Constitutional monarchy confirmed
On March 8th, 1702, died William III, the English king who did more than any other to preserve the role of the crown in constitutional government. After William it was always rule by “the King or Queen in Parliament,” rather than rule by any claim to divine right.
William was Dutch, born one week posthumously and inheriting the Principality of Orange. He had some claim to the English throne, being the grandson of Charles I and married to the daughter of James II, his uncle. James, the legitimate king, was Catholic, but Britain wanted a Protestant monarch. When William landed unopposed at Brixham in 1688, James fled to France and was deemed to have thereby abdicated, so William and Mary were declared joint monarchs.
In 1689 he assented to the Bill of Rights, a landmark document in British rights and liberties. It asserted that the monarch could not overrule laws passed by Parliament, or impose taxes without their consent, raise a standing peacetime army unless Parliament approved, or deny Protestant subjects the right to bear arms. The monarch was required not to interfere in Parliamentary elections, or to punish Parliamentarians for what they said in debates. He was also not to demand excessive bail or to inflict “cruel and unusual punishments,” limits that found their way a century later into the US Bill of Rights.
William was by no means enthusiastic about the Bill, but he accepted it to restore harmony to his kingdom. It largely succeeded, limiting the faction fights that had divided the nation. William promoted moderation and tolerance, both in politics and religion. In 1689, he gave the judiciary its independence, later enshrined in law by the Act of Settlement of 1700–01. He granted the Royal Charter in 1694 to the Bank of England, a private institution owned by bankers.
William had a lasting influence on constitutional history, and not just in Britain. Around the world today, it is arguable that it is the constitutional monarchies, rather than the full democracies, that are the best guardian of the rights and liberties of their citizens. The United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, plus Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan and others, all follow the precepts established under William of limited government, an independent judiciary, free speech, and some degree of separation of powers. He set a precedent that reverberates around the world today.
To watch George Monbiot fail Chesterton's Fence
George Monbiot tells us all that we should abandon the car except for those really essential journeys. For there are costs associated with car use and that means we should.
He’s entirely right on one point. There are indeed costs associated with car use. Personal costs, societal costs, health costs, he’s absolutely correct. He indulges in the usual switch and bait of course:
One of these emergencies is familiar to every hospital. Pollution now kills three times as many people worldwide as Aids, tuberculosis and malaria combined. Remember the claims at the start of this century, projected so noisily by the billionaire press: that public money would be better spent on preventing communicable disease than on preventing climate breakdown? It turns out that the health dividend from phasing out fossil fuels is likely to have been much bigger. (Of course, there was nothing stopping us from spending money on both: it was a false dilemma.) Burning fossil fuels, according to a recent paper, is now “the world’s most significant threat to children’s health”.
A goodly chunk of that global pollution death toll is the use of wood and coal as indoor heating and cooking fuels. The toll is higher than that of smoking by some estimates. Further, that pollution now kills those more than communicable disease is because we did spend money on curbing communicable disease as a cause of mortality. Obviously enough we’re all to die of something - Mary, Elijah and those few others who didn’t being somewhat controversial historical characters. If we don’t of smallpox, cholera or some other bloody flux or ague then we’re going to survive long enough for a lifestyle complaint to catch up with us. One of us here once received an email telling of a diagnosis of terminal cancer in another which read, in part, “I have now lived long enough to get prostate cancer” which might be both droll and dry but there’s also a great truth contained within it.
But the real mistake here is that Monbiot has entirely failed Chesterton’s Fence, completely refused the jump. The point being that if we see a fence in the country we cannot insist upon its removal until we have worked out why it was placed there in the first place. Only once we know the original reason can we understand whether that still applies or not. Obviously enough, only if it doesn’t can we proceed to modernise.
Here that fence is, well, why do we all use cars? Why does every society in which people become rich enough to do so do so? Simply because, on balance, people find that the autonomy of a form of personal transport outweighs the problems with it. We prefer to die at 85 of lung disease if we can tootle Toadlike for those decades.
It could even be that we shouldn’t but that’s not the point at all - the fact is that we do. The existence and use of the car adds value to our lives in that general calculation we make of our own utility maximisation. Entirely ignoring that, as Monbiot does, means one is never going to be able to deal with reality. Which isn’t a good start to trying to change it really.
