A gradual tightening
Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark succinctly summarises the only real obstacle to individual achievement in a single line: “the question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”
Fans of Rand (and private sector workers) know that few forces in the world have more stopping power than a government. With its monopoly on violence and its ability to rewrite the rules, government possesses the power to interfere with the private lives of those who live under it even when these persons are willing to abide with the multitude of other laws, regulations and taxes, not all of them fair, to which they are subject. And in the exercise of this power it can be unfair and arbitrary; democracies and tyrannies alike have the power to reduce the efforts of a single person to nothing, to crush him utterly for any reason such a government might choose. Last month brought the news that, as has happened many times in many nations, our government has done exactly that.
By revoking the “very highly trusted” status of London Metropolitan university without providing for any transitional arrangements, the Home Office gives that institution’s current and future students a mere 60 days to either find an alternative sponsor or to self-deport. These are not very good options.
Those who would see themselves as members of Middle England, whether working or not, will doubtlessly be delighted by the news. In a Daily Express piece calling for further crackdowns on illegal immigration three days ago, the London Met debacle received an Express mention; and though I do not ordinarily recommend the Express to my friends and readers at the Adam Smith Institute, as it is illustrative of Middle English sentiment to foreign migration, I will make an exception on this occasion.
Adorning its article with a photograph of our deadly serious-looking Home Secretary, Theresa May, the Express trumpeted the government’s efforts to “block sham marriages,” restrict access to credit and mobile phone contracts for over-stayers, deport prisoners, capture abscondees, and track down failed asylum seekers. All of this, the Express tells us, is part of a broader initiative to reduce “net migration” to “tens of thousands” – a stupid, relative concept with no economic basis and, in any case, a move which both industry and academia have vociferously opposed.
But the relevant point for present purposes is the conflationary link, where the Express betrays that it really views all immigrants to be the same, found at the article’s very end: “no decision has been taken on whether to strip London Metropol itan University of its right to take foreign students” – legal immigrants, who jumped through all the hoops, filled in all the forms, paid the fees, and at any rate who should commence studying at London Metropolitan university in a month. As a consequence of government action, these young people will be made to suffer a serious, life-altering disruption in the course of their lives. Given competition for university places and this very late stage, without rapid government intervention to fix its own mistake, individual remedies will not be readily found.
The structure of the Express’ article reveals, and is illustrative of, the struggle for establishment that immigrants in the UK face: whether legal or illegal, well-off or poor, studious and energetic or lazy and dull, immigration is a political question, and immigrants – current and future – are the collateral which unpopular governments post to offset the risks from their other political liabilities. As a political football, therefore, all immigrants are equal and equally problematic.
Take my own case, for example. A few years ago, after finishing my undergraduate, I had planned to finish graduate school and continue my leave under the “Highly Skilled Migrant,” or the “Super-Immigrant who is rich, pays taxes, and is not entitled to benefits” visa; however, before I could do that, the regime was revoked and replaced. I joined its replacement, the “Tier 1 – post-study” visa, and jumped into “Tier 1 General” class as soon as I could.
Clearly some other people had the same idea as, shortly afterwards, “Tier 1- post study” was abolished and the income, available funds, and educational thresholds for T1General extensions were increased. When this failed to stem the tide of rich, well-educated, taxpaying people remaining the country, the income and funds criteria for extension were increased yet again, and new applications in T1 General were abolished entirely. What was once a quiet and predictable legal environment under Blair has been in complete disarray and subject to constant chance ever since there was a threatening opposition in parliament; over the course of six years, the immigration rules to which many legal immigrants have been subject have been changed, in a fundamental way, at least six times, possibly more. Each change presents new challenges, and more failed applications as migrants cannot meet the higher thresholds. And this, our government tells us, is an indication of success.
I am not alone. From my immediate circle of friends, I can think of a half-dozen examples of well-educated people on the road to success and high taxation whose lives have been hampered by the veritable orgy of recent legislative activity concerning migration. One investment banker I know decided, after a few years in exile in her home country, to return to Britain; she is now tethered to her current employment due to the abolition of T1 General, whereas if she had come but two years earlier, she would have been able to choose her employment freely. Another banker I know who was similarly tethered quit the country and returned to Texas rather than stay tied to a job she despised; still others are prevented from obtaining jobs for which they are qualified, as the administrative burden to smaller companies of complying with Tier 2 visa sponsorship is, for many, absurdly high.
