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Samizdata unintended ironic quote of the day

· Opinions on liberty · Slogans & Quotations

“China is serious about building a cleaner, fairer, and sustainable society.”

As you know, I get press releases, and this one, from the Swiss private bank and investment manager, Vontobel, was too good not to let go without sharing.

Further comment from me is superfluous. Reading that comment, considering how the CCP operates and what it does, has left me dumbstruck.

September 27th, 2021 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)

A press release worth sharing

· Environment · UK affairs

I got this today from the Global Warming Policy Forum, a group that I guess can be best called a global warming sceptics group. It is based in the UK. Here is its press release today. It responds to reports that the UK is dangerously vulnerable to cuts in energy supplies and rocketing prices. Winter this year could be interesting. If the UK has power cuts and serious hits to supplies this year and into next, will the government double down on trying to produce energy from wind and happy thoughts, or realise that a mix of nuclear, some fossil fuels and limited renewables are the way to go? Can any major Western political leader withstand the likely wailing from the establishment media and call bullshit on Net Zero and the anti-carbon cult? Can you imagine any such figure advocating that people read Alex Epstein or Michael Schellenberger, for instance? It is worth noting that the last time the UK had power cuts, during the early 70s, we had a Tory government as led by Edward Heath (who took the UK into the EEC). Then, the coal industry was locked in a brutal industrial dispute with the unions. The three-day week, blackouts and all the rest were big reasons for why Heath was kicked out and eventually replaced by Margaret Thatcher. A basic requirement of a government is to keep the lights on, or at least not stop people from keeping them on. Boris Johnson doesn’t want to be the next Heath, does he?

Here is the GWPF press release:

The GWPF has consistently warned that Britain’s unilateral climate policies under both Labour and Conservative administrations were creating an insecure and expensive energy sector that would ultimately fail due to consumer costs and collapsing security of supply.

These warnings are now fully vindicated. Over-reliance on renewables and interconnectors and a failure to maintain a diverse portfolio of energy supply and electricity generation has resulted in a fragile, weather-dependent British system that is critically vulnerable to pan-European low wind conditions, interconnector failure, and high regional gas prices.

Income support subsidies to renewable energy investors currently total about £10 billion a year, and are still rising, while grid management costs have increased six-fold (to just under £2 billion a year) since the early 2000s when renewables were first introduced in significant quantities.

In spite of this large and growing cost burden, renewables do not protect the consumer effectively against fluctuations in gas prices, since wind and solar are both critically reliant on gas to guarantee security of supply. The UK’s apparent diversity of supply is an illusion. The current energy cost and supply crisis is the result of decades of ill-considered climate policy which has prioritised costly emissions reductions technologies while neglecting the consumer interest, security of supply and macro-economic impact.

The severity of the current crisis merits emergency measures, not only to protect consumers and the economy, but also to avoid the crisis from turning into social disaster as winter approaches.

The GWPF is calling on the Government to:

1. Suspend all green levies on energy bills, funding subsidies temporarily out of taxation, but acting firmly to cancel these subsidies in the near term.

2. Cancel constraint payments, and compel wind and solar generators to pay for their own balancing costs, thus incentivising them to self-dispatch only when economic.

3. Remove all fiscal and other disincentives to oil and gas exploration, including shale gas, to increase domestic production levels.

4. Suspend carbon taxation on coal and gas generation in order to provide consumer relief and ensure security of supply.

5. Re-open recently closed gas storage facilities and support new storage projects.

6. Suspend all further policy initiatives directed towards the Net Zero target, including the Carbon Budgets, the heat pump targets, and the overly ambitious timetable for the ban on petrol and diesel engines, until the UK energy sector has been stabilised.

7. Facilitate the acceleration of building and deploying Small Modular Reactors for both electricity and heat.

September 20th, 2021 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)

I wrote to my MP, and she wrote back

· Political Economy · UK affairs

A few days ago I did something I am not used to doing, which is I wrote to my MP, who is Nickie Aiken (she is MP for Cities of London and Westminster). I have met her several times; personally, I like her and she has been helpful on several local issues. I wrote about the rise in National Insurance Contributions, taking the UK total tax burden to levels not seen in 70 years.

