Via PharmaTimes | EU to probe pharma over “false pandemic”, this deserves a longer post:
The WHO’s “false pandemic” flu campaign is “one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century,” according to Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, chairman the PACE Health Committee, who introduced the parliamentary motion. “The definition of an alarming pandemic must not be under the influence of drug-sellers,” he adds.
Is this really the best way to secure public health?
In areas such as welfare reform, criminal justice and the voluntary sector, this government has got it badly wrong time and again
As the millennium dawned, record economic growth and stability gave Labour an unparalleled platform for social reform. Its intentions were commendable. Who could oppose “cutting the bills of social failure”; the unequivocal pledge on education; a commitment to be tough on crime and its causes; and early intervention to ensure every child mattered? Yet, many of us look at the widening gap between these promises and the reality of Britain today with disillusionment. Let’s look at four key measures.
Read on at The Centre for Social Justice.
A friend recently sent me this celebrated letter on the absurdity of bureaucracy. If you have not seen it, enjoy:
Rt Hon David Miliband MP
Secretary of State.
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA),
Nobel House
17 Smith Square
London
SW1P 3JR16 July 2009
Dear Secretary of State,
My friend, who is in farming at the moment, recently received a cheque for £3,000 from the Rural Payments Agency for not rearing pigs.. I would now like to join the “not rearing pigs” business.
In your opinion, what is the best kind of farm not to rear pigs on, and which is the best breed of pigs not to rear? I want to be sure I approach this endeavour in keeping with all government policies, as dictated by the EU under the Common Agricultural Policy.
I would prefer not to rear bacon pigs, but if this is not the type you want not rearing, I will just as gladly not rear porkers. Are there any advantages in not rearing rare breeds such as Saddlebacks or Gloucester Old Spots, or are there too many people already not rearing these?
As I see it, the hardest part of this programme will be keeping an accurate record of how many pigs I haven’t reared. Are there any Government or Local Authority courses on this?
My friend is very satisfied with this business. He has been rearing pigs for forty years or so, and the best he ever made on them was £1,422 in 1968. That is – until this year, when he received a cheque for not rearing any.
If I get £3,000 for not rearing 50 pigs, will I get £6,000 for not rearing 100? I plan to operate on a small scale at first, holding myself down to about 4,000 pigs not raised, which will mean about £240,000 for the first year. As I become more expert in not rearing pigs, I plan to be more ambitious, perhaps increasing to, say, 40,000 pigs not reared in my second year, for which I should expect about £2.4 million from your department. Incidentally, I wonder if I would be eligible to receive tradable carbon credits for all these pigs not producing harmful and polluting methane gases?
Another point: These pigs that I plan not to rear will not eat 2,000 tonnes of cereals. I understand that you also pay farmers for not growing crops. Will I qualify for payments for not growing cereals to not feed the pigs I don’t rear?
I am also considering the “not milking cows” business, so please send any information you have on that too. Please could you also include the current Defra advice on set aside fields? Can this be done on an e-commerce basis with virtual fields (of which I seem to have several thousand hectares)?
In view of the above you will realise that I will be totally unemployed, and will therefore qualify for unemployment benefits. I shall of course be voting for your party at the next general election.
Yours faithfully,
Nigel Johnson-Hill
This post originally appeared on cobdencentre.org.
Via FT.com / US / Economy & Fed – Fed signals pullback in liquidity supports, we learn:
The Federal Reserve on Wednesday upgraded its assessment of the US economy and highlighted its intention to shut down most of its crisis-fighting liquidity facilities in early 2010.
And consequently:
Stocks eased slightly after the Fed statement, while the yield curve in the bond market steepened.
Which brings us on to Roger Koppl’s Big Players and the Economic Theory of Expectations.
I am indebted to Cobden Centre Supporter Bruno Prior for introducing me to Koppl’s work which extends the tradition of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and others, unusually, applying empirical methods to demonstrate the application of the theory.
Koppl demonstrates, with extensive reference to other scholars, that investment and all other economic actions depend on “subjective” expectations. He then presents a theory of expectations which assumes people interpret their situations in unpredictable ways. This theory includes a theory of “Big Players”:
Big Players are privileged actors who disrupt markets. A Big Player has three defining characteristics. He is big in the sense that his actions influence the market under study. He is insensitive to the discipline of profit and loss. He is arbitrary in the sense that his actions depend on discretion rather than any set of rules. Big Players have power and use it.