Bankers, with their relatively high incomes, have it relatively easy – others are less lucky. Take, for example, the couple who had to fly abroad for a quickie wedding – planned, but two years early – in order to get around the fact that Tier 1 had tightened up. Or the self-sufficient lighting designer and AV technician who could not start his own business and legally remain after finishing an Open University course, despite having all the resources and connections to do so. Or the law graduate who, being supported by her parents, not eligible for (or taking) benefits while working as a paralegal, self-deported when she could not afford to jump into Tier 1. The young lawyer who tried to get a mortgage, but was rejected by the bank because the credit risk of a time-limited visa was too high due to the high probability of rule changes or non-renewal. The finance professional who, on account of the fact that her visa allowed her only to work in Scotland, was ordered to leave (which, being a law-abiding American, she promptly did) after being successful enough to find work in London in spite of the recession.
I could go on. What is clear from my view in the trenches is that the government’s obsessive tinkering with the rules is hugely disruptive and damaging to business and individual lives, and it must end.
It pains me greatly to have to hyperlink again to the website of the Express, doubly so as the article concerned features Tory MP Douglas Carswell – one of my favourites – arguing in favour of further tightening, in this case by “[insisting] on medical insurance” for all incoming migrants. For certain sorts of immigrants this is a proposal I would support (there are some stories I would like to tell to support this point which, for a number of reasons, I cannot). What is not made clear is whether the enterprising young things – the university students who are destined to pay taxes and NI and work in banks and law firms, for newspapers and insurance companies, in your productive industries as well as in enterprises of our own – would have to buy independent insurance, too.
If this were the case, I should object, since including bright and promising migrants in such a proposal would be, in economic terms, a silly thing to do. Tighten the noose if you wish, but this is the 21st century and we are young, we are hungry and we are mobile. If this country tries to stop us, there are plenty of others that won’t.
Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark succinctly summarises the only real obstacle to individual achievement in a single line: “the question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”
Fans of Rand (and private sector workers) know that few forces in the world have more stopping power than a government. With its monopoly on violence and its ability to rewrite the rules, government possesses the power to interfere with the private lives of those who live under it even when these persons are willing to abide with the multitude of other laws, regulations and taxes, not all of them fair, to which they are subject. And in the exercise of this power it can be unfair and arbitrary; democracies and tyrannies alike have the power to reduce the efforts of a single person to nothing, to crush him utterly for any reason such a government might choose. Last month brought the news that, as has happened many times in many nations, our government has done exactly that.
By revoking the “very highly trusted” status of London Metropolitan university without providing for any transitional arrangements, the Home Office gives that institution’s current and future students a mere 60 days to either find an alternative sponsor or to self-deport. These are not very good options.
The organic roots of oaks and free markets
‘David Cameron will announce tomorrow that the oak tree has been dropped and the torch of freedom will once again be the Conservative party logo.’ So wrote Benedict Brogan for a tongue-in-cheek Telegraph blog. Brogan’s mirthful explanation for this ‘back to the future’ change?
The move is being promoted by Downing Street as a “decisive” switch that demonstrates the urgency with which the Prime Minister is advancing the cause of free enterprise and a more robust grip on the economy.
Hold on, Mr Cameron, good news! The cause of free enterprise can still be championed by the Tory party’s venerable cultural symbol. As a traditionalist, for example, you will appreciate these inspiring lyrics from ‘Heart of Oak’ to rouse your industrious compatriots:
’Tis to honour we call you, as freemen not slaves, / For who are so free as the sons of the waves?
Fortunately, too, free market economics is synonymous with the organic principles of generation and growth which should be at the heart of conservatism, modernised or otherwise. For in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith praised the ability of entrepreneurs to struggle and triumph against adversity:
The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition, the principle from which publick and national, as well as private opulence is originally derived, is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in spite both of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest errors of administration. Like the unknown principle of animal life, it frequently restores health and vigour to the constitution, in spite, not only of the disease, but of the absurd prescriptions of the doctor (II.iii.31).
In his 1974 Nobel Prize lecture, Friedrich von Hayek denoted this undirected, up-from-below phenomenon as ‘spontaneous order’:
...in the social field the erroneous belief that the exercise of some power would have beneficial consequences is likely to lead to a new power to coerce other men being conferred on some authority. Even if such power is not in itself bad, its exercise is likely to impede the functioning of those spontaneous ordering forces by which, without understanding them, man is in fact so largely assisted in the pursuit of his aims. We are only beginning to understand on how subtle a communication system the functioning of an advanced industrial society is based—a communications system which we call the market and which turns out to be a more efficient mechanism for digesting dispersed information than any that man has deliberately designed. [emphasis added].
