jobs” are all used in a sense that means the opposite of their usual meanings. “Investment” means something you buy in the hope that its price will rise so that you can sell it later as a profit. The “investment” the article talks about is simply spending. Argue if you wish that it is justified spending, but that doesn’t make it investment. The article, taking its tone from the government, talks about “green jobs” as if they are a good thing. As Tim Worstall often points out, all jobs are a cost not a benefit. Perhaps a necessary cost, but a cost. And the purest, costliest, unbeneficialliest jobs of all are jobs that are created solely to comply with government regulations. Not unexpectedly, the people who get these make-work jobs like having them, because they get paid. But the money to pay their wages has to come from somewhere. It comes from (a) taxes, i.e. making everyone a little bit poorer, and (b) companies diverting money that could have been truly invested in making or doing things that people actually wanted made or done (which would have created genuine new jobs) into the hamster-wheel of fulfilling green regulations, filling in government forms to say that they have done so, paying to be trained to fill out the forms, paying protection money to Green organisations to get a little green smiley logo saying they comply, and so on and on and on. What’s wrong of the word “race” in the phrase “net-zero race”? This word is dishonest because a race is meant to indicate a competition in which some prize or benefit is won by whoever is fastest – and in which said prize or benefit goes in lesser degree or not at all to the other competitors. In this case “the race to net-zero” is a race to lose benefits, a race in which the prize is being hobbled. That is still true even if one accepts the necessity of being hobbled. The choice of the US to hobble itself first by passing Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act” (another example of dishonest language) hands a competitive advantage to the UK, so long as we do not do likewise. As to why the race to net zero is a racist concept, only a racist needs such an obvious thing explained. March 30th, 2023 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is much anger in Ireland over the country’s ongoing housing crisis. The Dail put in place an eviction ban over the winter. It got them some good headlines for a while, but the ban had the usual effect of driving smaller landlords out of the market, making the crisis worse. The ban is due to expire on 31st March. This will result in many people being evicted simultaneously on 1st April. Reddit Ireland is outraged. Here is a thread titled “Disgraceful” about how many Airbnb properties are available compared to how few long term rental properties. In fact the comparison is false. As a commenter called “Th0rHere” says, “Airbnb shows listings even when booked (to make future bookings possible). Daft [a property website] shows only available places to rent right now, as your not going to advertise place to rent if it’s already being rented. These numbers are not comparable.” Even so, it is true that an awful lot of Irish properties that used to be let to long term tenants are now given over to Airbnb. I have posted about the issue a couple of times. Why is this happening? Why would anyone choose the constant work and uncertainty of letting out their property as an Airbnb over the stability of having a long term tenant? On that same “Disgraceful” thread, a Reddit Ireland commenter called “RestrepoDoc2” explained why:
RestrepoDoc2’s comment got 3 upvotes, one of which was mine. A comment from “Irish_drunkard” saying, “We banned Uber because it would effect our taxi business, why can’t we ban AirBNB?” got 985 upvotes. March 25th, 2023 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Sweden has made its choice and must live with the consequences. Two years ago almost to the day, after a vote that attracted unprecedented public interest, Sweden introduced a new national flower. It is Campanula rotundifolia, a.k.a. the Harebell or Small Bluebell. No one ever says what happens to the old national flower on these occasions. Does it sit in its bed glowering at its successor, like Ted Heath, or does it try its hand at hosting a TV show like Harold Wilson? Those were the days, when nubile young couples sat up in bed as soon as an ex prime minister came on the telly. But if poor Mr Wilson was confused by that opening sequence, think how a flower would feel. The only reason I got onto the subjects of harebells and Harold Wilson and pollination being flower-nookie was so that I could make a joke about how Brett Christophers, professor in the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Sweden’s Uppsala University, spends most of his Guardian article tiptoeing around the Campanula rotundifolia. Er, that was the joke. Here’s the article. “From poster child to worst performing EU economy: how bad housing policy broke Sweden” Bad housing policy. The policy is bad. Very bad. The article says that the housing policy is bad.
Tip-
Toe.
Back in 2015, the Guardian was more honest: “Pitfalls of rent restraints: why Stockholm’s model has failed many”
March 9th, 2023 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Private rents in Glasgow rocket as landlords exit market” What brought this on? The report from the Glasgow Evening Times quotes Colin Macmillan of Glasgow Property Letting as saying,
The situation the Scottish Government created got so bad that even the Scottish Government noticed. The Negotiator, a site for residential agents, reported yesterday that the Scottish Government had U-turned, replacing a rent freeze with a cap on rent increases.
Well, “disastrous” to “bad” is an improvement. But unless and until the Scottish government realises that both rent freezes and rent caps are very nice for tenants already in place but very bad for anyone trying to rent a house or flat from the day they are announced onwards, times will be hard for those seeking to rent in Scotland. January 24th, 2023 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
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