The annoying thing is that Iran is trying to do the right thing here
Not in its totality, no, obviously not, but in this particular specific the government of Iran is trying to do the right thing. To switch subsidies from things to people:
Iran’s government has begun rushing out promised direct payments to 60 million Iranians, in a sign that the regime has been spooked by the scale of protests against petrol price rises announced last week.
In some cases petrol prices are being raised by as much as 300%. Unrest continued throughout Iran on Monday and internet access remained blocked for a second day.
Videos smuggled out of the country showed municipal buildings and banks being torched and large traffic jams as drivers blocked roads. The clashes seemed fiercest in the cities of Shiraz and Ahvaz rather than in Tehran As many as 1,000 people have been arrested.
In announcing the price rise on Thursday, the government said it was not seeking to raise state revenues but instead undertaking a complex switch in government subsidies.
It’s entirely possible to argue against subsidies at all. It must be possible because we make that argument ourselves often enough. But if there are going to be subsidies then it’s vastly better for it to be a subsidy of money to the poor than it is to be one to a certain product for all.
In Iran the petrol price is subsidised, substantially. It used to be even more, along with natural gas in fact. And there was a change, to instead of subsidising energy - Iran is one of the top three such subsidisers to fossil derived energy in the world - give people the amount to spend as they wished.
The advantage is that we all enjoy agency. Give us the money for us to deploy as we wish and we’ll gain greater value for that same cost to the exchequer. Simply because we are able to expend those resources on what we’d like, not on what politics thinks we should get.
The basic point is well known, to the point that the US Census readily admits it. Poor Americans value food stamps, or Medicaid, at less than it costs to provide them. They would be made richer if they simply got the cash instead. It is also this which explains why there’s a black market in food stamps. People value, say, nappies, more than they do food and will exchange money which works only for for for that which works for nappies at a substantial - 50% - discount. Diapers are in fact the major item paid for with illegally converted to cash food stamps.
The Iranian government is actually trying to do the right thing here, make everyone richer, by moving subsidies from things to people.
War criminals brought to justice
It used to be the case that tyrants could torture and murder their own subjects, and those they conquered, with impunity. That all changed on November 20th, 1945, when the War Crimes Tribunal began its hearings at Nuremberg, following the end of World War II.
The military tribunals were held by the Allies under international law, in order to put on trial 24 of the leading Nazi political and military leaders who had planned or participated in mass murders and other war crimes. They marked a major advance in international law because they put on trial people who had committed acts that were not illegal in their own countries at the time, but were deemed to be crimes against humanity.
Many of those most guilty of such crimes could not be tried because they were already dead. Hitler had shot Eva Braun and then himself. Goebbels and his wife had poisoned their six children before killing themselves. Himmler, although captured, had swallowed cyanide concealed in a false tooth when he was about to have his mouth examined. Bormann was tried in absentia because they did not realize he was already dead.
Amongst those who were tried, the most prominent was Goering, who was convicted and sentenced, but escaped the hangman’s noose by taking cyanide in his cell on the eve of his execution. Of the 24, 12 were sentenced to death, and 10 were hanged on October 16th, 1946. The two not hanged were Bormann and Goering, both already dead.
The Nuremberg trials were the first to mention genocide, “the extermination of racial and national groups, against the civilian populations of certain occupied territories in order to destroy particular races and classes of people” (count three, war crimes). They led in the years that followed to the establishment of an international jurisprudence for crimes against humanity and war crimes. The outcome was the creation of the International Criminal Court, the international tribunal that operates in The Hague, with jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for such crimes.
The legacy of the Nuremberg Tribunal is that those who inflict crimes against humanity can be brought to justice. The knowledge that this could happen might restrain some people from committing acts of barbarism they might otherwise hope to perpetrate with impunity. The knowledge that those who do these things can later have justice meted out to them affords the world some satisfaction that humanity is no longer prepared to tolerate the mass cruelty and savagery that it once had no recourse to deal with. It is another sign that we are less passive about violence, and that “The Better Angels of our Nature” have made another advance towards a more civilized life.
We disagree entirely with Berkeley Group's Tony Pidgely over land hoarding and planning uplift
This is entirely the wrong solution:
One of Britain’s top housebuilders has backed radical reform of property laws to reverse the decline of home ownership by ending the hoarding of land and triggering a new wave of development.
Tony Pidgley, the founder of Berkeley Group, said landowners and developers should be forced to share “planning uplift” with local authorities.
The move would upend the residential construction industry but Mr Pidgley said the system is “in dire need of reform” to meet demand for hundreds of thousands of new homes.
“We need a central body that buys land, awards planning permission, then passes on the returns to the local community,” he said. “The whole of society should capture that value – it’s about decency.”
This makes no sense to us at all. The aim should be that there’s no planning uplift, not that the gain is shared communally.