Hayek’s discomfort with the ‘power to coerce other men’—whether for good or ill—and what Smith called ‘the extravagance of government’ and ‘the greatest errors of administration’, is another reason why a return to the Tory torch (factual or otherwise) may be a bad omen, especially if it were meant to signal, in Brogan’s mirthful rendition, ‘a more robust grip on the economy.’
As Smith cautioned, ‘What is the species of domestick industry which his capital can employ, and of which the produce is likely to be of the greatest value, every individual, it is evident, can, in his local situation, judge much better than any statesman or lawgiver can do for him.’ If a decision must be made in favour of either the individual or the State, the presumption must always be made for the wisdom of individual entrepreneurs.
The stateman, who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it (IV.ii.10).
So, oak or torch, modernised or traditional, the Conservative party must always stand for individual initiative in economic endeavours, cognisant of the government’s circumscribed role in supporting such entrepreneurship. And that’s no laughing matter.
Why we don't want government providing things
One of the things that seriously annoys me about the political and economic discussion in the UK is the way in which a huge logical leap is made at times. I think we'd all be getting along a great deal better if people stopped making what I regard as this error.
There are indeed many problems in this world. There is a subset (smaller than some seem to think but still extant) of such problems that are amenable to government action. Without too much cynicism there's even a subset that can be alleviated rather than worsened with such state action.
However, the error is that because this is true therefore the state must actually carry out the action. This is not necessarily true: the state might be better to regulate, legislate, finance, rather than actually provide directly whatever it is.
Think of food for the poor for example. We can think of a number of different ways that this problem, of the destiitute starving in the streets, could be solved. We could legislate that every household must feed the hungry- that shops must give away some portion of their stock- that there should be special ration shops with special stocks- or we could do what we actually do which is give poor people money to buy the food they need from the usual infrastructure that the rest of us use.
Other places don't make quite the same devisions:
Ram Kishen, 52, half-blind and half- starved, holds in his gnarled hands the reason for his hunger: a tattered card entitling him to subsidized rations that now serves as a symbol of India’s biggest food heist. Kishen has had nothing from the village shop for 15 months. Yet 20 minutes’ drive from Satnapur, past bone-dry fields and tiny hamlets where children with distended bellies play, a government storage facility five football fields long bulges with wheat and rice.
By law, those 57,000 tons of food are meant for Kishen and the 105 other households in Satnapur with ration books. They’re meant for some of the 350 million families living below India’s poverty line of 50 cents a day. Instead, as much as $14.5 billion in food was looted by corrupt politicians and their criminal syndicates over the past decade in Kishen’s home state of Uttar Pradesh alone, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
The theft blunted the country’s only weapon against widespread starvation -- a five-decade-old public distribution system that has failed to deliver record harvests to the plates of India’s hungriest.
Direct government provision of a good or service might not be either as efficient or equitable as simple government financing of access to such a good or service. Those doing the providing on the government dime might turn the system supposedly making provision to the public into a system providing for the providers.
Actual government provision of goods and services might not be the best way to provide things. Even something as vital and humane as food for the starving might best be provided through tax financing aiding, working with, normal market processes.
So remind me, what is the argument that the British State should and must provide health care, education, housing, rather than just aiding with the financing for those that need such aid? Why should teachers and nurses be employed by a Minister, why does everyone shout about building more council or "socially owned" housing rather than concentrating on more cheap ones?
If anyone proposed the Indian method of feeding the poor for the UK we'd shoot them. The proposers that is, not the poor, however much it would alleviate their future suffering. So how have we ended up making the same logical error in all these other areas?
No war on motorists? Tell that to the world outside Central London
“Left wing think tank wants higher taxes” is a bit of a “dog bites man” story, but the IPPR’s call of higher fuel duty was spiced up by some eye-catching facts about the costs of getting about. Contrary to popular perception, they found that the price of motoring has fallen slightly in real terms in the last ten years. Ipso facto, they conclude, the “war on motorists” is a myth. “Compared to users of public transport,” says the think tank’s associate director, Will Straw, “there is no war on motorists.”