We learn that Big Players reduce the reliability of expectations, thereby disrupting markets. They encourage herding and produce perverse effects on entrepreneurship: traders must pay attention to the Big Player and not the fundamentals.
And so we find today, for example, the markets moving in response to the Fed not the realities of the economy…
From bella gerens, an excellent explanation and defence of libertarianism:
The truth is that advocates of freedom are found all over the political spectrum, but the only true libertarians are the ones who advocate it at all times in all circumstances, from the bedroom to the wallet – who believe that ‘freedom from’ is the only state of being consistent with the dignity and majesty of humankind.
‘Freedom from’ is the most important part of that ideology. Freedom from coercion. Freedom from interference. Freedom from oppression.
‘Freedom to’ is where the misunderstandings enter. People on the right think libertarians are advocating freedom to burgle, rob, rape, murder – because they read ‘freedom’ to mean ‘freedom to do whatever you please.’
People on the left think libertarians are advocating exploitation, pollution, callousness, and the primacy of making (and keeping) money above all else – because they read ‘freedom’ to mean ‘freedom to do whatever you please.’
And both sides think libertarians consider the laws we have prohibiting these activities to be a restriction on freedom.
When will they realise that they don’t understand?
It is now undeniable that a century or so of managerialism — of thinking the state knows best and is entitled to trespass on your private property for your own good and for that of your fellows — has succeeded in creating a segment of society within which anything goes and from which it is increasingly hard to escape: a segment populated by libertines who torment themselves and others despite a state which tries desperately to care for them at vast expense, an expense it forces on everyone, including those of meagre means.
Of course, the approach has now also succeeded in ruining us all, though not all have yet realised it, while delivering a state with tremendous power over our lives, and virtually every aspect of our lives too. Consider:
The state now looms far larger in many parts of Britain than it did in former Soviet satellite states such as Hungary and Slovakia as they emerged from communism in the 1990s, when state spending accounted for about 60% of their economies.
The question now is not how state power should be used to save us, but how state power can be gracefully dismantled so that we can save ourselves and one another from a system which plainly does not work.
What should now follow is a social system of mutual cooperation based on private property and the rule of law. Whether such a system comes to pass is up to us.
Frank Field writes in the Telegraph:
The point is that ever since 1945, parties have competed for votes by promising to expand public expenditure. Bribing voters with their own money has been the order of the day. Now the tables have turned. Parties will be judged on how effectively they cut the size of the budget.
So voters are beginning to look for clear answers on two fronts. Will reducing public expenditure be dealt out in the old-fashioned style of cuts across the board? Or will a new government use the need to slash public expenditure as an agent to shape a new radical politics?
…
Of course, these new strategies would be difficult to enforce, especially in a country groaning under the weight of that colossal deficit. But our fiscal situation actually makes radical change more possible – and increases the likelihood that whoever wins the next election could head the league table of great reforming administrations.
Let’s hope so: Conservatives have already begun to articulate a strategy for radical change. Read more here.
The statutory body “The Committee on Climate Change” has announced:
Cutting gross UK aviation emissions in 2050 to 2005 levels together with 90% emissions cuts in other sectors would achieve the required economy wide 80% emissions reduction which has been committed to by the UK under the Climate Change Act.
Yesterday, I learned there is an agile sports car in development which will achieve 75 mpg: very impressive, but cutting emissions by 90% means a target of about 300 mpg. In the meantime, this is what people want, Nissan’s new supercar, the GT-R, spotted on the way home amongst Subaru rally cars for the road:
We should note the presumption by the CCC that it is for government to plan society.
Meanwhile, it turns out there are plenty of peer-reviewed papers which contradict global warming alarmism. I read recently an article which asked “What will it take for the mainstream media to report reasonably on global warming?” I suggest the answer is a more serious “danger to the community” story, one which indicates where planned societies lead.
I am an Associate Member of the Centre for Policy Studies and I always enjoy reading their pamphlets: they remind me I am not alone. I caught up with the following four yesterday on the train. The theme? Putting humanity back into our society.
Click the images to download the pamphlets as PDFs.
The Reality Gap – an analysis of the failure of big government demonstrates that more government means worse. Jill Kirby writes of voter disenchantment and indicates that, in the EU elections, “Only one voter in 11 voted for the runaway winners, the Conservative Party”.
