This craze for organic stuff is terribly dangerous you know

As we all know the internet was originally built so that we could propitiate Bastet by sending cat pictures to each other. So thus a picture of a cat.

But there is another reason for this image, which is to show quite how dangerous this obsession with organic materials is. For someone deciding to use organic kitty litter, instead of the required inorganic, might just lead to the closure of one of the world's radioactive waste depositaries. At a possible cost of $7.5 billion. To say nothing of the costs of climate change if we all stop using nuclear power as a result of being unable to get rid of the waste. Which is, when we look at it, quite a high cost of someone trying to go organic.

The background is that when you've got certain solutions containing radioactive particles you want to make sure that they're not going to dry out. For if they do they might go bang: and bangs with radioactive material are something that we'd rather enjoy avoiding. One of the things that can stop thing bangness is the use of kitty litter:

Nitrate salt solutions can ignite when they dry out – which is why it’s tricky working with nitrate solutions in the lab and why you need to make sure they don’t dry out, something many a chemistry student has found out the hard way. So you need to stabilize nitrate solutions before they dry out, or prevent them from completely drying out. Traditional cat litter is made from various inorganic geologic silicate minerals like diatomaceous earth, zeolites or bentonites, materials that are excellent in absorbing and stabilizing chemical species like nitrates, ammonia, and urea. This is the very reason we use minerals for cat litter. Unfortunately, someone working with this waste, before it was to be shipped to WIPP, used a new “green” cat litter, made with materials like wheat or corn. These organic litters do not have the silicate properties needed to chemically stabilize nitrate the correct way.

One of the barrels of waste, that had already been put into the depositary, has gone bang as a result of this new and unapproved ingredient. That's not too bad: the correct use of robots means that it is potentially feasible to clean up the mess. The problem is, well, how many other damn fool hippes have we had filling up all of the other barrels?

There's undoubtedly a time and a place for desiring things to be organic: that Welsh hill lamb or that grass fed beef are certainly worth chasing across the plate. But there are also times when the obsession becomes rather dangerous. This would appear to be one of them.

Isn't this nice? Crimea will adopt English law

This is an interesting little snippet of news. Crimea is going to adopt English law:

Lawmakers in Moscow are working on a draft bill that will offer tax and other incentives to stimulate exports, according to Savelyev, the minister for Crimea. Businesses there will operate under English commercial law rather than Russian legislation to attract foreign investment, he said.

Obviously they're not adopting English electoral law, nor that on referenda and the like. But it's an interesting observation they've made: that part of what generates a thriving and entreprenuerial economy is that English commercial law. I very much doubt that they'll get it right mind, but at least it's a start. For the cornerstone of that English law is that as long as there's no law against it then you can do as you wish. This isn't something that accords well with the pysche of those who have ruled Russia in the past it has to be said.

Back when the Soviet Union was newly dead Anatoly Sobchak, the Mayor of St Petersburg (and Putin's mentor) decided that you no longer needed any permits from City Hall to start up in business. Just send us a letter telling us what you're doing so that we can set up the tax system for you. The next day the office was thronged with those seeking the permit that they'd need not to have any permits. The idea of really needing no permits seemed not to be believable.

Two further things: having English commercial law will be all very well but you do also need to have English courts and the English enforcement of those laws. And the second is that wouldn't it be so lovely if our own rulers recalled the basis of our legal system which is they get to tell us what we may not do but then they have to stay silent on what we may.

Liberalism day is 16th June

Monday 16 June has been chosen as Liberalism Day. The idea is to recapture the world 'liberal' from the American left – who, with their extravagant plans for government spending and taxation are far from Liberal in the true sense. As Milton Friedman put it in his 1955 article, Liberalism, Old Style:

"Liberalism, as it developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and flowered in the nineteenth, puts major emphasis on the freedom of individuals to control their own destinies.... Liberals favoured free competition at home and free trade among nations. They regarded the organisation of economic activity through free private enterprise operating in a competitive market as a direct expression of economic freedom and as important also in facilitating the preservation of political liberty."

That is all a far cry from American 'liberalism'. as the term has been used since the 1930s. That is not about free competition and individuals controlling their own lives, but about the New Deal era of public works, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and direct market interventions like the Community Reinvestment Act (which kicked off the whole sub-prime mortgage debacle) and Barack Obama's recent, forlorn, efforts to completely reconstruct the healthcare sector, not on market principles (which it sorely needed) but according to the political conception of himself and his party.