This rather depends on how you define a war and who you think is the aggressor. A breakdown of the figures (see graph below) reveals that bus and train passengers have seen fares increase well above the rate of inflation since 1987, but the costs of taxing, insuring and fueling a car have gone up by even more. If average motoring costs have not risen in real terms, it is thanks to the impressive decline in the cost of buying a vehicle which has consistently beaten inflation and is now lower in both real terms and—quite remarkably—also lower in nominal terms (as of 2010). Globalisation, a genuinely competitive free market and a relative lack of state interference have reduced prices and brought some rare good cheer to drivers.
The same cannot be said of the other costs shown, all of which are dictated by the state (in the case of fuel duty and car tax), or by cartels (OPEC), or by the half-state/half-cartel hybrid of the public transport industry. Fuel and car taxes have gone through the roof by any standard, and while motorists could be forgiven for viewing cheaper cars as a small mercy to take their minds off the looting, the IPPR sees it as justification for taking a little more.
There is no doubt that the pockets of bus and rail passengers have also been systematically picked over the past 25 years, but as high as the prices of bus and train tickets are, they do not represent the true cost of public transport. Local public transport was subsidised by the taxpayer to the tune of almost £5 billion in 2010/11, and close to £8 billion was taken from the public purse to spend on the railways (IPPR, p. 14). No government has yet come to terms with the fundamental problem that public transport is inherently expensive and can only be sustained by forcing those who don’t use it to cough up while making their customers pay twice.
The IPPR helpfully points out that motorists can reduce their expenditure by driving less. As a piece of advice, this is rather like telling commuters to save money by not travelling at peak times; technically true so long as one ignores the essential nature of the journey. They appear to be of the belief that motoring is still the preserve of wealthy Mr Toads, pootling around for fun on a Sunday afternoon, whereas private cars are by some distance the nation’s primary mode of transport.
This metropolitan bias is in evidence when the report notes that 25 per cent of the population do not have access to a car. The IPPR describes this figure as “surprisingly low”. Out here in The Provinces, we might regard it as surprisingly high. A look at the numbers reveals just how marginal public transport is to much of the population outside central London. Nationally, the average household spends £21.60 a week on petrol, diesel and motor oils, but only £2.80 a week on rail and tube fares. The average household spends more on spare parts and accessories for their cars or vans (£1.80) than they do on bus and coach tickets (£1.50). To put it still more starkly, we spend more money on lease cars than we do on bus journeys. As should be obvious, this is not because bus and train fares are especially cheap, but because the average household is considerably less likely to buy them than they are to fill up their tank. (If all these figures seem low, it is because many people use only public OR private transport, and some may not use either very much.)
For the majority of the population who rely on their cars to get about, the miracle of consumer capitalism has alleviated the pain of escalating taxes by providing cheaper vehicles, but it strains credibility to suggest that they enjoy favoured status in government policy. Whether one looks at fuel tax, car tax, bus fares or train tickets, no one escapes from the squeeze. I would be tempted to say that war is being waged on us all were it not for the fact that the cost of motoring is kept artificially high while the cost of public transport is kept artificially low thanks to the way it is subsidised by everyone—motorist, cyclist and pedestrian—whether we like it or not.
President Obama's blue chart of death
The American Enterprise Institute's James Pethokoukis posts an updated version of the Obama jobs chart. Note the green dot — what the unemployment rate would be like without the early retirements and other people who, in one way or another, have decided to stop looking for jobs altogether.
Of course a stimulus fan would say that this simply proves that the recession was deeper than was initially believed. That's circular logic, but is surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) popular among the upper levels of the Obama Administration. Another interpretation would be that the stimulus made things worse, as I mentioned this morning. The third possibility, compatible with either of the other two, is that this sort of prediction is inherently bogus. Maybe we can't predict the future — and should stop acting like we can.
No nanny no more
Britons do not like nanny. Despite decades of her telling us what foods we should eat, how much we should drink, and what lifestyles are safe, a majority of us wish she'd stop. This is the finding of a new poll commissioned by the ASI. Its full findings are well worth a look, but here's a snapshot.
71% agree that "It's up to me, rather than the government, to secure myself a job," and only 7% disagree.
51% agree that "I think most of my retirement pension will probably come from a pension fund I have saved myself," compared with the 22% who disagree.
Housing divides on party lines, with a majority of Labour voters agreeing that government has a duty to provide it, and a majority of Tory voters disagreeing.
Should government provide advice on what foods people like me should eat and how much to drink? 48% disagree and 22% agree.
The statement that "Politicians and Civil servants are well-equipped to make personal decisions on my behalf" finds only 9% in agreement, versus 65%who disagree.
