Remembrance Day
When the armistice that officially ended the First World War came into effect on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the anniversary was originally commemorated as Armistice Day, marking a time of tribute to and a remembering of those who died in that war.
On November 11th, 1919, one year after the war's end, King George V asked the public to observe two minutes of silence at 11am. He asked that "the thoughts of everyone may be concentrated on reverent remembrance of the glorious dead."
Following the Second World War, the day is now commemorated as Remembrance Day, though many of the ceremonies now take place on Remembrance Sunday, a day off work for most people that gives a chance to participate for those who wish. It now honours and remembers all members of the armed forces who died in the two World Wars, and in subsequent military and naval actions.
Most analysts think, with hindsight, that the First World War was not fought appropriately, and some think it should not have been fought at all. Leaders on both sides greatly underestimated the destructive firepower of modern weaponry. It is a source of regret that they did so, because there was an example they might have learned from. The US Civil War of 1861-65 had shown what artillery and modern firearms could do, and left over 600,000 dead. Had European leaders and generals taken more interest in its course, they might have learned its lessons.
The few commentators who think the UK should not have fought World War II seem to overlook the probability that Hitler might well have succeeded in conquering Soviet Russia if he had not had Britain and America to deal with. Had he done so, the horror of Nazi death camps would almost certainly have been even more widespread. They overlook, too, the fact that Japan would have drawn the UK into a far East war by attacking the British Empire there as it did US territories and bases. As it was, took two intercontinental powers to overcome a Germany that was a small country by comparison. And it took atomic bombs to bring Japan to surrender.
We remember their sacrifice and we honour those who died, not least because they enabled us to enjoy the freedom we have today. They fought off our enemies. Since then it was our armed forces in NATO that enabled us to resist Soviet aggression and prevent all Europe falling under a malevolent tyranny. It is our forces today who protect us from attack by being equipped and ready to strike back. Their readiness to fight for us deters those who might otherwise invade or undermine our interests.
Wars, they tell us, are often slipped into by uncertainty, by people thinking there is a chance that the other side will not respond. It is a tribute to those who died that we keep the peace they won, and stand ready to fight, as they did, to secure it.
Why is this a problem?
The Observer tells us that there’s a certain tension between the European Union’s thoughts on what the City should be and what some others think it should become.
The second aim is to keep London as close as possible to the EU’s evolving rulebook. In this way it would be prevented from branching out to become the western equivalent of Singapore, which has become wildly popular with bankers and investors after adopting a simple, laissez-faire set of regulations.
Shouldn’t a market be wildly popular with the people who are involved in that market?
If no farmers, bakers nor flour millers were happy with the structure and operation of the wheat market we’d think that a failing of the structure of the wheat market. If all the people who use cars and all the people who produce cars thought that the market for cars was an over-regulated, constipatory, mess we’d think that we’d got the regulation of the car market wrong.
If the providers, users and market middlemen in the market for capital find laissez faire regulation to be wildly popular doesn’t that mean that we should be instigating laissez faire policies in the market for capital?
No, not anarcho-capitalism, Singapore has a strong and firm insistence upon such things as property rights and the rule of law.
So why is it a problem, something we have to avoid, that a market be wildly, teemingly, popular with the participants in that market? What is it that we’re trying to achieve by regulating it into not being so? Other than the imposition of that haute bourgeois disdain for trade that is?
The prosecution of Lady Chatterley
On November 10th, 1960, the book, "Lady Chatterley's Lover" by D H Lawrence, went on sale in Britain. This was after a sensational trial at the Old Bailey that took six days between October 20th and November 2nd, 1960, when the publishers, Penguin Books, were prosecuted under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act. That Act, introduced by Roy Jenkins, had introduced a defence of 'literary merit' that would allow publishers to escape conviction for works that might otherwise have been deemed obscene. The public good section of the Act allowed a work that was "in the interests of science, literature, art or learning, or of other objects of general concern."
