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]
|
As most of us are aware the almost all Western governments are living beyond their means. Every year they spend more than they raise and their debts spiral ever upwards. But there is a solution: ask the voters. Here is how it would work:
- On his birthday the voter is asked what he would like the government to spend its money – sorry ill-gotten gains – on.
- The voter gets to select from the departments of state: defence, interior, health, education etc.
- At the end of the month the selections of all the voters who have responded are totted up and government revenues for that moth are divided amongst government deportments in proportion to how many voters have selected them.
At a stroke:
- Spending and revenues are brought into line.
- Voters cannot complain that the government isn’t spending enough on such and such because it is in their power to do something about it.
- If it becomes apparent that a department has too much money (or too little) then that will (one hopes) become public knowledge and voters will change their selections accordingly.
- There will no longer be interdepartmental rows over spending. It is taken out of the hands of politicians.
- Departments would have a strong incentive to keep waste to a minimum. If it becomes known that they are being wasteful, voters are likely to move their money to a different department.
I can see some objections/issues:
- How should voters make their preferences known? In person? By mail? Should the voters get one vote or several? 90% of me wants to spend on defence but 10% wants the money spent on prisons.
- War. If a war starts it could take a while for the state to get on a war-footing. About a month but I would guess there would be provision for such an emergency.
- Publicity. Humans being humans and politicians being politicians, there will be great competition between departments for voters’ favour. Would there be a danger of advertising budgets getting out of hand? If advertising was banned what else might politicians get up to?
- Revenue is lumpy as are birthdays. The government does not raise the same amount every month and birthdays are not evenly distributed throughout the year. This could have some interesting effects.
“Britain’s biggest problem is a lack of economic growth – so much else is downstream from that. In per person terms, annual real growth averaged more than 2 percent in the run up to the financial crisis. From the crash to COVID-19, growth was just 0.6 percent on average. And of course these growth rates compound. Before the financial crisis, living standards were on course to double every 35 years; afterwards, it was every 120 years. This is a change with profound societal – and even civilizational – consequences.
“From tax and regulation to institutional malaise, demographic decline, and a culture that denigrates success – there are all sorts of explanations for our economic slowdown. But the way I see it is that we are suffering a progressive loss of economic dynamism, as we gradually replace market processes with bureaucratic ones – often to reduce risk or increase ‘fairness’. To many observers, every individual step along the road is reasonable and easy enough to justify. But over time, the effect is suffocating.”
– Tom Clougherty, Institute of Economic Affairs
First time is happenstance, second is coincidence and third is enemy action. As it happens Bolivia has a third natural resource which, currently, is in high demand. Lithium. Those salt flats up at 12,000 feet and so on. One of the great deposits of easily extractable lithium they are. So, why aren’t they being extracted?
Because the government has insisted that they’re a great natural resource. Therefore, rather than greedy capitalists extracting and shipping out those batteries should be made up at 12,000 feet. Even, in fact, the cars that use the batteries.
The result is obvious – the lithium isn’t being extracted, the batteries aren’t being made and nor are the cars. Because idiot fuckwits are in charge of what happens to Bolivia’s natural resources of course.
– Tim Worstall
I have not watched this yet. But I am certain it is worth watching.
Steve Baker on Why Government is Failing you Debt & Inflation Peter McCormack Podcast
In this episode, we discuss pressing economic and political issues such as the challenges of government debt, inflation, and the often overlooked consequences of central bank policies. With a focus on the impact of taxation and government spending on individual freedoms and economic productivity,. We also discuss the structural inefficiencies in politics and examine the growing disconnect between politicians and economic realities.
“Britain’s deluded politics are downstream of a deluded public. This country simply doesn’t realise how poor it is; the gulf between public expectations of the state and the state’s means of financing itself has widened to dangerous levels. People on relatively high incomes don’t feel rich and therefore assume that there are plenty of actually rich people who could be squeezed to pay for stuff. Entitlement spending, in particular, is eating British democracy alive. Council budgets are increasingly consumed by social care and special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) spending, with services cut to the bone. Meanwhile in Westminster, successive governments continually forestall capital investment to avoid tinkering with absurd commitments such as the pension triple lock.”
– Henry Hill, writing about the UK Budget statement of Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves. (For non-British readers who want to know what the “triple lock” is, it is a safeguard that ensures the state pension increases each year by the highest of three measures: Inflation: The Consumer Price Index (CPI) for the previous September; Average earnings: The average increase in total wages across the UK for May to June of the previous year; and a minimum rise of 2.5%.)
I agree with Hill that many members of the public, and not just the chattering class, are so economically illiterate they have little idea of how screwed the UK is financially, given demography, state bloat, over-regulation and tax, and the rest. And anyone who pushes against it is one of those sinister people known as “neoliberals”.