Liberalism is a perfectly good word, but it does not actually mean anything like all that. it is about time that we Liberals took back out own word, without having to quality it by the foreword 'Classical' or the afterwords 'in the European sense'. Check out the website, and tweet the hashtag #LiberalismDay on or around 16 June.

It's amazing what we can learn from nature really

The latest news on the climate change front is that those melting glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland actually, by melting, aid in reducing the effects of climate change. Which is an interesting little thing we can pick up from our observation of the natural world around us. The reason is that the water, as it gushes over the rock underlying the ice, picks up a certain amount of iron. And we also know that there are areas of the oceans which do not have enough iron to sustain life (much of the deep ocean is actually a "desert" in that is has next to no life at all). So, iron in meltwater meets iron deficient areas, plankton blooms and some of that sinks to the ocean floor to, in time, become the sort of rock that Beachy Head is made out of.

Huge amounts of dissolved iron currently being released into the oceans from melting ice sheets might cancel out some of the negative effects of global warming, it has been claimed. A UK team has discovered that summer meltwaters from ice sheets are rich in iron. This can cause an increase in growth of phytoplankton - which capture carbon, they say.

This has all long been known to be possible, this is just a confirmation that it happens, through natural factors, more than we previously thought it did. But this poses another little problem. Chatting around to various scientists it's easy enough to find out that research has been done into artificially boosting the amount of iron that can be dumped into the oceans to create these blooms. And that it would be, in the words of one "ludicrously cheap" and could sequester, for geological time scsales, some 1 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions each year. Or about twice current UK emissions.

Quite seriously all that would be needed is a few ships tossing some ferrous sulphate over the side, something that any number of industrial processes would be delighted to give you for free.

Which leaves us with our little question, or perhaps two of them. Given that, from the political rhetoric at least, climate change is the most pressing problem of our times, a threat to our entire species, why was the last research into artificial boost to ocean iron levels this done a decade ago? And further, why would it be illegal to simply go out and do this? Who wants to stop a cheap and viable solution to at least some part of climate change and why?

Some things about equality that Piketty should know

Dr Arthur Shenfield (1909-1990) was a distinguished scholar and a valued member of the ASI's Academic Board.  In 1981 he published "Myth & Reality in Economic Systems," based on a lecture series.  The essay "Morality and Capitalism" is very pertinent today, given the recent claim by Thomas Piketty that capitalism must lead to widening inequality.  It is worth reading Shenfield, not least for his pithy turns of phrase:

Thus it ill becomes socialists to assail the inequality of capitalism for, once achieved, socialism produces inequality more gross and obnoxious than anything observable in a developed capitalist country.  However, since there is some merit in a wide degree of a fairly equal condition insofar as it does not hinder desirable incentives of varieties of life styles, it is important to consider which kind of system is most likely to achieve it. The clear answer is capitalism.

Socialism ostensibly pursues equality but produces inequality.  Capitalism pursues liberty but in the process also reduces inequality.  We have already noted that in capitalism wealth comes to those who serve the masses.  Thus in capitalism the inequality of condition is little more than the difference between the Cadillac and the Chevrolet, the Parisian couturier's model and the excellent mass-produced copies of it, caviar and the equally nutritious cod's roe. In pre-capitalist societies it was the difference between the mansion and the hovel, between silks and rags, between exquisite luxury and frequent famine.

In socialist societies it is between the luxurious country villa and the miserable worker's flat, between the special shops carrying high-quality goods imported from capitalist countries reserved for the Party elite and the endless queueing for the shoddy products of socialist industry imposed on the masses.

Richard Murphy's excellent argument for a lower overall tax burden

We here at the ASI have to be very selective in our mentions of Richard Murphy, the crusading tax campaigner. His normal output is such a target rich environment that we could spend entire working lives correcting his errors and misapprehensions. But there are times when he manages to, through some form of serendipty perhaps, get things right and it's worth our pointing to those happy events when they occur. So it is with his recent observation that, given that the collection of taxes is a burden upon both business and the citizenry then therefore we should work to lower that tax burden:

If, through its neglect, the government forces all the UK’s honest smaller businesses to compete with businesses that HMRC and Companies House are failing to regulate then it inevitably follows that the government are giving an unfair economic advantage to the cheats who do not pay their tax. No wonder as a result that the High Street is being decimated, bar the occasional fly-by-night pop up shop. And no wonder young people cannot find the jobs and apprenticeships they need with local employers when those honest enough to invest in jobs for those young people are likely to be competing against rogue traders who do not charge VAT on their sales and pays cash in hand wages.