The book, first published privately in Italy in 1928, had only been published in expurgated versions since it told the story of an intense (and sexual (relationship between an aristocratic lady and a working class man, with explicit descriptions of sex, sprinkled with four-letter words that were until then regarded as unprintable. The trial, making front-page stories in newspapers was followed avidly by the general public.
The defence mustered various people of repute to testify as witnesses to the book's worthiness, including E. M. Forster, Helen Gardner, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, Norman St John-Stevas, and the Bishop of Woolwich, Dr John Robinson. The latter was asked if Lady Chatterley's Lover was a book that Christians ought to read. He replied "yes," despite the prosecution's objection that the ethical merits of the book were a matter for the jury. The newspapers went to town on this, with one headlining, "A Book All Christians Should Read."
The evidence of Richard Hoggart, senior lecturer in English at the University of Leicester, was reckoned to be crucial. He described the book as "highly virtuous if not puritanical," and was asked by an incredulous defence counsel to help him by defining the word 'puritanical.' Hoggart replied that although it was often used to mean someone opposed to pleasure, to a literary man or a linguist it meant "someone with an intense sense of responsibility for one's conscience," its original meaning.
At the end of the trial the jury took only three hours to return a unanimous verdict of not guilty. The result not only vindicated the book, it also ushered in a wave of liberalization of what were then quite struct censorship laws. At that time the Lord Chamberlain censored the scripts of stage plays, and the British Board of Film Censors sometimes insisted on scenes being changed or cut. When I was a student at Edinburgh, the local Watch Committee would occasionally ban movies they thought had too-explicit sex scenes.
Some attributed the rise of what was later called "The Permissive Society" to the Lady Chatterley verdict that acquitted Penguin and allowed the book to go on sale. It certainly sold, rapidly selling over 3 million copies. It was a watershed moment, and heralded the gradual ending of the paternalistic censorship that had been a hallmark of British culture. People were in future to be allowed to make their own minds up about what to read and watch.
The poet and librarian, Philip Larkin, now commemorated in Westminster Abbey, referred to the trial in his 1974 poem, Annus Mirabilis:
"Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me)— Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles’ first LP."
A strange defence of the minimum wage
We’re told that an increase in the minimum wage raises productivity:
The labour market needs to be rebalanced. For wages to rise, workers need to take home a larger share of national income – through a higher minimum wage, more security for workers in the “gig economy” and a higher proportion of sectors in which trade unions engage in collective bargaining. As other European countries show, this helps, not hinders, productivity improvement.
The proof is this, details in this paper.
OK, let us accept the contention for a moment. Raise the minimum wage, this raises labour productivity. So, for any given level of output we need to employ less labour then. That is, in the absence of a boost to economic growth we have just proven that a higher minimum wage creates unemployment.
We agree, it probably does. It’s just that we think it’s a strange argument in favour of a rise in the minimum wage.
The wall that imprisoned half a city
The Berlin Wall built by the East German government in 1961 finally came down on November 9th, 1989, thirty years ago. It was erected to stop the exodus of people voting with their feet to leave what was called the German Democratic Republic, though in fact the GDR was neither German, nor democratic, nor indeed was it a republic. People fled the repression and deprivation of the Communist state to enjoy the freedom and prosperity of the West, and the wall was built to stop them from doing so.
With a Corbynesque contempt for the truth, the Communist authorities called it “the anti-fascist wall,” claiming that its purpose was to prevent fascists coming into East Germany. In fact the traffic was from East to West as the people imprisoned under Communism sought to gain their freedom. East German border guards shot to kill anyone caught trying to escape, and hundreds died during the wall’s lifetime.
The only people moving in the other direction seem to have been the Baader–Meinhof Gang, otherwise known as the Red Army Faction. After committing murders and bombings in West Germany, they were occasionally given refuge in the East by the Communist authorities before returning to the West for their next atrocity.