Speedy communication speeds the economy
The telephone dates from March 7th, 1876, the date on which Alexander Graham Bell took out a patent for a new device he called by that name. Three days later, on March 10th, Bell made his device to work. He spoke on it to his assistant, Thomas Watson, "Mr. Watson—Come here—I want to see you" into the transmitter. Watson, listening at the receiving end in an adjoining room, heard the words clearly. The device turned vocal sounds into electrical currents, which could do the reverse at the other end of the line.
It changed the economy rapidly, Businesses that had depended upon hand-couriered messages or mailed communications, or at best the anonymous telegraph, could now communicate by voice more rapidly. Not only did it grow a whole new telecommunications industry, it facilitated most other businesses by speeding up their transactions.
Bell and his partners offered the patent to Western Union for $100,000, but were rebuffed. Two years later the WU President said that if he could acquire it for $25m, he would think it a bargain. The Bell Telephone Company developed into American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T). For most of the 20th Century it held a monopoly in the US and Canada, and was nicknamed “Ma Bell.”
In the UK the telephone monopoly was held by the Post Office, a monopoly so tight that it was held that the ringing of hand-bells to communicate could be in breach of it. When its telecommunications arm was formed into an independent entity and privatized in 1984, it was initially thought that a telephone service was a natural monopoly, since it would be cumbersome to have several lines connected to each home. At privatization, however, the new company, BT, was required to send the signals of its long-distance competitor down “the last mile” into each home. More competitors were allowed later, making the UK one of the world’s most competitive telephone markets.
More recently the development of mobile telephony has leapfrogged over fixed landlines to enable developing countries to move from no telephone service at all into widespread mobile telecommunication. This had made a big economic impact, enabling isolated farmers to discover where the best prices are to be had before moving their produce to market. Mobile phones are increasingly used in developing countries to transfer money across distances rapidly and safely.
Such were the consequences of that March day in 1876, but Bell himself thought that telephones were a distraction from his scientific work, and refused to have one in his study. He continued to work helping to develop other inventions, including the phonograph and the hydrofoil.
It's a start on tariffs but it's not enough
We should, of course, take our good news where we can get it. So, this is good news but it’s not enough either:
The Government may cut up to 90pc of UK trade tariffs if Britain leaves the EU without a deal, according to reports from Sky News.
The Department for International Trade (DIT) is reportedly intending to slash between 80pc to 90ps of all tariffs on imported goods, with some being eliminated entirely.
Key items that will retain their protection include cars, beef, lamb, dairy and some textiles. But the component parts used to make cars, some finished food products and some farm produce including cereals would be scrapped.
The cuts, which have been agreed by the Cabinet according to reports, are intended to stop price increases and protect companies from overseas competition.
We should not be protecting producers from competition. As The Guardian, of all places, has just pointed out about the irruption of Aldi and Lidl into the British marketplace:
The British supermarket giants, whose 7% profit margins were the world’s highest,
...
By sucking in shoppers and, as former Aldi UK CEO Paul Foley puts it, “sucking the profitability out of the industry” – profit margins of 2-3% are now the norm – the two German-owned companies have forced the “big four” supermarkets to take drastic measures.
That’s a simple transfer - and a large one - from the capitalists and producers to consumers. That’s just what competition does and is the value of it too.
So, why would we want to protect British producers to the cost of consumers? Why would we protect car and textile producers from foreign competition and not retail stores even?
Unilateral free trade, as in 1846, being the correct and only correct stance to take.
Sure, it’s going to be tough convincing people of this. There will always be those misguided enough to insist that this or that needs protection. Not all of them will be producers themselves to be protected either. The answer to which is to make that protection obvious and open. It must be a direct transfer from taxpayer funds to those producers instead of some indirect method like tariffs or other price rigging. For that’s the only way that the costs of the protection become visible. And as we humans work it’s only the visible things that we’ll really calculate the pros and cons of.
Sure, OK, hill top farmers will all go bust without subsidy. Make that subsidy a clear payment so that we can all see it and decide. Do we want to pay that subsidy or would we be happy to see the uplands rewild? The same is true of all and any other subsidies.
Tariffs and import quotas should be set, entirely and wholly, at nothing and infinite respectively. Any allocation of subsidy - something we oppose but realise not all do - must be made out in the open so we can all consider the value of it.
