Politics isn't a good way to do things

Sometimes politics is a necessary way of doing things, but it’s still worth remembering that politics is a bad way of doing things. The necessary part meaning that sometimes politics is merely the least bad way of doing things.

Take investment. Thurrock council took upon itself the task of investing. This did not work out well:

A Tory-led council has admitted a series of disastrous investments in risky commercial projects caused it to run up an unprecedented deficit of nearly £500m and brought it to the brink of bankruptcy….which reveals it has lost £275m on investments it made in solar energy and other businesses….Thurrock had become one of the most indebted of all English local authorities in recent years after borrowing £1.5bn – 10 times its annual spending on local services – to enable a string of investments in solar energy and other businesses…..including hundreds of millions lent to companies owned by businessman Liam Kavanagh to invest in 53 solar farms….. borrowing cheaply from the Treasury and investing….

They’ve managed to borrow at below commercial market rates, invest in one of the country’s boomingest industries - solar is nine times cheaper than other forms of electricity generation isn’t it, while it still gets paid full market rate? - and by doing so lose some vast portion of the cash?

OK, good, so government doing the investing on behalf of wider society isn’t something that works then.

We’ve also George Monbiot shouting at us again:

The three sectors that appear to be most responsible for the collapse of ecosystems and erasure of wildlife are fossil fuels, fisheries and farming. In 2021, governments directly subsidised oil and gas production to the tune of $64bn (£53bn), and spent a further $531bn (£443bn) on keeping fossil fuel prices low. The latest figures for fisheries, from 2018, suggest that global subsidies for the sector amount to $35bn a year, over 80% of which go to large-scale industrial fishing.

Let us take fishing as our example there. This is an area where government and politics is necessary. Simply because we face a commons problem. As Elinor Ostrom gained her Nobel for: inshore fisheries, with their low number of resource exploiters, can largely be left to social pressure and management among that small number of exploiters. This is not a system that works at larger scale, on high seas and deep ocean fisheries. There the number of would-be exploiters is just too large therefore we’re in Garrett Hardin’s world of the commons tragedy. This requires political action - either the creation and allocation of property rights or detailed regulation.

As it happens we know the solution here. Regulation to insist upon - large - no fishing areas and individual transferrable quotas for fishermen in those remaining areas which may be fished. The reason for the private property, rather than direct regulation, approach is that the most profitable stock levels in a fishery are well above the sustainable population levels in that same fishery. People make more money by leaving a higher than necessary to merely replicate bioload because then it’s easier to catch fish that way.

But our problem is that while we’ve known that this is the solution for a couple of decades now politics is remarkably, pathetically, weak at delivering it. It’s really only the Australasians and some parts of the Alaska fisheries that have. The entire EU - which insists that fisheries is one of those central (no, don’t laugh) competences - both knows this and also insists that it’s not the system to be used.

Politics isn’t a good solution even when it’s the necessary one.

We could even have a glance at emissions:

Free pollution permits worth €98.5bn were given to energy-intensive sectors including steel, cement, chemicals and aviation from 2013-21. This is more than the €88.5bn that the EU’s emissions trading scheme (ETS) charged polluters, mostly coal and gas power stations, for their CO2 emissions.

In theory cap and trade should be as good as a carbon tax. There are differences - cap and trade produces a known emissions level at an unknown price, tax produces a price but an unknown outcome. But they should be equally effective - given the correct price - at reducing emissions. We here have long favoured the tax route because it means less politics. Politicians have long preferred cap and trade because it means more politics. As we can see more politics makes things worse - for the politicians never have been able to bring themselves to do the necessary, charging for all emissions permits. There’s far too much fun and power to be gained by listening to the importunings of those who would have them for free.

Politics is just a terrible way to get things done. Therefore we should reduce our use of politics as a method of getting things done to that irreducible minimum of where that politics is the least bad method of dealing with the real problems the universe throws at us. That is, if there’s any other possible solution at all, other than politics, then use that instead.

Who knows? If we restrict the remit of politics enough, strictly confine the political process and politicians to only those things that absolutely must be done through that process, we might end up with decisions informed by the occasional damn clue.