The other group who went East were a few enterprising young West Germans who dug tunnels under the wall to rescue friends and relatives still trapped in the East. The most successful was Joachim Neumann, who had fled from East Germany a few years earlier using a passport borrowed from a Swiss student. With a few friends he planned a tunnel to rescue his girlfriend. It took them five months of back-breaking work underground in dirty conditions, but they managed it. During the two days the tunnel was in operation, they managed to smuggle out 57 people, including his girlfriend, and other friends and family. The tunnel came to be known as "Tunnel 57" after the number who crawled to safety through it. The GDR Stasi finally cottoned on using ultrasound equipment and closed it down.
When the wall finally came down, it was due to a mistake. The Communist Party head in East Berlin was handed a note at a press conference and mistakenly announced that East Berliners were free to travel West. He was asked "When?" and replied that as far as he knew, it was effective immediately. A crowd of East Germans gathered at the Wall gateway, far outnumbering the guards, none of whom took the authority to use lethal force. Young Germans from East and West climbed the wall to join each other on top of it, and people began to dismantle it with pickaxes. East Berliners flooded West to be greeted with money and food from their Western counterparts.
I was watching the end of a BBC Newsnight special from Berlin when a cameraman walked into the studio live on air and dropped a lump of concrete on the table. The astonished presenter asked, "What is this; what's going on?" The cameraman replied, "It's the wall. They're taking it down."
It was a great day, symbolizing the liberation of many peoples who had endured the brutal repression of Communist regimes, and whose hitherto squalid, stunted lives, were now opened up to all the freedoms and opportunities available in the liberal democracies. It was a great day, not just for Berlin and Germany, but for the world.
Why we shouldn't get our economics from The Guardian
One of their long form pieces:
Consider the financial engineering done by such firms. Like most of the largest and most profitable multinational companies, Apple has loads of cash – around $210bn at last count – as well as plenty of debt (close to $110bn). That is because – like nearly every other large, rich company – it has parked most of its spare cash in offshore bond portfolios over the past 10 years. This is part of a Kafkaesque financial shell game that has played out since the 2008 financial crisis. Back then, interest rates were lowered and central bankers flooded the economy with easy money to try to engineer a recovery. But the main beneficiaries were large companies, which issued lots of cheap debt, and used it to buy back their own shares and pay out dividends, which bolstered corporate share prices and investors, but not the real economy. The Trump corporate tax cuts added fuel to this fire. Apple, for example, was responsible for about a quarter of the $407bn in buy-backs announced in the six months or so after Trump’s tax law was passed in December 2017 – the biggest corporate tax cut in US history.
Trumps tax reforms were the solution to this particular point. In the past foreign profits that remained in foreign territories were not taxed in the US. Therefore foreign profits were treated to a tan and a rum punch on some Caribbean island. They were then used as the collateral (in a way, even if not directly) for within the US borrowings which could then be used to pay dividends, buy back stock.
The Trump tax reforms now tax those foreign profits whether they are repatriated or not. Therefore there is no point in not repatriating them so they are repatriated. It’s not necessary to borrow against them, instead they can just be paid out to shareholders.
That is, that tax reform being complained of is the solution to the very problem being complained of. We really shouldn’t be getting our economics from The Guardian. For of course it gets worse:
That is the final trend worth considering. Technology firms drive down the prices of lots of things, and tech-related deflation is a big part of what has kept interest rates so low for so long; it has not only constrained prices, but wages, too.
If we’ve got deflation in goods and services then real wages are, of course, rising, not being constrained. Managing to get the sign wrong is pretty good, don’t you think?
Really, look elsewhere than The Guardian for economics.
The failure of the Forty-five
On November 8th, 1745, the Jacobite army led by Charles Edward Stuart invaded England. It was the last time a foreign army did so - (the Nazi occupation of the Channel Isles in World War II wasn’t England). Charles Edward, aka Bonnie Prince Charlie, had begun his rebellion by landing in Scotland in August and raising his standard at Glenfinnan, on the shores of Loch Shiel.
His Jacobites won the Battle of Prestonpans and captured Edinburgh. Prince Charles persuaded his Scots to march South giving assurances of the assistance of both English Jacobites and the support of a French army that would land in the South. They quickly took Carlisle, an important border fort, but manned by only 80 elderly veterans.
