An uncomfortable truth about state funding
George Monbiot has decided to treat us to his manifesto for a better country. There's evidence, of course there is, of his deep and abiding confusion over how to deal with corporate power: freer markets. He is being both anti-market and corporate power. Something that is really most odd as it is that competition in markets that tempers corporate power. As even a most cursory glance at an economic model will show. It's right there on the first couple of pages of any textbook: that (admittedly mythical, but real economies do tend towards the state) free market is defined as one in which no producer, no corporate, has market power. However, the point to really take issue with is the following:
A sound political funding system would be based on membership fees. Each party would be able to charge the same fixed fee for annual membership (perhaps £30 or £50). It would receive matching funding from the state as a multiple of its membership receipts. No other sources of income would be permitted.
No, just no. For when it's the State deciding who can have the money to be in politics then only those with State approved policies will be in politics. This is the way that the Communists of central Europe controlled those societies. Only state funding was allowed and if you didn't toe the communist party line you didn't get any funding. And it's not just such totalitarian states either. Vlaams Block suffered much the same fate. They were found to have been advocating policies that the establishment did not like and were then cut off from that state funding. The only form of funding allowed to Belgian political parties.
Yes, we are aware that that was all over accusations of racism, no we are not racists nor do we support Vlaams Block. However, if your definitions of freedom and political liberty do not include freedom and political liberty for those you disagree with, however vehemently, then they're not really notions of freedom and political liberty, are they?
State funding would mean that only those political ideas that are approved of by said state will receive funding. And insisting that no other funding is allowed will ensure that unapproved ideas cannot be heard. This applies to the racists, communists, Fascists, free marketeers, socialists, capitalists and the Monster Raving Loonies because that's just what political liberty means. Any and everyone can associate freely, band together to use their voices, assets and votes, as they wish.
When Sam Bowman and George Monbiot agree then we know the End Times are near
Rains of blood will obviously follow, cats will lie down with dogs:
Sam Bowman, deputy director of the Adam Smith Institute, said: ‘The housing shortage does not exist because the private sector doesn’t want to build new homes. The problem is that developable land is so scarce because the planning system makes it so.’
This is clearly and obviously so, as we have demonstrated in these pages many a time. But Sam's not the only person to have got the right end of the stick here. Much to everyone's surprise, George Monbiot has managed it too:
The Scottish government might address the speculative chaos that mangles the countryside while failing to build the houses people need. It might challenge a system in which terrible homes are built at great expense, partly because the price of land has risen from 2% of the cost of a house in the 1930s to 70% today.
Except that it's not quite the price of land which has risen. That's some £10,000 a hectare for reasonable agricultural land these days and that's suitable for 14 dwellings (according to the density rules that the planning system insists upon). That just ain't 70% of the cost of a house. It's land that has the planning permission attached to it that allows you to build 14 houses on it that costs the vast amount: it's the cost of the chitty, not the cost of the land.
But with that slight correction, yes, we are all on the same page here. Housing is expensive and it's the planning system than makes it so. Thus, if we desire cheaper housing then we need to reform ("reform" here being a synonym for "blow up with extreme vehemence") the planning system.
And given that the End Times must indeed be approaching given this convergence of views perhaps we can also hope for a murrain that strikes NIMBYS*, BANANAS** and politicians***?
* Not in my back yard people
** Build absolutely noting anywhere near anywhere people
*** A third and virulent plague upon our society.
George Monbiot doesn't quite get this competition thing
We've George Monbiot telling us all that this market thing, this rampant individualism, means that we all no longer cooperate with each other. Sadly, this shows a terrible misunderstanding of what markets actually are. They are, of course, a method by which humans cooperate with other humans. Competition is simply the method by which we decide who to cooperate with:
Yes, factories have closed, people travel by car instead of buses, use YouTube rather than the cinema. But these shifts alone fail to explain the speed of our social collapse. These structural changes have been accompanied by a life-denying ideology, which enforces and celebrates our social isolation. The war of every man against every man – competition and individualism, in other words – is the religion of our time, justified by a mythology of lone rangers, sole traders, self-starters, self-made men and women, going it alone. For the most social of creatures, who cannot prosper without love, there is no such thing as society, only heroic individualism. What counts is to win. The rest is collateral damage.
If I grow the pears, you grow the apples, then Bob and Jim make the cider and perry from them, then we sell some and drink the rest, are we competing against each other here? Or are we cooperating over the specialisation and division of labour and then trading in the resultant production? It is the latter of course: competition only comes in when we're deciding whether it's you growing the apples for this enterprise or Charlie in the next orchard over. The same with Bob and Jim: there might be competition to see whether it should be Bill and Johnny making that alcoholic nectar, but the end result is still that competition is how we decide who to cooperate with, the actual activities in the market, in the production cycle, being cooperation.
This same is true if it's Danny in Taiwan making the chips, Yue in China assembling them and Rupert in Cambridge writing the operating system that makes the smartphone work. The market is still the method by which we coordinate cooperation among human beings.
Over and above that misunderstanding there is also this from George:
This is the Age of Loneliness.
Well, yes, intellectual who lives in the depths of rural Wales thinks loneliness is an important phenomenon. There is a reason why the intelligentsia of every society tends to cluster in the cities. We might even identify a little bit of excessive projection from the personal to the general in this screed.