Ayn Rand's legacy
Ayn Rand died on March 6th, 1982, leaving behind a controversial legacy that still engages millions of people worldwide. Her book, "Atlas Shrugged," was voted the most influential in their lives by members of the Book-of-the-Month Club in response to a 1991 Library of Congress survey.
Although she wrote books such as "For the New Intellectual," and "Capitalism - the Unknown Ideal," her philosophy was accessed by many readers through her fiction writing. She left post-revolutionary Russia and settled in the US, where she began script writing in Hollywood. Her best-selling, "The Fountainhead," features a brilliant architect who refuses to compromise his principles, espousing a radical individualism central to Rand’s philosophy. The book’s success, and that of its movie adaptation starring Gary Cooper, projected Rand to a wider audience. Her later work, Atlas Shrugged (1957), depicting a mysterious strike by leading innovators and industrialists, still sells hundreds of thousands of copies a year.
She called her philosophy "Objectivism," supposing that reality exists as an objective absolute, independently of any conscious mind. She thought knowledge to be based not on faith, but on sense perception, the validity of which she considered axiomatic, and which was interpreted through reason.
In ethics, she argued for rational self-interest as the guiding moral principle, and said the individual should "exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself."
Her political philosophy emphasized individual rights, including life, liberty and property, and she supported laissez-faire capitalism because in her view it was the only system based on the protection of those rights. This led her to oppose any government action beyond those needed to protect individual rights.
Controversially, she opposed altruism as a denial of rational self-interest, saying that no person should live his or her life for the sake of another. Although some deride this as "selfish," in her view there is no conflict of interests between rational individuals; they recognize the value of respecting each other’s rights consistently, sacrificing neither themselves nor others.
A biographer, Jennifer Burns, referred to her as "the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right," and it is true that she leads many, by justifying their belief in themselves, to support capitalism and to oppose all forms of collectivism. Rand has a huge following today, especially among young people, attracted by her philosophy of rational individualism, and by the way the Objectivist view of knowledge meshes in with its ethical and political stance.
She remains massively popular, even a cult figure in some circles, and has been featured in several documentaries. Her likeness even appeared on a 1999 US postage stamp. Each year the Adam Smith Institute hosts an Ayn Rand Lecture to commemorate her ideas.
The technological revolution will make the NHS cheaper, not more expensive
One of the tropes we see around often enough is that we must spend vast sums more, invest ever more heavily, in the National Health Service because new technologies are going to raise the cost of health care. This is not actually so for a fairly obvious reason. Why would we adopt more expensive methods of doing something?
Quite, we’ll only - as is true in all other areas of life - start to use a new technology if it is better or cheaper than the one we’ve previously used. Some of these new technologies being considerably cheaper too:
Smartphone apps are five times more effective at diagnosing serious heart conditions compared to standard tests, a University of Edinburgh study has found.
Better and also cheaper:
After 90 days, the smartphone device helped doctors diagnose 56 per cent of patients, in an average time of 9.5 days.
However, only 10 per cent of patients given standard care were diagnosed, in an average time of 43 days.
The technology also cut the cost of diagnosis from £1,395 to £474, researchers said.
That’s not an argument in favour of increasing spending upon the NHS now, is it? It’s quite the opposite, an opportunity to sniff around and see whether it needs quite so much of our hard earned.
This has also been true of all previous medical technologies too. Vaccines are cheaper than wards full of smallpox victims. Aspirin cheaper than leeches at curing headaches. What makes health care more expensive at times is the technology which allows us to cure something we couldn’t before.
The total cost of health care in the future is going to be the balance of those two plus whatever the demographics of the population being treated are. But it’s simply not true to go about insisting that advancing technology is necessarily going to make the NHS more expensive so open those chequebooks now.
Remembering Stalin
March 5th is a day that will forever be associated with Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known to the world as Joseph Stalin. It was on this day in 1940 that he and 5 other members of the Soviet Politburo signed an order for the execution of 25,700 Polish intelligentsia, including 14,700 military officers in what would later be called the Katyn massacre. It was a brutal attempt to suppress Polish culture in the land acquired through the Nazi-Soviet pact.
When Germany broke that pact and invaded Soviet territory, they found some of the victims' remains and told the world of the crime. After the war the Soviets claimed the Nazis had perpetrated the massacre, but the date confirmed it had been done under Soviet, not Nazi, occupation, and documents that emerged when the Soviet empire collapsed have confirmed their guilt.