Jill provides and explores:
five techniques which have been deployed by the Government to create the appearance of success, while presiding over failure:
- Moving the goalposts
- Declaratory legislation
- Government as public relations
- Data collection
- Complex structures, procedures and language.
In particular, from the chapter Declaratory Legislation:
A 2008 survey by Sweet and Maxwell found that Margaret Thatcher’s Government introduced an average of 1,724 new laws every year. That rose to 2,663 under Tony Blair and in the first year of Gordon Brown’s regime the annual total reached 3,071.
This frenzied legislative activism can only be ignored by ordinary people. It puts me in mind of Jamie Whyte’s article Am I a Criminal? I haven’t a clue:
This Government has relentlessly undermined the rule of law by its vague legislation and constant meddling
Jill concludes that “The only answer is a significant reduction in state control” — I could not agree more.
Read more
Via Selling illegal DVDs not illegal because of blunder – Telegraph:
People who sell DVDs and videos illegally, including pornography to children, cannot be prosecuted because of a legislative blunder dating back 25 years, it has emerged.
…
The blunder centres on the 1984 Video Recordings Act which the then British Tory Government should have notified with the European Commission but failed to do so.
…
The technicality means the act is unenforceable and urgent action is now under way to notify Europe and re-enact the legislation.
I am amazed that coverage of this Whitehall farce does not ask the obvious question: how did it come to this, that our legislature cannot make a law in our own land without notifying an overseas power, and an unelected one at that?
In the meantime, how is it possible that reenactment will take three months? Should we not recall Parliament, pass the Act again and then debate how Parliament and the British system of government has come to this sorry state?
With all the debate about quangos, I wondered whether anyone had made the case against them based on the Rule of Law.
And so I found and added to my reading list Political power and democratic … – Google Books:
There is a sense in which quasi-government diminishes the role and authority of Parliament as well as its more obvious erosion of local government. In practice, the quango state removes layers and ares of policy-making and action from the parliamentary — and public — gaze. The absence of a constitutional framework and the informal and secretive nature of its policy processes blocks scrutiny and parliamentary and public debate about policy goals and outcomes. The government can co-opt and mobilise all manner of bodies, including private companies, consultants and advisers within the domain of quasi-government to carry out major tasks, such as industrial re-structuring, training and employment policies. Parliament has no oversight over the government’s creatures, their interests and processes, as they operate under cover of ministerial discretion. Indeed, even the government itself often has no direct control over them.
I am reminded of a quote attributed to Harold MacMillan:
We have not overthrown the divine right of kings to fall down for the divine right of experts.
And of the following campaign poster from the Conservative Party Archive (shelfmark 1929-31):
Via Treasury announces ‘bonfire of quangos’ to save taxpayer millions – Times Online :
Liam Byrne, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has written to Whitehall departments demanding an urgent review of all quangos to assess which can be abolished, merged with other bodies or taken back directly into their ministries. A number of quangos appear to have overlapping remits, including some covering skills, law and order, environment and transport. “The Ministry of Justice alone has 200 quangos,” said a Treasury spokesman.
This would be a good time to read the slim book Bureaucracy. The book is online here and my review is here.
Speaking to the Treasury Committee of MPs, Mr King dealt a serious blow to Mr Brown’s political strategy of casting the next election as a choice between “Tory cuts” and “Labour investment.”
In the Budget in April, Alistair Darling set out plans to borrow an extra £700 billion over five years, taking the national debt to £1.3 trillion.
Simply paying the interest on that borrowing will soon cost more money than the Government spends on schools or defence.
via Mervyn King warns that spending cuts and tax rises are needed – Telegraph.
The Policy Exchange has advised the next government that it must be prepared to make radical and immediate cuts to spending plans or face a serious risk of a full-scale sovereign debt crisis. In a new paper, it has also shown that only a third of the impending surge in government spending can be traced back to measures intended to combat the recession, with the rest going on increased budgets for ballooning government departments.
via UK ‘needs emergency Budget’ – Telegraph. The Policy Exchange report is here:
Government spending is growing far more quickly than in other countries, and faster than in previous recessions, think tank Policy Exchange today warns. A new report finds that the surge in spending is not being driven by the recession.
At most, 6% of the increased spending is going on public works, and just over a third is due to the rising cost of social security or debt. Instead of “investment”, most of the increase is due to a decision to spend more on consumption.
“A decision to spend more on consumption” — that is, borrowing to fund present expenditure: plainly unsustainable.