As he points out that collection of taxation leads to the decimation of the High Street, to the young, the future of the nation, being wasted on the scrapheap of untrained unemployment and no doubt to many other horrors as yet unmentioned. The solution therefore is clearly to reduce that economic birden of those taxes. As we here at the ASI have been saying for some decades now: reducing the burden of taxation is a desirable thing in and of itself of course, but also because it will make the nation richer.

No doubt Murphy's next missive will include the evidence that he's got this point: for no one could, as he has pointed out, note that tax is a burden without then arguing that the burden should be reduced.

Could they?

Gary Becker was right, part six: The family

Becker introduced the family into economic thinking and economic calculation into family life.  He spotted that a family is a miniature economic system like a small factory.  The basic goods it produces are things such as meals, residence, and entertainment.  The costs of these goods are compounded not only of the costs of their input, but include the time spent on producing them.  Since the family interacts with the wider economy including the place of work, there will be trade-offs between the two.

As real wages at work increase, it becomes relatively less attractive to spend time producing some of the family goods.  Some of these will be outsourced, buying in what was once done at home in order to free time for more valuable activity.  Examples include buying home-delivered pizzas or paying tailors to repair garments that used to be mended at home.  Sometimes people turn to outside institutions such as nurseries and schools to take over some of the activity that was once performed within the household.

Sometimes domestic production will become more capital intensive as work wages rise, with people buying labour-saving machines such as vacuum cleaners, washing machines and dishwashers.  The rise in the value of time at work has made domestic time relatively less efficient without them.  In place of the traditional dichotomy between work and leisure, Becker looked at the switch from more to less time-intensive production of home goods.

Becker noted some of the consequences of the large-scale entry of women into the workforce.  The wages they could earn at work made them less ready to spend as much time on domestic activity such as child rearing and childcare.  This provides an economic interpretation of the widely-observed decline in the fertility of societies as their economies develop.  Becker also thought it lay behind rising divorce rates in advanced societies.

Becker made a major contribution to our understanding of how families allocate time and assign tasks to the various members, so much so that we now routinely attempt to estimate the likely social and domestic impact of ongoing economic developments.

Err, yes, yes, this is the point

There's a very strange comment in the British Medical Journal. One that makes me worry for the ability of some of these doctoring types to quite grasp the point and purpose of the world we live in. They're talking about e-cigarettes, vaping, all that sort of thing, as an alternative to actually lighting up the cancer sticks directly:

However, Gerard Hastings and Marisa de Andrade have a different take on the issue. They dispute e-cigarettes’ effectiveness in smoking cessation, urge caution, and suggest that NICE’s revised guidance may give these untested products implicit approval. They present long term use of nicotine products marketed by big tobacco as commercial exploitation of smokers attempting to quit. Calling for a broader view of smoking than nicotine dependency, they say, “When the only obstacle to progress on preventing the harms of smoking is the user’s dependence, e-cigarettes offer the beguiling prospect of addicted smokers migrating painlessly to safer mechanisms of nicotine delivery.” But without evidence that e-cigarettes work, they conclude, “The tobacco multinationals have leapt enthusiastically into this market; all now have major e-cigarette interests. This is not a consumer movement but the full onslaught of corporate capital in hot pursuit of a profitable opportunity.”

Err, yes, yes, that's the point and purpose of the system. This capitalist/free market hybrid that we have. If consumers decide they quite like something, perhaps it's getting a regular hit of nicotine without hacking one's lungs out 30 years later, then the point and purpose of the free market part is that the consumers get to choose among possible suppliers of those products. And the successful producers get to make a profit out of supplying those things that the consumers would quite like to have. Because, you know, over the past few millennia we've worked out that this is the best manner of encouraging people to produce the things that consumers would quite like to have.

So, a bit of invention, some innovation, sparks off a bit of consumer desire and suddenly potential producers are rushing to market, salivating at the prospect of the hot and cold running Ferrari's that the profits of their efforts will being them.

This isn't an aberration in the system, this isn't something to be decried, this is the whole damn point of it all in the first place.

I'm sure that someone once told me that you've got to be bright to be even accepted into medical training. Is this no longer true?

