Non-redistribution to the cities is known as democracy in action

One of the interesting little points about democracy is that it enables us, collectively, to change our minds. We can think of this without prejudice and potter along with the thought that we, the electorate, are proffered plans and we try them out to see if they work. If they don’t then come the next or subsequent election we get to change our plan and our minds. We can be more cynical - what we would refer to as realist - and decide that given the ghastly mess created by that lot we’ll try the others for all the good that will do us.

But whatever the tone of our explanation that we do get to change course is the very essence of the basic set up:

Ministers have been accused of a “stitch-up” over proposals to redraw the funding formula for councils in a way critics say will redirect scarce cash from deprived inner cities to affluent Conservative-voting shires.

The proposed changes – which include the recommendation that grant allocations should no longer be weighted to reflect the higher costs of poverty and deprivation – come amid increasing concern over the sustainability of local authority finances.

Leaders of urban councils have written to ministers to complain that under the “grossly unfair and illogical” proposals, potentially tens of millions of pounds would be switched to rural and suburban council areas.

That we’ve collectively changed our minds is the explanation for this. For, under the Brown Terror, the system was moved to one of more redistribution from those leafy shires to the grim and bitter inner cities. That might be a good or a bad idea, might be righteous and might be approaching theft. But it is indeed what the duly elected government of the day decided should happen, we having done that electing to do this.

We’ve had more than the one election since then, we’ve put the other lot in charge and thus we seem to have changed our minds upon the desirability - to say nothing of the perceived righteousness or theftness - of such redistribution.

We do actually get to do that, it’s the very point of our having this democratic system. We the people have changed our minds. And?

Abolish the DWP - a failure to understand how Whitehall works

The think tank, Demos, has released a report recommending the abolishing of the Department for Work and Pensions - so the Observer says. The report itself seems a little more modest, suggesting that certain functions be moved elsewhere in Whitehall. It is, sadly, true that it does not suggest entirely closing down some function of government - as we know, the only way to actually reform anything given institutional inertia.

But even the Observer’s reading, close it all down having transferred the functions, doesn’t work, as doesn’t the report’s more modest of transferring some of those functions. For both ideas are missing how such transfers are done in practice.

The same people sit in the same offices doing the same stuff. There’s just a different departmental nameplate outside and up at the airy height of Cabinet anoxia there’s a different person responsible for their errors. That’s how the civil service does these things.

This is exactly why reform of anything civil service is so difficult. We don’t even get shuffled deckchairs nor the band reading from different sheet music, just a different baton waver influencing near nothing.

The actual complaint itself is that the DWP is pretty good at dealing with people unemployed because they can’t find a job, pretty bad at dealing with people unemployed because they’re incapable of a job. We agree it probably is but only because that second is the rather harder task. Quite probably one that no government organisational system will ever be able to deal with.

Lenin died 95 years ago

On January 20th, 1924, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin died. After the February Revolution had overthrown the Tsar in 1917, Germany allowed Lenin and supporters to cross their country in a sealed train. Back in Russia, Lenin with his Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government of Kerensky, and quickly established a Communist dictatorship. He instituted the Red Terror, in which tens of thousands of people were killed or interned in concentration camps. He spoke the language of Marxist Socialism, but his practice was of the ruthless seizure and maintenance of power by violent repression of all opposition. He and his fellow Bolsheviks expected a proletarian revolution to sweep Europe within days, but it did not happen.

Marx had predicted that the most advanced capitalist countries would progress to revolution first, not a relatively economically backward country such as Russia, but Lenin seized power and attempted to impose socialism regardless. The record of the Soviet Communist state he established is now known to have been bloody and brutal. The problem was that central planning does not work. It did not then and does not now. State takeovers of industry and agriculture set production quotas, but in the absence of market information about what was needed, they might just as well have been guesswork. The result was the shortages, queues and rationing that characterized the Soviet economy throughout its existenceWhile party bosses in the Soviet Union, the nomenklatura, could shop in special stores packed with Western goods, ordinary Soviet citizens had to deal with bare shelves, shoddy goods, poor quality clothing and plain food. It was a socialist state that Lenin created, one that lasted 72 years, giving the world an example of what socialism achieves in practice. There have been other examples since, and all have failed. Between them in their 72 years, those states murdered 100 million of their own people, an average of 4,000 every day of every year.

Some young people in Western countries claim to be Marxist-Leninists, but have little knowledge of the history of Lenin’s great experiment. They talk the theory with the honeyed words of liberation and equality, but have little inkling of what the practice achieved. They want to redesign society according to their vision of what it might be, but without taking on board the violence, suffering and deprivation that have accompanied attempts to bring this about.