Would young people like to run their own business? Of the Of the 18-24 age- group, 49% agreed, versus 27% who did not. Among 25- 39 year-olds some 44% agreed that they would like to do this, versus 30% who disagreed.
It seems that despite all the nannying, the British prefer to make their own decisions, and young people might well be out there creating the new businesses for our future prosperity.
The Olympics and public choice theory
I view the Olympic Games as a prime example of a Public Choice dilemma. It has grown from being a relatively small-scale, privately-funded and organised event into a behemoth supported by a large bureaucracy, state-enforced monopolies (so-called ‘exclusive sponsorship rights’) and vast amounts of state subsidies. Public choice theory coherently explains why countries are so keen to host the Olympics and why such rent-seeking behaviour occurs at the expense of the public good.
Concentrated special-interest groups benefit from the Games both directly and indirectly: the IOC bureaucrats with their junkets, Olympic organisers in the host nation such as LOCOG and the London Legacy Development Corporation, athletes who raise their profiles and win sponsorship deals, corporations and construction firms who benefit from contracts and via advertising opportunities and so on (one might also say that the Olympics represents a classic example of Corporatism, an unholy alliance between Big Government and Big Business).
Politicians also gain from being an Olympic host nation from a Public Choice perspective. On the one hand, they may benefit directly from the lobbying that inevitably takes place from the special interest groups. On the other hand, there is clearly an expressive interest at stake – one might rather aptly call this the ‘bread and circuses’ approach, developed particularly by Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomansky. Much of the public support for the Olympics is given on the basis of an expressive interest rather than an instrumental one and politicians of all stripes seek to benefit from the public mood of good cheer and enthusiasm that do – genuinely – seem to surround the Games.
The instrumental arguments for the Olympics are much less convincing. Much emphasis has been placed on the legacy, particularly in terms of the sporting infrastructure and the ‘regeneration’ of run-down parts of northeast London. It is highly doubtful, given the level of success of previous Olympic legacies and the general record of government spending and top-down regeneration how successful this will be. Moreover, there can be no doubt that the transfer of resources via taxation of £9billion (or more?) represents a similar problem to all other government spending in that we cannot know what use the resources would have been put to, had they been left in private hands. What we can tell is there will be a significant deadweight cost, not only because of the usual deadweight costs of collection and reallocation but also because the Games themselves represent a one-off, deadweight cost with no tangible benefits.
From a Public Choice perspective, however, it is clear that the concentrated interests of particular groups who might benefit from the spending - certain people in Newham, sportsmen and women, the bureaucrats responsible for administering the legacy and so forth – have benefitted instrumentally from the Games at the expense of the broader public (especially Londoners) who have suffered a loss. That this loss is small per capita is precisely the reason why opposition to the games has not proven more substantial. Moreover, as opponents to the bid and then the spending had no real means of expressing their opposition, even in the unlikely event that they were willing to do so, given the small per capita cost involved. This is, however, exactly how the Public Choice process works and we must not construe such tacit consent as legitimising such spending relative to the Olympics or any other areas of public policy.
The time bomb keeps ticking
Last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal (US edition) carried an essay by David Wessel, author of the forthcoming book, “Red Ink: Inside the High-Stakes Politics of the Federal Budget”. It provides an excellent breakdown of the budget crisis looming over the US federal government.
Perhaps the most striking fact contained in the essay is that 63 percent of the US federal budget is on auto-pilot: “Social Security benefits get deposited. Health-care bills for Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor are paid. Food stamps are issued. Farm-subsidy checks are written. Interest payments are dutifully made to holders of Treasury bonds.” In technical jargon, this is non-discretionary spending – unless Congress actively stops it, such spending continues every year without the need for any further authorization. Throw in an ageing population and inexorably rising healthcare costs, and it becomes clear that such spending is only heading in one direction – skywards.
What is most worrying is that the US federal government currently only funds 66 percent of its spending through taxes. For the rest, it has to borrow. And while that may be bearable in the short-term, as nervous investors around the world pile into US Treasuries and push bond yields to record lows, it spells big trouble in the medium- to long-term. Every cent the government borrows now means more debt interest payments – and even more non-discretionary spending – in the future.
For an idea of just how bad it could get, take a look at this 2010 working paper from the Bank of International Settlements (BIS). Its projections indicate that without a policy shift, US public debt would rise to more than 400 percent of GDP by 2040. That would translate into annual debt interest payments equaling 23 percent of GDP – well in excess of total federal tax revenues, which have averaged a little over 18 percent of GDP since the Second World War. Such a scenario is plainly impossible: the US would be forced to default on its obligations long before things reached that point.
