Adam Smith Institute

I wonder if we'll ever get an apology from Friends of the Earth for this? Soaring food prices, the felling of forests, rising CO2 emissions: all their fault.

Another surprising emissions finding: taking the car is better than walking. 

This banning of plastic bags: do the people proposing it really understand what they're doing? 

Is this a group of charities lobbying for change? Or is it the government paying a group of charities to lobby the government for change? 

The Laffer Curve part II: the second video from Cato on the subject. 

Gun buybacks and amnesties: are any of them any more effective than this? 

And finally, which Nobel Laureate rhymes with which food?

46. "Getting everyone's DNA on file would allow us to track down criminals and protect society."

If we wanted simply to track down criminals and protect society in the most efficient way, we would watch everyone all the time, listen in on their every conversation, constantly record all their movements, and know everything about them it was possible to know. Criminal activity would be difficult, given this approach, but no doubt clever criminals would find news ways of concealing their activities.

Even though it would undoubtedly be efficient, we don't allow it because we don't want to live in that kind of society. We want a private domain in which we have space that is only for ourselves and those we choose to share it with. The state has no business in that domain.

We treat people as innocent until proven guilty. We do not start with the assumption that all people are criminals, if only we had enough information on which to convict them. Only those who transgress the law, or who give grounds for reasonable suspicion, forfeit the right to that private space and prompt the state to enter it to protect the rest of us.

Our DNA is private information. It not only tells uniquely who we are, it can be used to tell where we have been, and in some cases what we have been doing. The state has no right to such information without good grounds for suspicion. It is more information than it can be trusted with. DNA tells even more than that, however, it tells of our genetic traits, something of our abilities and potential, and the conditions and diseases to which we might be prone. There is no way we want this information in the hands of a body we put in place to serve our interests. It would give it more power than any authority can be trusted with.

It seems the likelihood is growing that the Green-House-Gas (GHG) alarmists' political lobbying may result in final overkill. One of the more serious indications of this is the defection of big business, who had previously sought new opportunities in eco-business but not expected stubborn fundamentalism.

With eco-lobbyists raising the carbon cut targets relentlessly, investment in the mitigation industry looks increasingly risky or outright futile. That’s why even some of the most committed international companies behind the scenes are looking for alternatives to mitigation. When ten of the largest US companies and four environmental groups had formed the U.S. Climate Change Partnership (USCAP) early last year it “was seen as a watershed in corporate environmentalism.” Now it seems some of these are getting disenchanted and place investments in policies that clearly undermine carbon cutting efforts:

Three high-profile USCAP members—General Electric, Caterpillar (CAT), and Alcoa (AA)—also sit on the board of the Center for Energy & Economic Development (CEED), an Alexandria (Va.) group formed in 1992 that opposes regulations on greenhouse-gas emissions. In April, 2007, CEED's board unanimously signed a position paper that, in part, described as "draconian" one federal climate bill that would require a 65% reduction in emissions by 2050.

Too much politicization, as has been the case in global warming regulation stampede, rarely pays off:

Other business groups are also stepping up opposition to global warming regulations. At the end of 2007, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce launched a television commercial that lampooned carbon reductions, depicting a family sleeping in full winter garb, a man cooking eggs over candles, and people jogging to work in business suits, while the narrator intoned: "Climate legislation being considered by Congress could make it too expensive to heat our homes, power our lives, and drive our cars."

Our latest report, Unfair Trade, got lots of media coverage over the weekend. It was in the Sunday Telegraph twice (here and here) and in the Mail-on-Sunday. ASI representatives appeared on the BBC World Service, BBC News 24, BBC One, and Radio 4's Today Programme.

There was more in the Mondays, with the report popping up in The Guardian, The Independent, The Scotsman and The Daily Telegraph. Tom Clougherty wrote a piece for The Scotsman's "Burning Issue" and respected commentator Janet Daley wrote about the report in her latest Telegraph column, titled "Forget Faritrade – only free trade can help the poor".

Correcting the statistics behind the current hysteria over the costs to the nation of drinking. Things really are not as we're being led to believe.

The BMA is not being entirely consistent either. But then there's always been some amusement in the idea of an anti-alcohol campaign being run by ex-medical students.

Caculating the benefits or not of a basic income system. More work needed but this is a start. 

Harriet Harman shows that an expensive education may take you a long way: but it won't necessarily educate you. 

An economist visits Cuba. More exploration of the place.  

Paying £1 million on a 50 p accumulator? It's a rip off! Should be £1,000,000.14 at least! 

And finally, yes, this is the Irish entry to Eurovision. Stay tuned to see if our Continental friends have a sense of humour.

This story about Debbie Hirst and her cancer treatment has even hit the NY Times. To recap, the NHS does not pay (upon the grounds of cost effectiveness) for the use of Avastin, a breast cancer treatment. Ms. Hirst decided to pay for it herself and then was told that if she did so she would also have to pay for all of the other treatment from the NHS, something that of course she had already paid for once through the taxation system. Alan Johnson said:

Patients “cannot, in one episode of treatment, be treated on the N.H.S. and then allowed, as part of the same episode and the same treatment, to pay money for more drugs,” the health secretary, Alan Johnson, told Parliament.

“That way lies the end of the founding principles of the N.H.S.,” Mr. Johnson said.

Should a parent who hires an after-school tutor for his child be barred from sending the child to the public [i.e. State] schools?

Some people like to think of health care and education of basic human rights. Maybe they are. But they are also normal goods. That is, the income elasticity of demand is positive. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the right cost-benefit calculation for providing the good depends on the income of the consumer. Achieving both efficiency and equality in the provision of these goods is impossible.