The physical remains of Lenin were embalmed 95 years ago. It is a tragedy for the world that his ideas were not embalmed with him.

Venezuela Campaign: Chavez' Cuban healthcare fiasco

Hugo Chavez’s apologists have always used his healthcare spending in the early years of his presidency to counter criticism of his appalling human rights and economic records. A cursory google search brings up many fawning articles to this effect.

However, a closer examination of Chavez’s healthcare policy reveals a decidedly ugly picture. Chavez subcontracted a large chunk of Venezuelan healthcare provision to Cuba in a programme called Barrio Adentro, paying huge sums to Cuba for the provision of doctors. Very little of the money goes to the Cuban doctors, the vast majority (96%) is pocketed by the Cuban state. This funding helped Chavez finance Cuban security and intelligence support for his regime. Cuban intelligence has been vital to the Chavista regime’s ability to control both its population and political opposition.

Meanwhile, the Cuban doctors working in Venezuela are close to being slaves. The doctors are not allowed to bring their families with them and are forced to live in terrible conditions. They are only given small stipends with most of their extremely modest salary being held by the Cuban state until they return. They lose that too if they are sent home early by the Venezuelan regime. In 2010, seven Cuban doctors and a nurse who had escaped to Miami sued Cuba and Venezuela for conspiracy to force them to work as “modern slaves”.

Barrio Adentro failed to create a lasting healthcare system in Venezuela and consumed a large part of the Venezuelan budget. Between 2005 and 2014, $29.7 billion (over 50% of all social expenditure) was spent on Barrio Adentro. Most of this money went directly to the Cuban state and much of the rest was lost to pervasive Chavista corruption. By 2014, according to the President of the Venezuelan Medical Federation, 80% of Barrio Adentro’s facilities had been abandoned. Many of these facilities were being used to dump trash or were occupied by the homeless. Of the 20% of clinics still operational most were operated only part-time, often just until 10am. By 2014, after a nine-year programme and tens of billions of dollars, most of the Cuban doctors had gone home or fled to other countries.

Barrio Adentro has also comprehensively failed as a preventative healthcare programme. Since 2010 Venezuela has had the highest teenage pregnancy rate in South America, something that is easily prevented with basic contraception and education. The Health Ministry stopped publishing statistics in 2016, but by then maternal deaths had reached 756 per annum from 346 in 2010, and child mortality had increased by 92% since 2010. Vaccination rates for all the major preventable diseases have collapsed. Vaccination against polio fell from 86% in 2000 to 58% in 2008, and vaccination coverage against tetanus, whooping cough and diphtheria fell from 77% in 2000 to just 22% in 2008. After having been eradicated, diphtheria broke out again in 2017 and is spreading, along with many other previously eradicated diseases.

Essentially, Chavez built Barrio Adentro as a secondary healthcare system based around foreign indentured labour and starved the primary public healthcare system of resources. Following the almost total collapse of Barrio Adentro, Venezuelans are left with a system that is falling apart and unable to provide even the most basic forms of healthcare. Hugo Chavez’s healthcare legacy is a broken system that disproportionately harms the poorest Venezuelans.

More information on the Venezuela Campaign can be found on their website. 

Brexit shows the perils of a planned economy

One of the remain arguments about Brexit is that it’s going to be a terrible disruption to how the world works - or that part of it that concerns the UK that is. It’s also true, unlike some other arguments being bandied about. The thing is though, this is also the argument against a planned economy in the first place.

Think through what that argument is. We’ve got so much work to do, so much administrative gumph to work through, that we’d better not make the change in the first place. It’s all just too complicated, see? Butwhat would a planned economy be? An even greater amount of administrative gumph meaning that we’d never be able to change anything.

Not changing anything in the face of changing technology is also known as progressively becoming poorer than we ought to be. Thus a planned economy is contraindicated on the grounds that it would indeed make us poorer.

Take this about medicines:

Few of the recipients of the millions of prescriptions dispensed every day across Britain are likely to give much thought to the system that ensures that everything from painkillers to niche medicines are available. Beyond the pharmacist’s counter, however, lies a network spanning national borders andcontinents and involving multiple supply chains.

“It all works so smoothly because of the incentives and obligations that are in place,” said one industry insider. “What will be really interesting to see is what happens when it comes under pressure.”

Certainly the doling out of the pills is a largely non-market system in the UK but their manufacture is globalist marketry writ large. Which system is easier to change as technology does? Well, the drug companies do seem to be able to continue to produce new things, it’s the NHS which lags other health care systems in deploying them, isn’t it?