Many British troops were on the Continent, involved in the War of the Austrian Succession, but the Duke of Cumberland, commanding British troops in Flanders, was hastily recalled with 12,000 men. The lightly-armed Jacobite army, although small, was effective at charge attacks, but lacked heavy artillery or siege equipment for longer campaigns. They reached Manchester, the only town to add significant numbers of recruits to their cause, and then went on to reach Derby on December 4th. Preston, thought to be a centre of Jacobite support, yielded only 3 extra recruits.
At this point Prince Charles’ army was disillusioned. The expected masses of recruits had not appeared, and there was no sign of the French landing. Charles was by now regarded as duplicitous and overbearing, and he drank heavily. Cumberland was marching North from London, and General Wade was moving South from Newcastle. The Jacobite army, fearing their supply lines and escape route would be cut off, retreated Northwards.
The general view at the time was that the Hanoverian regime would not have collapsed, even if the Jacobites had reached London. The country was too committed to its liberal Parliamentary democracy to return to a monarch who claimed divine right. The final suppression of the rebellion took place at the Battle of Culloden the following April, where the Jacobites took heavy casualties. Charles was pursued through the Highlands and finally picked up by a French ship in September. He was not betrayed during this time, despite a price on his head of £15 million in today’s money. A charming story tells that he rewarded loyal followers by imparting the secret recipe for his family’s drink, the liqueur Drambuie.
Many historians regard the defeat of the ’45 as boosting the confidence of the Scots that they were to remain part of the modern world, and not plunged back into clan governance and divine kingship. This, in turn, is reckoned to have created the intellectual climate that nurtured the explosion of genius called the Scottish Enlightenment, a movement that gave us David Hume and Adam Smith, amongst others.
And yet we should be spending less on renewables each year
One of those shock, horror, reports:
Investment in greenhouse gas emission reduction fell last year despite the growing urgency of the climate crisis, and the benefits of outlays were cancelled out by investments globally in fossil fuels and other dirty industries, finds a report by the Climate Policy Initiative.
Global climate finance hit a record high of $612bn (£476bn) in 2017, according to CPI advisers, but fell back 11% after that bumper year to $546bn in 2018.
Gaia will therefore be boiled in her own salt water stock because we are not sacrificing enough to save her. Except, of course, we should be spending less on renewables each year. Because, as we keep being told, renewables are becoming cheaper. Therefore we can achieve the same amount for less sacrifice:
After nearly two decades of strong annual growth, renewables around the world added as much net capacity in 2018 as they did in 2017,
Oh, that is what is happening. The problem with this is?
Smith's library
The Econ Journal Watch have released a list of all the books owned by Adam Smith and as one of the last men said to know everything, it’s hardly surprising that there are some interesting reads in there.
Smith had a vast range of books from the free verse epic poem Paradise Lost to the far more practical Horse-hoeing husbandry. From the Econ Journal’s list, it doesn’t take much to see the sheer number of books that Smith owned. The range and quantity reflective of his wealth of sources, which of course explained his wealth of knowledge.
Being a true academic, he was able to read many languages. Smith’s range of French titles, such as Histoire de la ligue faite à Cambray or Considerations sur Considérations sur les corps organisés, only go to show the cultural strength of the Auld Alliance. Being both an intellectual and a Scotsman, the interest does not seem out of place. His possession of Institution du droit françois also reflects this fascination with France and its governance.
Smith was a man of logic and reason so his possession of various books on law and legal systems e.g. Principles of Scots law, is in keeping with his character. Indeed Smith’s interest was once again not confined to his native Britain seen by Russian code of laws or Code of Gentoo law. Certainly not a narrow focus!