It was also on March 5th, but in 1946, that Churchill made a speech in Fulton, Missouri, telling the world that “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” Many Americans had been sympathetic to their wartime Russian allies who had borne such suffering, but President Truman wanted to alert them to what the Soviets were really like, and thought that they would take it better if it came from the man they regarded as a hero, Winston Churchill.
In that speech Churchill alerted them to the fact that half of Europe was now, in effect, a Soviet prison, with its peoples unable to leave, and forced to act in accordance with the instructions of their masters. Undemocratic puppet regimes, sustained by Soviet military might, stamped out free speech, a free press, and the rule of law. Furthermore, the failures of socialism doomed them to decades of want and poverty while the West streaked ahead in freedom and prosperity.
That "iron curtain" remained in place for decades, and marked the graveyard of thousands who tried to flee through it. No-one was ever killed trying to break into the Soviet bloc countries.
It was also on March 5th, this time in 1953, that Stalin died, having ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist for nearly 30 years. Nearly 3 years after his death, his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, delivered a speech in secret to a closed session of the 20th Communist Party Congress, a speech that denounced Stalin, detailing some of Stalin's crimes and the "conditions of insecurity, fear, and even desperation" he had created. Stalin's mummified body, which had lain alongside that of Lenin in the Kremlin's wall, was subsequently removed and buried.
While some people today affect a respect for Stalin and his socialist system, most do so without any inkling of the utter evil he personified, or of the crimes he perpetrated that matched Hitler in their scale and savagery. A large part of the world lay under his thumb for decades, with its peoples denied the basic right to express themselves and to better their lives. Like Hitler and Mao, he is remembered as a monster, and when he died on March 5th, 66 years ago, the world started to become a better place.
Talking shops or Government
Adam Smith dismissed the idea in the Wealth of Nations that international success could be achieved by a “nation of shopkeepers”. Instead, government should be “influenced by shopkeepers”, i.e. business people. His point was that government should back practical business people to get on with what they do well and not indulge in talking shops producing “strategies” that never happen.
A fine example of that distinction is the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) announcement on 27th February of “a new National Genomic Healthcare Strategy”. Clearly mapping genomes to detect inherited (potential) health problems and finding ways to treat them even before the symptoms arise, is a great idea. The government is right to support promising research in this area. So what, you may wonder is this “strategy”? Read down to the end of the press release and it turns out that no such strategy yet exists. The Minister said: “In order to make this a reality, I am delighted to announce that we will be working with the National Genomics Board and the broader genomics community to develop a National Genomic Healthcare Strategy.”
The National Genomics Board has 26 great and good members albeit not great and good enough to report directly to the DHSC: “The National Genomics Board will report to the Life Sciences Council via the Life Sciences Industrial Strategy Implementation Board.” The Genomics Board has its own advisory panel and then , there is the Genomics England Board which also “has several independent advisory committees that report to the board.”
And one must not forget the also recently created UK Rare Disease Policy Board and Forum. Genomics and rare diseases are intimately bound up since the former is expected to provide the solution to the latter. The UK Strategy for Rare Diseases reads as follows: “Each country in the UK will take action and develop plans to implement the strategy that best meets their own health and care systems, but will work together where it makes sense to do so.”
While the DHSC has been busy building all these new talking shops, NHS England has actually been doing something. Last July, the Chairman of NHS England reported, inter alia: “The design of the new phase of roll-out of a genomic medicine service in the NHS in England, following the successful conclusion of the 100,000 Genomes Programme. We have been undertaking a procurement process to establish seven genomic laboratory hubs, building on the 13 Genomic Medicine Centres that we set up under the 100k Genomes programme, with a view to transforming the highly fragmented pattern of genetic testing in the NHS into a national network of regional provision, with standardisation of testing through the roll-out of a National Genomic Test Directory. Genomics England Ltd., a wholly Government-owned company, is our partner in procuring sequencing and analytics.”
This plethora of DHSC talking shops, many created recently, interferes with the ability of the NHS to do its job. Judging by the variety of figures it cites, one wonders whether the DHSC even knows how many it has. Take Health Education England, for example. It has 2,000 staff and a Chairman paid more than the Prime Minister. It claims to create new clinical staff and train the existing staff but in reality it does neither: it simply hands out the NHS’s money to the universities and professional trainers who do.