Just to make the problem clearer. Economies do add up. If this happens here then that over there must also happen. If we don’t see that second then we’re mistaken in our assumption that the first has. If productivity has risen and wages haven’t then the labour share must have fallen. The labour share – up to when PK wrote in 1996 – had not fallen. Therefore that confident blue line from 1970 to 1996 is wrong.
We don’t even have to worry about why it’s wrong. It just is – so bollocks to the rest of it.
Chakrabortty’s getting on a bit to be an enfant terrible of course, his unwillingness to spend time and energy understanding the economics he’s attempting to write about is easier to explain for he’s at The Guardian. In fact, he writes the economic editorials for The Guardian and an actual knowledge of economics in that job – let alone time and effort spent gaining it – would be a positive hindrance.
No, really.
– Tim Worstall putting the boot in 😀
The current tax rate as a proportion of net national income (according to the Adam Smith Institute) is 44%. See if you can guess what it was in
a) 1924 and
b) 1913.
Answer below the fold.
→ Continue reading: Sunday morning quiz
But moving away from the obvious and serious to something more jocular.
Borrowing costs imposed on France
And, no, really, just no. Yes, yes, we all know what they’re saying but it doesn’t work as a construction.
Think of the average nutter – the average socialist but I repeat myself – who’ll scream the house down about the power of The City, of “the market”. This is to make a category error, it is to reify the markets. Those markets are not, for all the linguistic ease of our saying so, “a thing”. They’re just you and me and the folk holding our chequebooks, that’s all. There’s no thing there, no market view, no market control – either control of the market or the market controlling other things. Just that interaction of 8 billion people each counting their own pennies.
The markets – as opposed to the market – do not impose borrowing costs upon anyone. They don’t impose anything at all. There’s a price at which people will lend you their pennies, a price at which they won’t. That changes over time. And, erm, that’s it. This is not an imposition.
– Tim Worstall
#Just_Stop_Toil is best anti-Luddite hashtag ever. Use it.
Why does it work? Because, as it turns out, the profitable level of a fish stock is above the sustainable level. More fish around, less diesel and time used to catch enough to feed the market. Profits are thus maximised at stock levels substantially above sustainable levels. That means more fish to gawp at while maximising profits.
Or, alternatively, George Monbiot has got the neoliberal capitalist attitude to fisheries entirely and wholly the wrong way around. The reproductive rate of money, within that neoliberal capitalism, is more fish in the sea than there are currently. Therefore, having neoliberal capitalism running the fisheries (some to many fisheries perhaps not all) would increase the number of fish to gawp at. Exactly and precisely the opposite of what George is claiming.
The problem is about George. For someone who keeps insisting that he’s just critiquing the neolberal capitalist attitide to the environment he knows fuck all about the neoliberal capitalist attitude toward the environment.
But then that’s such a strange thing in public intellectuals, isn’t it? Ignorance?
– Tim Worstall
Shocking news from today’s Sunday Telegraph:
Dutch job disease: how labour rights have undermined the Netherlands
Sacking an employee in the Netherlands is no easy feat.
Ask many managers and they will explain to you the nuisance of having to apply to the courts to obtain a “dismissal permit” for an underperforming employee.
Even if a worker has agreed to leave, they then have a two-week cooling-off period to possibly change their mind.
The process is so arduous that the Dutch are deemed by the OECD to have one of the strictest worker protection regimes in the developed world.
This might sound unambiguously progressive for the Netherlands, and a potential inspiration for Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner as she seeks to enhance workers’ rights in the UK.
However, for plenty of workers, the Dutch system has backfired.
Underpinning the problem is the fact that many bosses are increasingly reluctant to hire workers given the difficulties they later encounter when trying to sack them.
The result is that more than one quarter of Dutch workers are employed only on temporary contracts, far more than any other rich country.
‘The system is the problem, not people’: how a radical food group spread round the world
Incredible Edible’s guerrilla gardening movement encourages people to take food-growing – and more – into their own hands
Pam Warhurst insists she’s no anarchist. Nevertheless, the founder of Incredible Edible, a food-focused guerrilla gardening movement, wants the state to get out of people’s way.
“The biggest obstacle is the inability of people in elected positions to cede power to the grassroots,” she says.
[…]
Her big idea is guerrilla gardening – with a twist. Where guerrilla gardeners subvert urban spaces by reintroducing nature, Incredible Edible’s growers go one step further: planting food on public land and then inviting all-comers to take it and eat.
I doubt this idea would scale up, but if growing food to give to others gives people pleasure, go for it. I cannot bring myself to feel outraged about the odd unauthorised carrot in a municipal flowerbed. And long have I waited to see lines like those I have put in bold type appear in the pages of the Guardian:
But as much as Warhurst’s idea has simplicity and wholesomeness, it also has a radical streak. At its heart, Incredible Edible is about hijacking public spaces – spaces nominally owned by communities, and paid for through their taxes, but administered and jealously guarded by public authorities.
And that is where Incredible Edible meets its biggest challenge: the dead hand of the state.
|
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.
|