Start back at the beginning. We have an artificial restriction upon who may build what, where. That restriction leads to there being value in having the permission to build something, somewhere. The value comes purely and solely from that restriction.
The result of this is that people have to pay very much more to live somewhere than they would without that set of artificial and entirely human, bureaucratically, created restrictions. We wish it to be cheaper for people to live somewhere. Thus we should be killing off the price rise caused by the restriction by killing off the restriction.
Shuffling around who gains that value created by the artificiality of the system doesn’t change that people have to pay more to live somewhere. That is, communal planning gain doesn’t solve our actual problem. Reorganising the system so that we issue more planning permissions, their value thus declining, would solve our problem.
Thus the answer is to issue more planning permissions until there is no planning gain at all. Or, as we’ve noted a certain number of times before, blow up the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors.
Arguing about who should get a slice of the pie when there shouldn’t be a pie to be shared at all isn’t dealing with the root problem here. Why don’t we actually try to solve the thing instead of shuffling it?
Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg
On November 19th, 1863, US President Abraham Lincoln delivered at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania a speech of 271 words that has resonated through the culture of the United States and of the liberal democracies throughout the world. It was the famous Gettysburg Address, delivered at the dedication of the Soldier’s National Cemetery, four and a half months after the victory there of the Union army over that of the Confederacy.
Edward Everett, a former senator, governor of Massachusetts, and president of Harvard, and regarded at the time as America’s best orator, delivered a two-hour oration before Lincoln's short remarks. Everett’s speech was fine, but was eclipsed by the brief eloquence of Lincoln’s short address.
Lincoln had travelled by train with some of his cabinet and staff. His assistant secretary, John Hay, noted that Lincoln looked pale, haggard, and unwell. It was a correct observation, for Lincoln was later diagnosed with a mild case of smallpox.
Contrary to myth, the speech was not written on the back of an envelope, or put together in moments. It was carefully crafted and corrected, and touched the bases of what the Union soldiers had been fighting for - the preservation of that Union and the values that were embedded in its birth.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
America had been established as a counterblast to the autocracies and tyrannies of Europe. It was to be a nation governed by its people, and although many of those founding fathers and early presidents were slave owners, it was now fighting a costly civil war to assert its commitment to universal liberty and equality before the law for all Americans. People had died in this cause, and Americans were being reassured that their sacrifice had been worthwhile, and was honoured accordingly.
“…we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The entire text of the speech is engraved into the South wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. It has been quoted and alluded to many times, but rarely more powerfully than when Martin Luther King delivered his “I have a dream” standing on the steps in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
People in several countries in the world today are demonstrating in the streets, some fighting, some dying, and they do so in the cause that Lincoln so eloquently expressed on that November day - government by the people instead of by those with the power to oppress.
How can the NHS be running out of heroin?
Jeremy Corbyn tells us all that he’d never allow a free trade agreement with the United States because this would mean the NHS would have to pay more for drugs:
There is a plot against our NHS. Boris Johnson is engaged in a cover-up of secret talks for a sell-out American trade deal that would drive up the cost of medicines and lead to runaway privatisation of our health service.
US corporations want to force up the price we pay for drugs, which could drain £500m a week from the NHS. And they demand the green light for full access to Britain’s public health system for private profit.
Our public services are not bargaining chips to be traded in secret deals. I pledge a Labour government will exclude the NHS, medicines and public services from any trade deals – and make that binding in law.
We have to admit that we can’t quite see the mechanism here. Freer trade means a reduction in the barriers to people offering us their production. As buyers that means we get offered more sources of supply. Quite how more people being able to offer us their goods increases prices we can’t quite see.
But then perhaps the NHS should be paying more for drugs anyway?
The NHS is running short of dozens of lifesaving medicines including treatments for cancer, heart conditions and epilepsy, the Guardian has learned.
An internal 24-page document circulated to some doctors last Friday from the medicine supply team at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), headed “commercial-sensitive”, listed many drugs currently hit by shortages at the NHS.
As we all know - at least should - the NHS negotiates down the prices it pays for drugs from whatever source. And one of the things about offering prices lower than other people for your purchasing is that at times people will find better places, other people to sell to. A shortage is in fact evidence that the price being offered is too low.
Which brings us to this, one of the drugs in that short supply:
Diamorphine: “insufficient stock to cover full forecasted demand in both primary and secondary care”.
Diamorphine is heroin. It’s nothing else either. And a regular complaint about that drug is that there are copious stocks in every city, town, village and hamlet in the country.
The market, paying whatever is the market price - even through that cost of illegality - provides enough heroin to float us all off into feeling no pain at all. The NHS manages, at that very same time, to have a shortage of the same stuff. You know, perhaps there’s something wrong with the price the NHS is paying? It’s too low perhaps?