The NHS, like any other large organisation, would be perfectly capable of doing that for itself and the taxpayer would save £5bn. a year if it did. That’s a healthy sum to save.
Dating apps and the terrible difficulty of planning an economy
To an economist everything is substituitable. The implication of this is that everything we use is a substitute for something else. Where it all gets rather tricky is that technology marches on, what can be used as a substitute for whicht is an ever changing feast. It is this which makes any form of planning of the economy so difficult.
Dating apps are partly responsible for a significant decrease in 24-hour alcohol licences, new research has suggested.
The number of pubs, bars and nightclubs granted permission to serve alcohol round-the-clock has fallen by a fifth over the past year, according to commercial law firm EMW.
The company said expected demand for nightlife had failed to materialise, leaving 742 late night alcohol licences in 2018, down from 919 in 2013.
The increasing popularity of Netflix and dating apps has contributed to a "cultural" shift in how people socialise, thereby affecting demand of drinking in late night venues, the research suggests.
We don’t know whether this link is true or not but let us take it as so for the moment. The argument is that late night drinking and dating apps are substitutes for each other. Possibly substituitable methods of meeting the partner of your dreams, possibly simply of a rather more earthy form of leisure pursuit.
But think of the difficulty this provides for the planner. Sure, one could be Taliban in outlook and insist that cross gender contact should simply never happen outside arranged marriage. The Southern Baptist view that sex is to be abhorred because dancing may break out has its adherents. But in general the idea that consenting adults should get on with being consenting is how society works.
So, as that planner, one might in a technologically static society think that the provision of more late night drinking places will aid in this project. But when one does so it’s necessary to take account of simply everything else too. The military invented GPS to know where to drop the bombs - who knew that this would lead to proximity dating apps? Steve Jobs thought a touchscreen on a phone was a pretty neat idea - who knew this would lead to so much touching?
Yes, we could indeed predict that humans will use any new technology, at least test it out for its usefulness concerning, for sex because that’s what humans do. We’re all descended from those who found sex interesting after all. But how can that rational planner looking at opening hours hope to consider and predict the results of dateless nerds playing with code in San Francisco upon pub usage in Brentwood?
It’s not possible to consider all of these things which is why that planning is simply too difficult to actually do. We’re left with the chaotic experimentation of the market to sort it all out for us.
A red-letter day for liberty
On March 4th in 1789, one of the most significant events in the history of liberty occurred. The first Congress of the United States met in New York City to give effect to the US Constitution and to propose the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution. Largely crafted by James Madison, the amendments add guarantees of personal freedoms and rights, limits on government powers, and specify that all powers not given to Congress by the Constitution are to be held by the states or the people. They were done largely to meet reservations by anti-federalists.
The First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion, free speech and a free press, and the right to peaceful demonstration.
The Second upholds the right to bear arms.
The Third bans soldiers being quartered in private homes.
The Fourth rules out unreasonable searches and seizures.
The Fifth protects against double jeopardy and self-incrimination, the one often claimed by gangsters. It also guarantees due process and compensation for any property seized.
The Sixth establishes the right to a speedy and public trial, to trial by an impartial jury, to be informed of criminal charges, to confront witnesses, to compel witnesses to appear in court, and to the assistance of counsel.
The Seventh guarantees jury trials in Federal cases involving over 20 dollars.
The Eighth prohibits excessive bail and fines, and "cruel and unusual punishments."
The Ninth states that there are basic rights that lie outside the Constitution.
The Tenth Amendment says that the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, or to the people.
This is the one that is sometimes abused by withholding Federal funds from states that refuse to comply with Federal rules. This device was used to make them set universal 55mph speed limits until these were modified under President Reagan before their abolition in 1995, and is used to enforce a national minimum 21-year drinking age.
Taken together, the Bill of Rights amendments give written guarantees that US citizens can appeal to in court, and can be taken to the Supreme Court itself for interpretation. They have many times been used to strike down Federal or state laws that are judged to be in violation of them. They thus provide a model of written fundamental laws that protect the liberty of citizens from arbitrary abuse. They also protect individuals from new laws that would restrict hem, even if these enjoy widespread popular support. They put liberty ahead of democracy, which is where it should be.