Zoe gets horribly confused about the difference between charity and taxes

An alternative headline for this would be since when did Zoe Williams become a libertarian? For she's managed to get herself horribly confused over the difference between charity and taxation.

It is impossible to devise good tax policy on the basis that reasonable people don’t want to pay it and have to be either coerced or conned into doing so. .... You cannot collect tax unless you believe in tax; likewise you cannot pay tax gladly unless you love it, not for the useful stuff it might buy but in itself. This is seen as a political impossibility. But why? Tax is no more and no less than an investment in the future.

What is being described there is charity, not tax. And any good libertarian would rub their hands with glee at the idea that we should all be paying only what we voluntarily wish to pay for the good of our souls and of the society at large. And it's also a goodly part of the classical liberal point that if taxation were lower then there would be more charitable giving as we all gladly would alleviate the suffering of our fellows.

Quite how this got published in The Guardian I'm really not sure. For she really is insisting that we should be forking out only that amount that we love to: and let the coercive aspects of the State demanding money from us go hang. At which point, if that really happened, quite a lot of us would have to pack up and go home, job done.

Think of it another way. I'd certainly be happy enough to pay, voluntarily, for, say, food banks which feed the hungry in their time of need. Come to think of it, where I actually live, I do (and the fire and ambulance service in fact). It's the paying for the State professional class that reads The Guardian that I'm not so keen on the State forcing me to do. So, let us bring on Zoe's system forthwith! Tax is only what we will voluntarily pay, as with charity. All we're left with now is the thorny question of what on earth Zoe would do for a living....

Wikipedia: Another answer to the tragedy of the commons

The tragedy of the commons is an oft-cited theoretical example by those who advocate government intervention. It postulates that, without regulation and intervention, public goods that everyone has an interest in using will actually not be provided (or at least not efficiently or to an optimal quantity) if contributions are voluntary. The logic is that everyone’s dominant course of action is to essentially just refrain from contributing because, if one contributes and others don’t, then the public good is not provided and their payoff is worse than if they don’t contribute and the public good is not provided. Additionally, if they don’t contribute and the public good is provided, the individual’s payoff is higher than if they do contribute and the public good is provided. In this sense, a society full of rational, self-interested individuals (as this scenario represents it) could actually lead to a harmful or sub-optimal outcome for society in the long run. However, Wikipedia is a prominent, empirical illustration of how the tragedy of the commons does not always hold since the website runs purely on private donations. Periodically, the site’s owners ask for donations to maintain it and keep it running ad-free. They claim that if everyone who read their plea paid £3, then fundraising would be over within an hour – nice in principle but not everyone pays up in practice. Some, inevitably, end up contributing more than others and many don’t contribute monetarily at all.

The following chart lists the percentage of donators corresponding to each reason for donating to Wikipedia, according to Wikipedia.

Conversely, here are the reasons cited for not donating:

Of course, one might argue that the knowledge found on Wikipedia is unreliable. However, a study published in Nature found that Wikipedia “is about as accurate on science as the Encyclopaedia Britannica”. Of course, Encyclopaedia Britannica attempted to refute the study. Access to a vast store of monitored, reviewed information via Wikipedia is an incredible asset to humanity and this asset is made possible entirely through voluntary contributions (whether this be in terms of time spent editing or money contributed) rather than through the coercive dictates that people are so often subject to.

Furthermore, it’s interesting to note that if you were to, hypothetically, replace “donating to Wikipedia” with “tax” in the second bar chart, you might find a lot of people agreeing with the affordability, with unwillingness to pay tax based on principle or their belief that it would not be used properly. Similarly, people may want to contribute time to society rather than pay money to preserve it.

In our rapidly changing world, voluntary contributions to fund public goods may become feasible sooner rather than later.

What is this objection to private charity?

One of the more difficult things to fathom about a certain strain of thinking is the antipathy to private charity:

In fact, you may be astonished to learn the extent of children’s rights to which we, as a nation, are signatory. Under article 26 of the UN convention on the rights of the child, children have a “right to benefit from social security”. According to article 27, they have “a right to a standard of living adequate to their physical, social and mental development”.

There is scope for argument within those terms but, by any measure, an adequate standard of living includes the right not to be hungry. So the fact that more than 300,000 children are using food banks – supplied, bear in mind, not by a state agency but by a charity, Trussell Trust – puts the UK squarely outside its UNCRC obligations.

By what appalling misfortune has that hunger been allowed to fester and left to non-state agencies to deal with?

A detailed answer to that would come from the Trussell Trust itself. Which points out that 83% of food banks have reported that benefit sanctions have led to more people being referred for emergency food. Private charity is here compensating for the incompetence or malevolence of that state and its agencies.

A more general answer would be that what is this insistence that rights, whatever they are, must be supplied by the state? The right to a family life does not mean that David Cameron has to find me a comely wife does it? The right to free speech does not mean that Ed Miliboy must purchase me a newspaper. In fact, we don't care in the slightest who provides whatever it is that enables a right to be enjoyed: only that that right can indeed be enjoyed. And so it should be with food.