Political diplomats
You might think that the term "political diplomat" is an oxymoron, but it is not one in the United States. Ambassadors representing that country are often chosen, not on the basis of any diplomatic experience or skills, but because they are friends and supporters of the current President. Joseph Kennedy, who died 50 years ago on November 18th, 1969, was such an appointee, representing President Roosevelt and US interests in Britain in the run-up to the Second World War, and during its early stages.
His qualifications for this highly important post were that he was an investor and businessman who had supported and contributed to the Democratic Party, and helped to bring Roman Catholic voters onside, as a high-profile Catholic himself. He was also very rich. He made a fortune in the 1920s bull market, often by what today would be called illegal insider trading. Famously he decided to quit the market in 1929, deciding it was over-extended when a shoe-shine boy gave him investment tips.
His wealth vastly increased when he invested in property during the Great Depression. He also invested in the newly-emergent movie industry in Hollywood. Allegations that he profited from bootlegging during Prohibition were never substantiated. President Roosevelt rewarded his massive financial backing and fundraising by making him Chairman of the new Securities and Exchange Commission, then Chairman of the US Maritime Commission.
In 1938 Joseph Kennedy was appointed US ambassador to the UK, and he hoped to succeed Roosevelt as President in 1940. However, he supported appeasement, and tried to arrange meetings with Hitler. He opposed the US giving military and economic aid to Britain. He sent back reports saying Britain was finished, and was looked down on for his defeatism. When the Royal Family and the government stayed in London during the blitz, Kennedy retreated to the countryside, prompting a Foreign Office official to say, “I thought my daffodils were yellow until I met Joe Kennedy."
Joe Kennedy wanted to be the first Catholic President, but it was not to be. Roosevelt stood again in 1940, and Kennedy’s influence declined. He resigned as ambassador. British MP Josiah Wedgwood described him as “a rich man, untrained in diplomacy, unlearned in history and politics, who is a great publicity seeker.” He was also thoroughly unpleasant, virulently anti-Semitic, saying of the Jews that “as a race they stink. They spoil everything they touch.” When he learned of Nazi assaults on Jews. Kennedy’s comment was, "Well, they brought it on themselves."
His wealth brought him political alliances, and it was alleged that he bought the Presidency for his son, JFK, by paying the notoriously corrupt Democratic Chicago machine to rig the votes in Illinois. Of the three sons who went into politics, two were assassinated and the third was disgraced when he crashed a car off a bridge and was too concerned to set up a false alibi that he left a girl to drown in the back.
There was nothing remotely diplomatic about the former ambassador. On the contrary he was a fixer and a crook, but he had money and used it to buy political favours. UK ambassadors are usually those who have worked their way through the Foreign Office and shown or learned the diplomatic niceties. Occasionally political appointments happen, but they are rare. On the whole, the UK system works. It is more low-key and more mannered. It doesn’t always appoint urbane and skilful diplomats, but it never appoints charlatans.
An amusement about Labour's nationalisation of the country's broadband system
Leave aside everything else being said about Labour’s surprise announcement that, given election victory, they’d nationalise the country’s broadband system. Then offer the service, over fibreoptic cabling, for free, to every household. Think just on the one point to follow:
Only 8% of the UK has access to ultra-fast broadband. McDonnell said: “The development of our new technology infrastructure has been held back as a result of the failures of government to invest, and BT itself obviously can’t marshal the resources government can, and that’s why we’re intervening.”
We’re just about to take the next step in mobile telecoms technology, to 5G. This is rolling out in 20 UK cities so far. One of the advantages of this 5G being that it’s possible to use it for the “last mile” for a broadband internet link.
That is, it is no longer necessary to put fibre to every household in the nation.
Which is precisely the point at which we’re promised government action to put fibre to every household in the nation.
If nothing else this election promise is an excellent example of why we shouldn’t use politics and government as a method of organising technological advance, no?
Global trading
The Suez Canal opened on November 17th, 1869, and it was on the same date 44 years later, in 1913 that the first ship sailed into the Panama Canal. The Suez Canal connected the Indian Ocean to the North Atlantic via the Mediterranean, and the Panama Canal joined the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Suez Canal eliminated the need for ships to round the Southern tip of Africa, and the Panama Canal cut the need to pass the stormy seas off the Southern tip of South America.
Both were stupendous engineering projects, and both facilitated global trade, making freight and passenger transit times both shorter and safer. Both were early pioneers of measures to speed up worldwide trade, and both lowered not only the time it took to convey goods internationally, but also the cost of doing so,
The construction of the Suez Canal was easier, but the Panama Canal required a vast system of locks to allow for the different sea levels of the two oceans. The French engineer, Ferdinand de Lesseps, who built the Suez Canal, was thwarted by the challenge of the Panama project, and saw his construction firm go broke, and have the undertaking later taken over by the United States.