My letter suggested that there was no point putting new money into the NHS, a state monopoly, without reforms, and that NI ought to be blended with income tax, given that “insurance” is a misnomer and that this would give people a clearer idea of how much the State takes. I commended efforts by former Cabinet Minister Peter Lilley to her on how to use private insurance and other methods to increase availability of residential care and doing so in a way that was fair. My letter avoided the usual libertarian fire-eating exercises we can get into. I was polite and constructive. I think others who want to contact MPs should adopt the same approach, if only to make them aware of how we think. These things do add up. MPs can count, particularly those in marginal seats.

She replied. I don’t know if her reply – which was quite lengthy – was one that she has sent to other constituents and some sort of pro forma thing. If she wrote it to me personally then that speaks most well of her to take the time to do so. I think it is okay for me to republish it here because this letter was sent by a supporter of a government and defending what is now official, public policy. Remember, this is a “moderate”, fairly middle-of-the-road MP, and I think pretty typical of most of her party.

Here goes:

During the summer recess, I spent a week looking after my father who is living with advanced Alzheimer’s while my mother had a respite holiday. I experienced what millions of people up and down the country live with day in day out, month after month caring for their loved ones in similar circumstances and I pay tribute to every single one of them. Equally I am in awe of our care professionals working in care homes and those who provide care services in people’s homes. I believe the covid-19 pandemic has shone a light on the outstanding service they all provide for which I am grateful.

It is this recent experience as well as having been a Council Leader where 40% of the local authority’s budget was spent on adult social services, has led me to accept that if we are to reform social care and ensure that all those in need receive the dignified care they all deserve then extra funding is required. I believe that such a levy as proposed would have been necessary even before the pandemic. However, now with the nation’s finances in the position they currently are, with the Government having spent over £400bn keeping the economy and businesses afloat, raising further revenue is now a must.

I therefore accepted the arguments both the Prime Minister and the Health & Social Care Secretary have made in their reasons why they are proposing the new levy. During the Prime Minister’s statement in the Commons this week I sought assurances that, through the health and social care levy, money raised will go to fund local authorities who are on the front line of providing social care. I am firmly of the view that not all the money raised should go to the NHS but to councils too. As I understand the situation, in total £36 billion will be invested in the health and care system over the next three years to ensure it has the long term resource it needs.

Having looked at the proposals I note that the 1.25% proposed levy means someone working full time on National Living Wage earning £16,216 would pay around £1.50 per week. With such investments patients will benefit from the biggest catch-up programme in the NHS’s history, so people no longer face excessive waits for treatment. This will provide an extra 9 million checks, scans, and operations; and increase NHS capacity to 110 per cent of its pre-pandemic levels by 2023-24.

I appreciate that some people highlighted that the young will be burdened more than the older generations when it comes to the levy and that this is a tax on low paid workers. I note that the highest-earning 14 per cent in the country will pay over half the levy, and the Government has also announced an equivalent increase in dividend tax rates and the suspension of the pension triple lock which would have seen an 8.8% increase in the state pension next year which I agree would be unfair at this time. Instead it will rise by 2.5% or inflation

As a Conservative I believe in a low tax economy. I also believe in financial responsibility and following the pandemic I do feel that we are not in the same position as a country that we were pre-pandemic thus it is right to raise funds in order to support the NHS deal with the immense backlog of waiting lists and also take the necessary and fair steps necessary to give our health and care services the backing and funding they need in order to recover from the effects of the pandemic and ensure the health and wellbeing of residents here in the Two Cities.

Draw your own conclusions on where politics is headed in this country.

September 13th, 2021 | 53 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day

· Political Economy · Slogans & Quotations

“When Boris Yeltsin visited a Houston supermarket in 1989, the sheer choice of goods and services on offer compared to stores in Soviet Russia shocked him. `Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,’ he said. Faced with this new, striking reality of American living standards, he began to recognise the massive costs of the communist economic system on the Russian people. Before seeing it with his own eyes, though, Yeltsin was none the wiser. To echo the movie The Matrix again, his supermarket visit was a ‘red pill’ moment – it allowed him to escape the constructed reality of Soviet communism and experience a real, alternative world.”