It's simply astonishing that people are regarding food banks as some bad idea. They are instead a glorious example of the way in which us humans are sociable, societal, beings who really will go out of our way to help our fellow. What the heck is wrong with Burke's little platoons anyway, why this insistence that what people will happily do unprompted must be replaced by bureaucrats?

Food banks are stepping in where governments have created a mess

Mention the growth of food banks, with nearly a million users this year, and you conjure up a Dickensian image of a country on the breadline, chronically unable to feed its children, and a heartless government that is cutting benefits and quite willing to let them starve. The reality is very different. First, food banks are a great achievement of private charity. They flourish in the world's wealthiest countries – like the US, UK, Canada, and New Zealand – precisely because people in rich countries can afford to be charitable.

Second, around 60% of those using food banks in the UK are once-only users. In around 30% of cases, that is because of a hiccup in their social benefits – a sanction imposed because they haven't turned up to an interview, perhaps, or a delay in benefits starting after someone loses their job. This is not chronic 'food poverty' – it is people facing temporary crises, much of it due to the welfare bureaucracy.

Third, the rise in food banks started long before the government started reforming benefits. Nearly all food banks in the UK are run by a single Christian charity, the Trussell Trust. As it gets more experienced and slicker, more care workers have been referring people to them, and more people know about them. So the numbers of users have risen.

Fourth, remember that the UK spends nearly £100bn a year on welfare, around one-seventh of all government spending. Working age welfare costs each family in Britain about £3,000 a year. And since the best form of welfare is actually a paying job, it is good news that unemployment has fallen so quickly in the UK.

Some Church leaders want the government to get involved in the food bank movement. That is a grave mistake. Government money will come with delays and with strings. It will discourage private giving – why should individuals contribute if the government is doing it? And government interventions are most of the problem in the first place. World food prices have risen 25% since 2007, due in part to biuofuel subsidies that have taken land out of food production, and the EU Common Agriculture Policy, which adds 13% to Britain's household food bills. And family budgets are further squeezed by the 11% surcharge on electricity bills, destined for uneconomic wind turbines.

No, government would do better to get out of the way of private charity. It is only in the last few years that food banks could even advertise their existence. The benefits bureaucracy is notorious – which is why Iain Duncan Smith's efforts to simplify the system are so important. And we need more realistic food regulation so that shops have a better option than simply throwing out food that is unsold, and so that consumers do not think food is unusable just because it is past its sell-by date.

Once again, private charity is stepping in where governments – of all colours – have created a mess. All strength to them.

This is a bit of cheek from Tessa Jowell, isn't it?

One of the reasons that we around here aren't in politics is simply because we've not got the cheek to be a politician. This doesn't seem to be true of Tessa Jowell (who, we might recall, resigned from her family to spend more time in politics) as she shows here:

Now Labour MP Tessa Jowell is launching a campaign to cap excessive charges on money transfers, saying remittance companies have become “the international Wonga”, referring to companies that charge exorbitant interest rates on short-term loans. She says the “transfer tax” can add £20 to a payment of £100, especially in the case of money sent to sub-Saharan Africa. Fees to countries in Asia and Latin America are also high.

“Many people who are trying to support friends and family abroad are being ripped off. Instead of their hard-earned money going towards medical bills, books or to cover the cost of failing crops, huge amounts are being creamed off by the giant money transfer companies who have cornered the market,” said Jowell, who will launch a campaign to “Stop the Transfer Tax Rip-Off” in Brixton on Sunday.

We're almost rapturous in our applause for the effrontery of this. Tessa Jowell has been in Parliament since 1992. She has held ministerial office in a government that increased the costs to such money transfer firms by tightening up all of the money laundering and know your customer rules. Now that she's leaving Parliament she's setting herself up to run a campaign to undo the evil effects of those very laws she voted for while in Parliament.

It's quite a cheek really, isn't it? Earn your pension crust by campaigning against the things you did while still employed by the electorate?

No, no, we here at the ASI do think ourselves quite brazen, have no illusions about our own chutzpah, but we really cannot rise to this sort of level. Which is, as above, why we're not politicians. Just can't do it.

Just send money!

In an extremely rude thank you letter, Horrid Henry tells his Aunt Ruby that her (admittedly terrible) birthday present is rubbish and she should, next time, send him cash. Beneficiaries of anti-poverty programmes could be forgiven for saying the same thing to welfare authorities. Their schemes are expensive to administer, involve grand ideas, social theories and detailed plans, and yet their results are substantially worse than letting people live where they want to, or just sending them cash to alleviate their bad circumstances. A new paper from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, by authors Laura Abramovsky, Orazio Attanasio, Kai Barron, Pedro Carneiro and George Stoye and entitled "Challenges to Promoting Social Inclusion of the Extreme Poor: Evidence from a Large Scale Experiment in Colombia" only adds to this literature. We can only be glad that the Colombian authorities thought to do a randomized and controlled pilot study, although perhaps they should have waited for its results to come in before rolling it out generally!