The policy implication here is straightforward enough: non-discretionary spending programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid need urgent, drastic reform to put them on a more sustainable footing. The problem is politics: neither party is really serious about dealing with this fiscal time-bomb. Politicians’ electorally-driven time horizons are just too short to permit the sort of significant, structural changes that are required. Perhaps a rise Treasury yields will force the issue. Maybe another showdown over the debt ceiling will do the trick. But I won’t be holding my breath. As Detlev Schlichter puts it, when it comes to debt, governments around the world are determined to “extend and pretend”. Sadly, it is only a matter of time before reality catches up with them.
Tom Clougherty is managing editor at Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank with offices in Los Angeles and Washington, DC. This article was originally published at reason.org.
New at AdamSmith.org: These Olympic Games are nothing to be proud of
The London 2012 Olympic Games have been a triumph of wastefulness, nannying government, corporatism, deceit and incompetence. Our writer Lawsmith asks, how could our political class have gotten it so wrong?
The first and only time I've met Boris Johnson was when we were on our bicycles at the traffic light at the bottom of King William Street in the City. I stammered: "Uh, good morning, Mr. Mayor." Play it cool. After a brief (and awkward) exchange, he pushed off, away from my sight and into eternity.
Months later, as the tangible effects of the Olympic Movement's month-long occupation of central London started to make themselves felt, my thoughts once again turned to my cycling buddy. After reminding yourself for a moment that Boris once gave some constructive criticism to the city of Portsmouth by saying it was "too full of drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs," and that barely two months ago he referred to the BBC – which, like that brainchild of the Blairite Labour Party, the 2012 Olympics, is state-run – as “corporatist, defeatist, anti-business, Europhile and… overwhelmingly biased to the Left”, I take the view that BoJo -- currently the Games' biggest cheerleader -- would be doing one thing, and one thing only if he were in opposition (if he were so inclined).
He would tear the government, the media, and anyone even remotely associated with bringing the Olympics here to shreds.
In his absence, others have tried. Most have failed to make a dent. Dominic Lawson, writing for the Independent, fired the opening salvo of reason against Olympics fever last month — writing a fairly broad-brush piece which covered most of the general criticisms of this circus (cost, inconvenience, armed police), he scored his best points at the ‘leftist’ BBC's expense: "[news coverage of the Games] really does make one feel as if this is North Korea,” he wrote, “rather than a country supposedly characterised by individualism and nonconformity."
The (il)logic of Sunday trading laws
George Osborne’s announcement that laws banning Sunday trading will be suspended for 8 weeks is a welcome one, and he is right to point out that this will be beneficial to business. It will be convenient for consumers and create jobs for the unemployed. But he should be making them permanent.
Many arguments to protect Sunday trading laws have rested on the notion that they protect worker’s rights. Opponents of repeal have stated that employers will force existing labourers to work extra days. This assumes that the supply of jobs is fixed, and longer shifts must be filled by the same stock of employees. But there is no reason this should be the case - more shops being open for longer would mean more employment opportunities, particularly of benefit for students in full time education. This would allow them to gain experience and supplement their income. When youth unemployment figures are looking ever more depressing, now seems a better time than any to support a permanent suspension of the law.
A revolution in internet shopping (which is available 24 hours, every day) has put bricks-and-mortar shops on an increasingly uneven playing field. What the internet can not offer, is the sort of convenience that the local high street can. Claims that we already have enough time to shop will fall upon deaf ears amongst those who work unconventional hours and can find it hard to get shopping done around their jobs. Those with less flexible schedules, often the sort of things these laws are said to protect against, are the greatest victims in this case. Reform can mean that customers can tell businesses when they want to shop, not politicians.
If there is to be a loser from these changes, it will be small, independent stores. This may be the case, but that does not justify the government stepping in to protect them, when consumers would prefer to do business with larger stores, which often offer a better range of products at lower prices. What smaller stores can offer on a Sunday is a shopping experience. While other forms of entertainment are not prohibited under trading laws, shopping is, and this is to the detriment of those who enjoy shopping as an experience.
Many, including the Adam Smith Institute have been arguing to let shops open on Sundays for decades (one report is nearly as old as I am). Politicians should not allow law to be dictated by scripture or by those who wish to put protecting the currently employed before the needs of those who have no jobs at all.