It's true, new technology creates mineral reserves

We’ve been known to be quite vocal around here on the subject of mineral reserves and resources. It is entirely true that the Earth’s endowment of, say, copper atoms is fixed to any useful estimate. That’s not what either mineral reserves nor resources are though, they are an entirely economic concept. Reserves are what we’ve identified and proven - yes, proven - we can extract using today’s technology, at today’s prices, and make a profit doing so. Resources are where we’re pretty sure but haven’t proven to a certain legal standard.

That being so it is quite obviously advancing technology - that being Julian Simon’s Ultimate Resource - which creates mineral reserves and resources.

Even among those who accept the above truth there’s still one point underappreciated. Each step forward in that identification and extraction technology does not apply just to the one reservoir, it gives us an entire new Earth to explore once again:

After billion-barrel bonanza, BP goes global with seismic tech

Buoyed by the success of seismic imaging that found an extra billion barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, BP is looking to take its latest technology to Angola and Brazil.

The software used in the Gulf, based on an algorithm created by Xukai Shen, a geophysicist straight out of Stanford University, led to BP discovering the crude in an area where it had long thought there was none to be found.

Industry experts said the scale of the discovery 8 km below BP's Thunder Horse field, announced last week, marked a major leap forward for deepwater exploration - a costly business known for its low success rate and high risk.

This new technology has not created that one billion barrels. It has done that plus given us the entirety of the planet at 8 km deep to go explore again. And that’s why technology produces so many new reserves, simply because each advance creates new planets to explore.

As an example concerning Simon. His bet with Ehrlich about the prices of commodities, one of which was copper. Over the period of the bet the SX-EW technology came into widespread use. Before this copper was produced from sulfide ores. With it they could be produced from copper oxide ores. The new technology meant we could explore the world again for copper oxide - no wonder the price fell.

Montesquieu was born 330 years ago

Charles, Baron de Montesquieu, born on January 18th 1689, was one of history’s most influential political thinkers. He never needed to earn his living, having inherited the fortune and the title of his uncle, but instead devoted his life to thinking and writing. Born a year after England’s “Glorious Revolution” had deposed the autocratic King James II and replaced him with a constitutional monarch, William III, he was influenced by, and admired, the way the English had introduced institutions that tempered absolutism. He compared this unfavourably with the unchecked power of the French monarchy.

His 1748 book, “The Spirit of the Laws,” set out the notion of the separation of powers, a principle that underlies the US constitution, and which has been incorporated into the constitutions of many other countries. He proposed that the three branches of government, the executive that directs the country, the legislature that makes its laws, and the judiciary that adjudicates its justice, should be separate and independent of each other.

This went beyond the English constitution, which had the executive embedded within the legislature by virtue of its ability to command a majority, and until recent times had the judiciary within the legislature’s upper chamber. Montesquieu’s idea was that the separation of the three branches, in tension with each other, would limit the power of the state, and therefore enlarge the liberties of its subjects.

His book was banned by the Catholic Church, but was widely acclaimed in Britain, and especially among the American colonists. His innovation was the recognition that rulers had to be restrained by checks and balances. Since Plato, people had supposed that power could be checked if leaders were virtuous and acted with restraint. Montesquieu disagreed. Morality does not check power. Only power checks power. And if each source of power is checked by others, it will be restrained. That insight was Montesquieu’s lasting contribution.

The cost to society of a £5 dress is nothing

A puzzling question asked over in the Telegraph:

What’s the real cost to society of a £5 dress?

Nothing, quite obviously. Society doesn’t have a wallet, society’s not paying for the dress, the cost must be nothing.

Boohoo’s festive sales rise might have allayed investor fears that it was going to repeat Asos’s shock profit warning, but the millennial-focused fashion brand is stoking a wider debate about the bigger cost of fast fashion. Few fashion retailers can afford to sell dresses for £5 a pop. The question is should they even be trying?

That’s a slightly different question and one to which the answer equally obviously is - Yes.

Consider what happens when the £5 dress is available. We become richer as we are able to dress ourselves for £5 not £50. It costs us less of our own labour time to enter the Dolly Parton lookalike contest. We’re richer by what else we can gain from our labour over and above that dress.

The person who made it is almost certainly going to be someone much poorer than us who is also made richer by the transaction. We are buying her labour time at a rate in excess of what other local to her opportunities will provide and she is thus able to earn more. She’s richer.

And there isn’t anything else. For all those other costs - say, landfill of barely worn clothes and so on - are already included in our price system. We have got that landfill tax, recall?

The world has simply become more efficient at clothing our nakedness and what’s wrong with that?