Why we need a general election now:
Gordon Brown’s government was in disarray on Tuesday night as Jacqui Smith, home secretary, led a wave of resignations ahead of what is expected to be a dismal performance by Labour in this week’s local and European elections.
Gordon Brown’s government has suffered a shock defeat in the Commons on its policy of restricting the right of former Gurkhas to settle in the UK.
MPs voted by 267 to 246 in favour of a Lib Dem motion that all Gurkhas be offered an equal right of residence.
Tory leader David Cameron backed the Lib Dem motion to scrap rules which leader Nick Clegg called “shameful”.
Mr Brown’s first significant defeat as PM came despite last minute concessions being offered to rebel Labour MPs.
An explanation of the financial crisis for everyone:
Linda is the proprietor of a bar in Cork. In order to increase sales, she decides to allow her loyal customers – most of whom are unemployed alcoholics – to drink now but pay later. She keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans).
Word gets around and as a result increasing numbers of customers (still mostly unemployed alcoholics) flood into Linda’s bar. Taking advantage of her customers’ freedom from immediate payment constraints, Linda increases her prices for wine and beer, the most popular drinks. Her sales volumes and profits increase massively.
… read on: You’re having a laugh ….. seriously?: The Credit Crunch Explained.
Three themes appear often in explanations of the crisis:
The roots of the crisis from a United States perspective:
To understand today’s financial crisis, you must understand the long history of government interference and subsidies for housing and housing debt.
Since the New Deal, the federal government has passed law after law attempting to shape U.S. housing markets. The U.S. today compels banks to lend to risky borrowers, skews the cost of housing debt and benefit of housing-related capital gains through the tax code, and operates several enormous government lending programs and taxpayer-backed corporations.
…
1933 – President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issues an Executive Order banning the private ownership of gold coins and bullion under penalty of imprisonment. The government is released from redeeming dollars for gold which makes inflating the money supply much easier.
(This post is a precis of Huerta de Soto’s Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles pp650-653, presenting an argument which was famously expounded by von Mises in Socialism.
Among the young idealists who were attracted to socialism after the Great War, who came through these arguments expressed in full to understand that they “had been looking for improvement in the wrong direction”, was F A Hayek, Author of The Road to Serfdom, Nobel Prize winner and proponent of the denationalization of money.)
To attempt to coordinate society through coercion is an intellectual error: it is impossible for an institution to obtain the information needed to establish social coordination by decree. There are four reasons:
These are the arguments developed at length by von Mises in Socialism. Von Mises demonstrates the impossibility of socialism and of effective state intervention in the economy. His thesis explains theoretically why the socialist economies of the Eastern Bloc failed. It also explains the growth of the tensions, maladjustments and inefficiencies in western economies which have led to our present crisis.
Crisis is the inevitable outcome of the application of coercion and privilege by government, which systematically worsens social maladjustments, hinders the creativity of entrepreneurs, distorts economic information, encourages irresponsibility, corrupts individuals and encourages the underground economy.
Read more
New president Barack Obama’s $3.55 trillion budget serves notice that if you thought government couldn’t get any bigger or more intrusive, think again. The budget “represents real and dramatic change,” according to the President. But really the Obama plan is just more of the same, with the federal government expanding its role in education, foreign policy, energy policy, health care, and environmental policy.
via The Lies are Sacred, Blessed by Government – Doug French – Mises Institute .
“They meant well” by D R Myddelton, published by the IEA, is a tour-de-force of government project disasters. It analyses in detail:
One would have hoped it was redundant to point out that these massive programmes needed to be managed actively, but the author finds it necessary to indicate the three essentials for managing projects in progress:
From the conclusion:
If everyone ‘meant well’, who was to blame: politicians, civil servants, scientists, engineers or managers? No, I think what was mainly to blame was the post-second-world-war collectivist zeitgeist — the visceral distrust of markets, partly based on ignorance, which I call ‘agoraphobia’.
… An important lesson from these projects is that governments do not understand product markets where customers are free to choose…
…My own ’solution’ is simply: let the market work. To proceed with more large government quasi-commercial projects would be a recipe for further expensive disasters. Governments that lose thousands of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money should not easily be excused on the grounds that ‘they meant well’. Those of us who advocate laissez-faire (which I define simply as ‘government non-interference’) mean well too.
Despite my aerospace engineer’s emotional attachment to Concorde, I thoroughly recommend the book.
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