Smith’s library also served as a travel diary of sorts. He collected books from people he met throughout his life such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Quesnay. Smith had Voltaire’s philosophie de l'histoire, Rousseau’s Nouvelle Heloise and Quesnay’s Physiocratie, among others. Smith also had books from countries further afield, such as John Bell’s Travels from St Petersburg or Peter Kalm’s Travels into North America, showing his intellectual curiosity knew no bounds.
As you would expect for an intelligent and educated man, he has a large collection of classic works in Latin and Greek (including lesser known authors such as Manilius). He has a wide range of literature and history but a comparatively tiny choice of philosophy. This lacuna is all the more surprising from philosopher and economist when you realise he did have books on philosophy such as Philosophy of rhetoric by George Campbell, just not classical philosophy.
He did have compendia of Plato’s works (e.g. Platonis Opera) but not the individual dialogues that one might have expected from someone who had such an interest in moral philosophy, dialogues which deal with ethical issues for which Plato is known. Smith’s Aristotle collection is similarly thin for a man with such a vast collection, with no works of any pre-Socratics either. His possession of the compendium does not give a particular insight into the aspect of Plato that Smith was interested in.
The Econ Journal Watch’s report offers a fascinating insight into the material that helped to shape Adam Smith.
Unsolved mysteries
There are unsolved mysteries associated with the date of November 7th. In 1872 the US merchant brigantine, Mary Celeste (usually misspelled as Marie Celeste), set sail from New York City headed for Genoa with a cargo of denatured alcohol. On December 5th, the Canadian brigantine, Dei Gratia, found her adrift and deserted off the Azores. The sails were partly set and in poor condition, but there was no sign of anyone one board. Her lifeboat was missing, but her cargo was intact, and the personal effects of the captain and crew were undisturbed. The last entry in her log had been made ten days earlier.
The ship’s papers and navigation instruments were missing, but galley materials were tidily stowed. Despite popular later myth, there was no sign of food prepared or in preparation, but there were ample supplies. There was no sign of fire or violence. The signs pointed to an orderly departure by the captain and crew in the missing lifeboat, but no-one on that fateful ship was ever seen again. The ship itself was towed as salvage, sold and renamed, and saw more service before it was finally deliberately sunk off the Irish coast in an insurance fraud. But the fate of her missing crew has remained a mystery ever since.
Another unsolved mystery began on November 7th, 1974, with the disappearance of Lord Lucan. After his marriage broke up, he moved from the house in Lower Belgrave Street to a house nearby. He lost a custody battle for his three children, and had incurred large gambling losses.
On the fateful evening, the children’s nanny was found battered to death in the basement, and Lady Lucan had been attacked, she reported, by her estranged husband. Lucan himself phoned his mother to ask her to pick up his children, then drove to a friend’s house in East Sussex. He then disappeared. The car was found abandoned at the ferry port of Newhaven. There were bloodstains inside it, and a piece of bandaged lead pipe like the one used in the attack.
A warrant was issued for his arrest, but Lucan has never been found. There were reports of sightings in several countries, one of which led to the arrest in Australia of the British MP, John Stonehouse, who had faked his own death to escape a fraud trial. Detectives thought they had found Lord Lucan rather than another fugitive.
But Lucan’s whereabouts remained a mystery. One theory was that he might have committed suicide by jumping overboard from a mid-channel ferry, but there was no evidence to support this other than his continued absence. He was legally presumed dead in 1992, and officially declared dead in 1999. A death certificate was issued in 2016, in the absence of any evidence that he was alive. But there was no evidence of his death, either.
There is another unsolved mystery, one that concerns the UK in the 1970s. It was a naff decade, characterized by constant strikes and union bullying. The government spent money it did not have, and inflation soared. There were periodic shortages of basic items such as toilet paper and sugar. Public services deteriorated to a low level of quality and reliability. The Prime Minister had to seek a bailout from the International Monetary Fund to prevent the country going bankrupt. Extremists took over several local councils. The top rate of income tax was 83 percent, with a punitive extra 15 percent to take it to 98 percent on anyone foolish enough to invest in Britain.
The unsolved mystery is why anyone in their right mind today would want to see a return to those days.