How to fix the NHS: privatisation

So it appears that we do know how to sort out the NHS then. Privatise it:

Last week, Hinchingbrooke Health Care NHS Trust was named the top hospital in England, based on 12 indicators for ‘outstanding performance in high quality care to patients’. Hinchingbrooke, in Cambridgeshire, had been the only small hospital even to make it onto the shortlist in the 25th year of the annual CHKS Top Hospitals Awards. Yet the expert panel awarded it the coveted first prize ahead of such leading NHS foundation trusts as Guy’s and St Thomas’ and Chelsea and Westminster. But Hinchingbrooke is unique: it is the only NHS district general hospital to have been put under the control of a private company — the Circle Partnership, which is co-owned and run by doctors and nurses. In 2011, Hinchingbrooke was failing, having had three notices served because of ‘inadequate’ results in accident and emergency, colorectal and breast cancer treatment. But when the Conservative-led Government approved Circle’s bid to take over its running, there were dire warnings and howls of fury from the unions and the Labour Party. Unison declared: ‘This is a disgrace, an accident waiting to happen, putting patients at risk.’ Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, protested: ‘This is not what patients, public or NHS staff want.’

From possibly the worst hospital in the country, so bad that not even the State wanted to try and keep running it, to the best hospital in the country. Sounds like we'd do well to do more of this then. You know, more of what works?

There is more to this than just privatisation of course. While we might like to think so markets all the time nothing but markets isn't quite the best way to run the world. It's a useful guide, certainly, that our presumption should be that markets will sort everything out but it's not a strict rule that will guide us to the optmial end state. There are those times when we need to do other things: the trick is in working out what we should be doing and where we should be doing them.

With regards to the NHS it's worth thinking back to the various WHO reports on who has the best health care systems. Note how the ranking is achieved:

The rankings are based on an index of five factors:

Health (50%) : disability-adjusted life expectancy Overall or average : 25% Distribution or equality : 25%

Responsiveness (25%) : speed of service, protection of privacy, and quality of amenities Overall or average : 12.5% Distribution or equality : 12.5%

Fair financial contribution : 25%

There's an awful lot there that deals with the equity, or "fairness" of the system. And a system that is nominally free at the point of service should beat everyone else hands down at that sort of thing. Yet the NHS was only 18th even by these, very favourable to the NHS indeed, criteria for measuring a health care service. The reason being that while the NHS is very equal, it's not all that good. Mortality amenable to health care is dreadful as is speed of service.

So, what could be done to improve matters? Well, one idea is to take a leaf from the book of what the WHO regarded as the best health care service in the world, the French. Which is, roughly speaking (the French use an insurance system but it's so tightly bound with the tax system that it's not radically different) to keep the current tax based financing system but open up provision of services to anyone who wishes to do so. Charities, for profit companies, doctors' and workers' cooperatives (Circle being a combination of those last two), the State itself: why not have a vibrant ecosystem of providers?

As it turns out this is a very good idea: for we've maintained that equity and fairness in the provision of health care but the change in the system, from a centrally planned near Stalinist monstrosity to something approaching a market, has led to those very large improvements in the quality of treatment and the speed and responsiveness with which it is delivered. The best of all worlds perhaps.

Now that we know what we should be doing the only question left is why isn't everyone trumpeting this from the rooftops? It cannot be that some people would prefer health care to remain bad simply for ideological reasons, can it? It would be quite outrageous to suggest that any in our fair land are so blinkered as to do that.

Is the City muddling into oblivion?

One of the most valuable parts of the UK economy, the City, will not be greatly affected by the UK leaving or staying in the EU.  The EU market will continue to be governed by EU regulation.  The UK market may be a bit freer but UK regulators will try to ensure it is not. The rest of the world market will not be affected.  Any greater freedom would be offset by no longer being officially part of the EU lawmaking process.  Unofficially, the UK’s position as a major net importer should secure some attention.

You might expect the City, faced by these troubled waters, to have a realistic long term vision and a strategy to get there.  You would be wrong.  The City believes it has done well muddling through the last 300 years and therefore it should carry on doing so.  Each new EU directive can simply be challenged as it heaves over the parapet.

Furthermore the government has no idea what the City should want in the longer term. And therefore it cannot help. The Chancellor has just demoted the City from the attention of the Treasury Financial Secretary to that of the Economic Secretary.

And even if the government did know, does the UK have enough influence in the EU to bring it, or most of it, about?  Business for Britain claims that the UK was outvoted on every single one of the 55 occasions it voted “no” to new EU legislation.  This is independently supported by Full Fact. Europhiles per contra claim that the UK’s vote was successful over 90% of the time but that is because the UK voted “yes” over 90% of the time.  Maybe the UK has been successful behind the scenes but there is no evidence of that.

Venice was the financial capital of the world in the 18th century just as London is today and for many of the same reasons.  Latterly it failed to see the threats from Paris and Amsterdam (in particular) just as the City is failing to recognise, still less plan to counter, its competitors today.  Future tourists floating down the Thames are likely to be listening to the same stories that those on the Grand Canal hear today.