We evaluate the large scale pilot of an innovative and major welfare intervention in Colombia, which combines homes visits by trained social workers to households in extreme poverty with preferential access to social programs. We use a randomized control trial and a very rich dataset collected as part of the evaluation to identify program impacts on the knowledge and take-up of social programs and the labor supply of targeted households.

We find no consistent impact of the program on these outcomes, possibly because the way the pilot was implemented resulted in very light treatment in terms of home visits. Importantly, administrative data indicates that the program has been rolled out nationally in a very similar fashion, suggesting that this major national program is likely to fail in making a significant contribution to reducing extreme poverty. We suggest that the program should undergo substantial reforms, which in turn should be evaluated.

Really we ought already to have known this. Anti-poverty schemes seem smart but rarely or never report successes in randomised controlled trials unless they are cash handouts or removals of restrictions that were stopping people from generating wealth themselves (e.g. immigration liberalisation). But, as slow as academic progress works, it does seem like every extra contribution helps push the debate in the correct direction.

Unsurprising: Migrants give back to new communities (often more so than natives)

Migrants in high-income economies are more inclined to give to charity than native-born citizens, this Gallup poll finds.

[High-income economies are referred to as "the North"/ middle- to low-income economies are referred to as "the South".]

From 2009-2011, 51% of migrants who moved to developed countries from other developed countries said they donated money to charity, whereas only 44% of native-born citizens claimed to donate. Even long-term immigrants (who had been in their country of residence for over five years) gave more money to charity than natives–an estimated 49%.

Even 34% of migrants moving from low-income countries to high-income countries said they gave money to charity in their new community – a lower percentage than long-term migrants and native-born citizens, but still a significant turn-out, given that most of these migrants will not have an immediate opportunity to earn large, disposable incomes. The poll also found that once migrants get settled, their giving only goes up.

Migrants seem to donate their time and money less when moving from one low-income country to another; though as Gallup points out, the traditional definitions of ‘charity’ cannot always be applied to developing countries, where aid and volunteerism often take place outside formal structures and appear as informal arrangements within communities instead.

It’s no surprise either that the Gallup concludes this:

Migrants' proclivity toward giving back to their communities can benefit their adopted communities. Policymakers would be wise to find out ways to maintain this inclination to give as long as migrants remain in the country.

This is yet another piece of evidence that illustrates the benefits of immigration for society as a whole. (It also highlights the insanity of Cameron's recent proposal to curb the number of Eurozone migrants coming to the UK). Not only does the UK need more immigrants “to avoid a massive debt crisis by 2050,” but apparently it needs them for a community morale boost as well.

This is a very strange argument against foreign aid

And it's coming from a very strange place, too, the Jubilee Debt Campaign. These are the people who tell us that we should just write off the debts of the poor of the world, both countries and people. At times and in places they've certainly got a point but this is still a very strange argument:

A sharp rise in lending to the world’s poorest countries will leave them with crippling debt payments over the next decade, a few years after many had loans written off, a report has warned.

The Jubilee Debt Campaign said as many as two-thirds of the 43 developing countries it analysed could suffer large increases in the share of government income spent on debt payments over the next decade.

Coinciding with the World Bank’s annual meeting in Washington, the anti-poverty campaigners accuse the international lender and other public bodies of “leading the lending boom” to poor countries without checking how repaying debts will divert resources from cutting poverty.

What they think they're saying is that we shouldn't be lending these people this money, we should just be giving it to them in the form of grants. What they're actually saying is that the money shouldn't be going there at all. For look at what they do say: money is going to these poor countries, yes, but the returns from it going there aren't enough to pay the interest bill on that money.

Now, we can play all Teenage Trot and shout that so what? But we should perhaps be adult and remind ourselves that prices are information. These loans are already at concessionary interest rates meaning that risk is pretty much disregarded. All that is included in the rate is the time value of money. And if investment in these countries cannot even cover that time value of money then this sort of spending is a really bad thing to be doing. It's value destruction upon a global scale.

Converting it all to grants doesn't change this: investing money in something that cannot even cover the cost of simple interest (not even risk adjusted interest!) is still that value destruction, whether we charge the interest or not.

No, this does not mean that we here think that the poor should be left to fester in their squalor. The above though does mean that simply shipping off money isn't the right way to be going about things: for as we can see no value is being added. The correct answer is that emergency aid should still exist: doesn't really matter where you get your moral precepts from feeding the starving is still worthwhile. However, that developmental aid, that aid that is being wasted simply because it cannot even pay back its own value, should perhaps cease. To be replaced by the one thing that has lifted hundreds of millions, if not billions, up out of poverty in recent decades. We should be buying the things made by poor people in poor countries. And the best thing we could do for those poor is to tear down the barriers we still impose upon ourselves stopping us from doing ever yet more of that.