– Ryan Bourne.

September 10th, 2021 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)

Widening college enrollment gap between men and women

· Education & Academia · North American affairs

From the Wall Street Journal:

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5 per cent, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71 per cent of the decline. This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65 per cent of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59 per cent of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Assuming that there is some connection between having a higher education qualification and pay (that connection is not by any means set in stone) then if this trend continues, not only will it eliminate any alleged “pay gap” to the detriment of women, but push it another way. Of course, it might be that some US men have worked out that college in many ways is a waste of their time, a cesspit of wokery and pointless diversions, and they’d be better off learning code, or industrial welding, or something that doesn’t saddle them with big debts.

Even so, the male/female college attendance gap in the US, and quite possibly in a few other nations, appears to be one of those stories that very clearly pushes against a standard narrative of how the cards are stacked in favour of we toxic males and that therefore this needs to be fixed in some way. In my day job, I routinely get lots of emails from banks, wealth managers and other firms going on about the wonders of diversity, etc, and rarely, if ever, is this college attendance point brought up. I have raised it once or twice with people, and it gets a sort of muffled response, if at all.

A few more paragraphs from the WSJ article, which is behind a paywall:

Over the course of their working lives, American college graduates earn more than a million dollars beyond those with only a high-school diploma, and a university diploma is required for many jobs as well as most professions, technical work and positions of influence.

Yet skyrocketing education costs have made college more risky today than for past generations, potentially saddling graduates in lower-paying careers—as well as those who drop out—with student loans they can’t repay.

Social science researchers cite distractions and obstacles to education that weigh more on boys and young men, including videogames, pornography, increased fatherlessness and cases of overdiagnosis of boyhood restlessness and related medications.

Men in interviews around the U.S. said they quit school or didn’t enroll because they didn’t see enough value in a college degree for all the effort and expense required to earn one. Many said they wanted to make money after high school.

September 7th, 2021 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day

· Economics, Business & Globalization · North American affairs

“President Biden’s tax plans might soon make Europe look like a capitalist heaven by comparison. He wants to raise the long-term capital-gains tax from just below 24% to above 43%. Switzerland has no such tax. In Britain, inventor of the welfare state, it is 20% and in Germany 26%. On income tax, the U.S. may soon top the scale. Mr. Biden wants a top marginal income-tax rate of just below 40%. Add state and local income taxes, like California’s 13.3% for top earners, and wealthy U.S. taxpayers could pay more than their European counterparts.”

– Josef Joffe, Wall Street Journal ($)

I have been covering this news story about the tax proposals in my regular day job in the banking and wealth management/media sector. Joe Biden, who has been having such a shit-show lately over Afghanistan, is equally terrible over tax and the economy, and also a bit two-faced. This is a man who, let it not be forgotten, was a senator for Delaware for many years. Delaware is a bit like a mini-“Switzerland”, one of those states that is favoured by corporations and creators of trusts (South Dakota, New Hampshire, Nevada and Alaska are similar).

The US is going to have to familiarise itself with the “Laffer Curve” all over again.

August 23rd, 2021 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day

· Environment · Science & Technology · Slogans & Quotations

“Politicians have spent trillions of dollars subsidizing renewable energy with no effect on climate. Nuclear power, which would sharply reduce CO2, is taboo among the greens. Innovation in developing low-cost natural gas, which substitutes for coal, may have done more than any government policy to reduce U.S. emissions. Yet President Biden wants to crush the gas industry with regulation. The IPCC report doesn’t justify putting the U.S. economy into the hands of government. A sensible climate policy will continue to monitor trends, while allowing a free economy to find solutions and build the wealth that will allow for adaptation and amelioration if the worst happens. This lacks the drama of the Apocalypse, but it will better serve the world.”

– Wall Street Journal, responding to the latest IPCC report on global warming (aka climate change).

August 10th, 2021 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)

Social credit in the UK

· Privacy & Panopticon · UK affairs

“There’s a reason that Her Majesty’s government can now afford, politically speaking, to experiment with policies that are native to stratified east Asian states. It’s the very same reason why the Democratic Party here in the States can attempt to spend multiple trillions of dollars during just six months of unified government without any obvious public dismay. Catastrophes are accelerants of government expansion, and the pandemic will go down in history as one in a series of quantum leaps into a more statist world — a world in which governments feel increasingly emboldened to attempt the previously unthinkable.”