45. "Speculators are parasites who produce nothing."

Speculators have had a bad press. Along with landlords, corn merchants, and tax gatherers, they have been the whipping boys of demagogues. They are often thought of as drones who "buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest," adding nothing of value in the process. Typically the speculator buys up something they think will be in short supply later, and can therefore sell for more than they paid.

Yet the speculator helps to smooth out uncertainty. The farmer who plants in the spring does not know what prices might be like when the harvest is in. He might prefer a guaranteed price than face that uncertainty. Someone who buys the crop now offers a sure price; the crop might sell for more than that, but it could also be less. The speculator can carry that risk instead of the farmer, and profit from it if he is right.

This is what speculators do; they handle risk. They live and trade by being able to call the future more accurately than others. They give people certainty and security now, in return for a higher return for themselves in the future if they are correct. Speculators can lose. The goods they buy now at a guaranteed price might plunge in value later. Unlike many farmers and merchants, the speculator can carry those losses.

Speculation in currencies is similar. A manufacturer planning to sell in another currency might prefer the certainty of a fixed value, rather than take chances on the future exchange rate. The speculator will sell him that currency now, at a price he thinks it will exceed in the future.

As long as speculators are right more often than wrong, they can prosper, and they smooth market volatility in the process. So far from being unproductive drones, speculators actually offer a valuable and skilled service: they manage risk.

It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.

– P.J. O'Rourke

An excellent outlining of the problems with ethanol and biofuels. Of course, our Masters took the decision to insist upon them before they found out anything about them. Par for the course.

As, for example, with the proposed rules about ISPs and their policing of file sharing. Not technically possible. 

Looks like the euro (if it doesn't collapse first) could supplant the dollar as the international reserve currency of choice in the next decade. Not that this actually means very much of course....

How to get around the smoking ban.

A look at the British medical blogging scene. 

When picture captioning goes wrong. 

And finally, an Italian confession and humour in typography. 

John Kampfner has recently been thrown out resigned as the editor of the New Statesman. My assumption is that even the highly partisan readership of that magazine got  bored of being offered inaccuracies of the following sort:

It is strange to remember that a Labour government has presided over the phenomenal transfer of wealth and assets into the hands of the very rich.

I could understand if he said a transfer of resources from the productive, private, sector to the less productive State one, for taxation and government spending have indeed risen over the New Labour years. But a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich? How does that work then?

Leaving aside the sarcastic point that the poor, by definition, don't have any wealth worth taking because, by definition, they're poor?

A requirement for this to be true would be that the poor now have less wealth (and we should distinguish between wealth, a stock, and income, a flow) than they did ten years ago.  There's no evidence that this is in fact true: quite the contrary, every level of society is now wealthier than they were ten years ago. So there has been none of the transfer that he complains about.

What is true is that of the growth in wealth in the past decade more of it has gone to the top of the distribution than was formerly the case. But this is a function of the way in which the benefits of growth are distributed, not a transfer from one group to another. And even there it's hardly phenomenal: in 1999 the top 1% had 34 % of the wealth in 2003 they had, err, 34% (adjusted for housing, and yes, I'm cherry picking).

I've no objection to someone complaining about the distribution of newly created wealth (I might disagree but it's a legitimate concern) but I do have an objection to someone insisting that if some have become richer then others must have become poorer: that simply isn't true, the economy and the wealth it can create are not zero sum games. All can benefit, as they have been, rather than more for some having to mean a transfer to them from others of a set amount. 

Now we've put him straight all we need to work out is why this guff is appearing in The Telegraph rather than tucked away in a magazine no one reads. 

44. "Business should be forced to be socially responsible."

People in business have moral obligations to others, just as teachers and lift operators and everyone else does. Nothing about the activity excuses them from these, which include behaving in a responsible way to others, and respecting their rights, too.

Business people have the additional burden which trust imposes. They engage in transactions and contracts, and have a moral duty to keep their side of the bargain. Of course they have a legal duty as well, but that is not why they behave honourably.

They already perform services to society by making goods and services available, by creating employment, and by contributing to society's maintenance by paying the taxes and levies it imposes. Some suggest that they have the additional obligation of contributing to charities and the arts, to funding neighbourhood community schemes, and to supporting causes they deem worthwhile.

Some businesses engage in such activity to boost their public relations and their reputation. If being seen to do such things makes them sell more of their product, these are legitimate business actions, calculated to improve the financial position of the company. It can be good business practice to maintain excellent employee and community relationships.

People invest in companies, lending them money in order to generate a yield from it. It is a company's duty to use that money with due diligence for the purposes for which it was lent to them. If they misapply it to themselves, we rightly castigate and even prosecute them. If they apply that money to causes they approve of, perhaps because it makes them feel good, this can be a misuse of funds lent to them in good faith. It was not lent to them to support good causes, however noble. The lenders could have done that themselves. If it aids the business it is a valid use, otherwise it is not.

Yes, tax competition does pose problems for politicians who buy votes with other people's money. Tim Worstall points out on the GI site that "if people are able to pay lower tax rates elsewhere then they might just leave and go and do precisely that." Thus the presence of more tax-attractive places restrains the big spenders. More to the point, though, as Tim emphasizes, is that tax competition brings choice and with it the opportunity for people to satisfy different preferences simultaneously.

Some prefer the greater State services (however incompetently delivered) that higher taxation brings, there are even those who prefer greater regulation. Excellent, let those who desire such things have them. And thus the point and value of having competition in such tax and regulatory jurisdictions: people get to choose which they prefer.

The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State.

– Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995),