Both canals have enjoyed a chequered political history, since they represented strategic choke points that different powers sought to control. They represent a determination to make the world smaller, and to make travel easier. Since their construction, this drive has continued with projects such as the Channel Tunnel joining Britain and France, and the Oresund Bridge connecting Sweden and Denmark. Later still came the $20 billion Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge, the world's longest sea-crossing bridge.
Perhaps the ultimate will be a link across the Bering Strait, establishing a land link between the United States and Russia, most likely built as a combination of a bridge and a tunnel. The point of these endeavours is that surface links, either by sea or land, make for much less costly transport than air transport provides. They also enable pre-packaged containers to be loaded onto different vehicles without goods needing to be off-loaded and reloaded at various stages of their journey.
Ventures such as these represent projects of international co-operation, as well as means of facilitating transport. They call to mind the view, attributed to Claude-Frederic Bastiat, that when goods cross frontiers, armies rarely follow. Nations that trade with each other grow used to negotiating with each other and tend to settle disputes peaceably, by agreement or by legal settlements.
A globalized world, trading across frontiers, and aided by the shortcuts that bold engineering projects can make possible, is more likely to be a peaceful world. It is also guaranteed to be a richer world, creating the wealth that international specialization and exchange makes possible. We thus have every reason to applaud and thank the bold engineering pioneers who made the world smaller, who made it closer, and who helped to make it richer.
A distinct failure of logic - why must utilities be publicly owned?
There is that PJ O’Rourke comment to consider, that if you think health care is expensive now wait ‘till you see how much it costs when it’s free:
Labour’s plans to renationalise part of BT to offer free broadband to all has sparked warnings that the plan would suffocate competition, bankrupt rivals and cost as much as £100bn.
Jeremy Corbyn said on Friday at Labour's policy launch that the party would buy Openreach, the network infrastructure arm of BT, from shareholders.
“What was once a luxury is now an essential utility. That’s why full fibre broadband must be a public service,” the Labour leader said.
Offering free broadband would save households £30 per month on average, Mr Corbyn said.
The contention that a government behemoth will cost each household less than £30 a month seems dubious, at best, to us.
But it’s the free to households that looks to be the deeper economic problem. Bandwidth is a scarce resource. Access to it has to be controlled in some manner. The best way of rationing any scarce resource is through the price of it.
After all, we don’t want everyone to be Hillary and running their own servers at home, that’s going to overpower the network - make it vastly more expensive that is - in no time at all.
There’s also that problem of an essential utility. Why must that be a public service? After all, if something is truly essential for a civilised life why would we turn over provision of it to the more inefficient method of doing so, bureaucratic control?
Oswald Mosley - a man who embraced evil
On November 16th, 1896, Sir Oswald Mosley was born. The title was inherited, not awarded, via a baronetcy. He saw service in the First World War, and was elected as MP for Harrow in his early 20s, serving there from 1918-24, initially as a Conservative, then as an Independent. He subsequently joined the Labour Party and became MP at a Smethwick by-election in 1926.
He served in the Labour Government of 1929-31, and was regarded as a possible future prime minister. He was described as “strikingly handsome,” “probably the best orator in England,” and “with great personal magnetism.”
However, he resigned from the government because he didn’t think it was doing enough on unemployment. He founded ‘The New Party,’ admiring what was being achieved in Europe by Mussolini and Hitler. The party became the British Union of Fascists, and aped its continental counterparts by having black-shirted thugs to commit street violence against opponents.
This largely and rightly discredited him, although it was the outbreak of the Second World War that saw his support evaporate, since the fascists were now the enemy. Mosely himself was interned in 1940 on the orders of Winston Churchill under regulation 18B, and was not released until 1943, and even then placed under house arrest.
After the war he attempted to return to politics several times, but was by now a marginal and discredited figure who had no impact on events. He went to live in Paris, and finally died just outside it at Orsay, at the age of 84, having achieved nothing of consequence since he was 35.
He is an example of an immense talent, fatally flawed by poor judgement. Looking at history’s ‘what ifs,’ had he not resigned he would almost certainly have held high office, perhaps even rising to become Prime Minister. As it turned out, though, he provides an example of those who, had they known where the road would lead, would never have set their first foot upon it. In wanting efficiency to address social problems, he ended up embracing evil.
In a more sinister ‘what if,’ had Hitler succeeded with his Operation Sea-Lion and conquered Britain, Sir Oswald Mosley might well have emerged as his puppet Prime Minister, as Vidkun Quisling did in Norway. Like Quisling, he might have engaged in, or acquiesced in, war crimes, including the murder of Jews and political opponents. Had Nazi Germany been ultimately defeated by the combined might of the USA and the USSR, Mosley might, like Quisling, have met his day of reckoning by facing a firing squad.
It never happened. And we fortunately never found out the consequences of his opinions in practice.