– Cameron Hilditch, writing in National Review. Quick observation: there would, from a free market sort of view, be nothing necessarily wrong if an insurance company, for example, varies its premiums on clients who have proof that they, for example, keep fit, eat a healthy diet and so on. But that is a transaction freely entered into, and subject to the competition of a market place. Social credit systems on the Chinese model are not like this, however. There is no choice, no opportunity to opt out.

If I got a pound every time someone went on about Boris Johnson’s damned “libertarian instincts”, I’d be a resident of Monaco by now. We left the EU to get out of a form of creeping statism, and we get this. At least, I suppose, we can eventually vote the current government, led by this albino circus act, out of office, but for things to improve, there has be a shift in the culture in the UK – and elsewhere – of what is acceptable and and about the importance of liberty and autonomy.

August 3rd, 2021 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)

China’s crackdown on profit-making education

· Chinese affairs · Education & Academia · Hippos

China appears to be doing its level best to harm itself in the long term. This story hasn’t so far stirred a lot of international commentary, but it matters, I think. It shows that the rising nationalism (and arguably, a degree of paranoia) in China is reaching the point where it is damaging the domestic economy.

According to one report in Forbes:

Chinese authorities have ramped up their crackdown on after-school tutoring companies by unveiling a new set of sweeping regulations that bans the firms from making profits and raising capital from overseas markets.

Tutoring companies that teach school subjects are now required to register as non-profits. They are also banned from raising capital from overseas investors or through public listings.

What’s more, authorities will stop approving new tutoring companies seeking to teach China’s school syllabus, and require existing ones to undergo regulatory reviews and apply for licenses. The companies found to be in violation will be rectified or eradicated, according to the rules, without further elaboration.

The moves by Chinese authorities have hammered shares of firms operating in the space.

One story I read in the Wall Street Journal said that China, while hitting private sector education, is at the same time trying to make it easier for young couples to have more kids, reversing decades of its odious “one child” policy.

Why does this matter? Because the ever-shifting moves of Chinese authorities on certain sectors must make it hard for entrepreneurs in that country to plan ahead. One moment a chap like Alibaba’s Jack Ma is a sort of business “rock star”, and the next, he’s “disappeared”. In my job in the financial services industry, I have heard a lot of comments over the years on how vibrant, dynamic and coherent Chinese policymaking is, so much better than all that messy Western “neoliberalism”.

Well, it turns out that things in China aren’t quite what they are cracked up to be.

July 28th, 2021 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day

· Economics, Business & Globalization · Slogans & Quotations

“When something is free, only the well-connected get much of it.”

– George Gilder, The Scandal of Money.

July 22nd, 2021 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day

· Education & Academia · North American affairs · Slogans & Quotations

“Today’s targeting of successful Asian-American kids lacks the crudity of a Jim Crow lunch counter or a whites-only drinking fountain. But it is no less ugly—and no less racially discriminatory—for being more genteel.”

– William McGurn, Wall Street Journal ($).

Here is a non-paywalled story at USA Today outlining the issue, and highlighting what a steaming pile Critical Race Theory is. And its doubly outrageous given the demoralising impact it has on children who study and work hard and on the families who encourage this effort. Given how these things work, this story is worth reading outside the US as well.

July 14th, 2021 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day

· Opinions on liberty · Slogans & Quotations

“The cliche goes that the UK is a former empire in search of a role. That is not strictly true. The NHS has become Britain’s all-consuming project, the millstone around its neck and the cloying source of confected national pride. Its hold over the country is so powerful that even a libertarian Conservative PM decided this week to risk sacrificing our ordinary freedom rather than dare to reform it.”

– Sherelle Jacobs, Daily Telegraph, 13 July (£) My only quibble is the appellation “libertarian”, in this case. Mr Johnson’s libertarian views increasingly resemble entities of myth and legend, such as the Loch Ness Monster, Atlantis, or the 1966 English World Cup winning football team.

July 13th, 2021 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
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