More spin, Less in the way of truth from Public Health England

The latest nanny statist smackdown comes from where you would least expect: the BBC.

In an extraordinary episode of BBC 4 show More or Less, the unscientific claims from Public Health England are finally challenged head on in a train wreck interview with PHE head of nutrition science, Dr Louis Levy.

In an extraordinary exchange, show presenter and economist Tim Harford put to Levy the findings of PHE’s own expert report which found that there is a lack of evidence that sugar consumption is problematic for adults. Levy initially responds by repeating the claims that sugar is problematic for weight gain because a higher sugar intake increases calorie consumption.

Harford, however, does not let him get off lightly:

Harford: I'm just looking at the [Public Health England’s 2015] committee report and it does say there's insufficient evidence of appropriate quality to draw conclusions on the impact of sugar intake on the majority of cardiometabolic outcomes in adults including bodyweight. That's from the committee's own report.

Levy: Yeah. So I was talking when I gave you my statement, I was talking about the link particularly for children. I mean, there was good evidence for children and there’s no reason to believe that the evidence would be any different for adults, although obviously as it said, there wasn't as much evidence for that.

Harford: So I did read the evidence correctly then they didn't manage to find the link between sugar…

Levy: Yeah

Harford: ...and body weight in an adults.

Levy: They didn't find good studies that allowed them to make the same conclusion as they were able to draw in children.

Harford: Yeah, but I mean they did have some randomized controlled trials...

Levy: Yeah

Harford: ...that seemed not to find an association.

Levy: So there are some studies that find that association. However, overall when you take the body of the evidence together, they concluded that there was an association between sugar intake and weight.

Harford: Although just to underline, they found that for children, not adults.

Levy’s willingness to repeatedly mischaracterize the evidence is extraordinary. Levy says, for example, that “there’s no reason to believe that the evidence would be any different for adults,” while in fact there is evidence, from the gold standard of research, randomised controlled trials.

This is shameful behaviour from a public body that has a revenue of £4.5 billion. Importantly, this exchange finally puts to shame the mirage that Public Health England are neutral arbiters of scientific fact and not political activists.

As is outlined earlier in the show, in an interview with Institute of Economic Affairs' Head of Lifestyle Economics and ASI Fellow Christoper Snowdon, the government’s own data shows sugar consumption is actually declining

Since 1992 added sugar consumption has fallen by about 28%, according to the Family Food Survey. Since 2000, adult consumption of sugar has fallen by about 10%, teenage sugar consumption has fallen by 18%, and since 1997 sugar consumption amongst younger children has fallen by 29%, according to the National Diet and Nutrition Survey.

It turns out that the only reason the headlines and messaging is so apocalyptic about sugar is because Public Health England halved the guidelines for acceptable level of sugar in one’s diet from 10 per cent of daily calorie intake down to 5 per cent in 2015 on the basis of weak evidence of the impact of sugar. This was on the basis of the aforementioned committee report that did not, in fact, find sugar is problematic for adults.

The pin’n’mix attitude to sugar stats by Public Health England does leave a rather sour taste in the mouth.

Al Capone and Prohibition

On January 17th 120 years ago, the American gangster, Al Capone, was born. He rose to prominence as a bootlegger in Chicago during prohibition, and became notorious for his brutality against rival gangsters. He was wealthy enough to have the city's mayor and police chiefs on his payroll, but was finally convicted on Federal charges of tax evasion on his illicit earnings and jailed in 1932, a year before prohibition ended.

The prohibition era, 1920-33, was racked by crime and violence, as ordinary Americans had to resort to criminality in order to drink alcohol, and ruthless gangs such as Capone's were happy to supply it. Many commentators have pointed to the similarity between the ban on alcohol in that era and the ban on narcotics today. The criminality of drugs means that prices are high and there are fortunes to be made in selling and smuggling them. In the countries that source them there is money to buy politicians, police and judges. Turf wars in city streets resemble those of the bootleggers, with dealers shooting each other to protect their patches. And otherwise law-abiding citizens are forced into conflict with the law to satisfy their preference.

If one had asked in 1930, "Will legalizing booze mean more alcohol-related health problems?" the answer would have been yes. "More addiction?" Again, yes. Will it mean some lives ruined?" Yes. "More accidents?" Yes. "More suicides?" Probably yes. Yet prohibition was repealed, partly because what they currently had was Al Capone, and that was worse.

Many similar questions could be asked about legalizing drugs, and the answers might be similar, too. True, quality control would be better, and prices lower, but there might well be more addiction and the related problems it brings. But what we have at present is the equivalent of Al Capone, and that's worse.