No, this is a bad idea

Rachel Reeves will pledge to “hard-wire” net zero into the planning system to speed up the construction of onshore wind turbines and other green energy sources.

The shadow chancellor will use her Labour Party conference speech to announce a strategy to fast-track infrastructure such as wind turbines, pylons and solar farms through the planning system and protect developers from legal challenge.

No.

Reform of the planning system, yes, of course. Our favoured idea is to blow it up. Proper blow up, Kablooie. In the absence of that surely we should welcome some reform though?

Some reforms, yes, others now. The reason for the no here is that the reform is to be only for those favoured activities. Which isn’t the way to do it at all.

Even by the mere mention of reform being necessary then we have an admission that the current system does not work. But it does not work for everything, not just for the proto-Chancellor’s favoured list of activities.

It doesn’t work for net zero infrastructure, OK. But it also doesn’t work for fossil fuel infrastructure, for car plants, car battery plants, for housing, for supermarkets, for anything at all. The solution is not to introduce privilege - literally, private law - for favoured activities. It’s to reform the planning system for everything to that same level we’re going to have it for those favoured activities.

Special planning rules for what the Chancellor likes, no, better planning rules for everything, yes.

Ah, yes, but who values the valuations?

There are ideas that make perfect logical, even economic, sense. Which then don’t work out in reality. The reasons for the ultimate failure is that reality is inhabited by us, us human beings. Take this idea:

Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, claimed that Rachel Reeves, his opposition counterpart, was preparing to “fiddle the books” in a move “out of the Gordon Brown playbook”, harking back to claims that the former prime minister hid private finance initiative schemes “off balance sheet” in order to maximise borrowing. Labour insisted the claims were untrue.

The intervention came as the independent Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) also sounded a warning over Labour’s plans to introduce a fiscal rule that would take account of “public sector assets as well as public sector debt.”

Entirely sensible. Yes, of course the public sector should run a proper balance sheet. We do think that should be a proper balance sheet as well - we need to have all those future liabilities from promised pensions on it as well that is.

If government borrows to create an asset then yes, that is different from government borrowing to finance current spending. Our accounting for government should reflect that.

Now, why won’t the idea work? Because of who will value the valuations and how they will do it. For what will happen - no, will - is that the standard GDP assumptions will be carried over. Within GDP calculations we measure value added at market prices. There are not market prices for a lot of what government does. Therefore government is valued at the cost of provision of government.

This has the odd effect that if we increase the number of bureaucrats, increases the wages of bureaucrats, then we’ve increased GDP. Equally, if we fired the bureaucrats who regulate the red flags carried in front of those new-fangled cars then we’d have reduced GDP. Even as we increased value added.

But government is valued in GDP at the cost of the provision of government. So, how will government created assets be valued? At their cost of provision, obviously. At which point having an actual balance sheet doesn’t improve matters. Because we’ll not be valuing the assets created at their actual value.

No, we are not just being cynics. This is how the accounting will be done. Therefore the idea fails.

Think on it. This idea of a public balance sheet, showing assets as well as borrowings. Imagine someone decided to borrow £50 billion - an absurd idea, we know - to build a railway line that cuts 10 minutes off the not-central Birmingham to an outer suburb of London travel time. Truly a ridiculous thought, agreed, but an obesely hyperbolised example just to show the abject foolishness possible. That railway line would have an actual value - either objective or realisable - of zero. But it would be carried on the government’s balance sheet at the £50 billion cost of production. Because that’s how government is calculated in GDP.

The aim of having a government balance sheet would be that sure, borrowing that creates assets worth more than the borrowing is a grand idea - that’s adding value, it’s wealth creation. But given who will value the valuations it won’t work that way. Any government spending upon anything will be concluded to have added value. Something which isn’t the case and therefore this plan fails.

Increasing housebuilding by reducing the profit from housebuilding

That sounds like a very odd plan. But it does also seem to be Labour’s plan. Not that we’re particularly worried that it’s Labour’s plan - it’s simply a very odd plan indeed:

The next Labour government will oversee the biggest boost in affordable housing in a generation by getting tough on developers and reforming planning rules, the party’s deputy leader has said….(…)…Under Labour’s plans, the party would prevent developers from “wriggling out” of their affordable housing obligations, known as section 106 rules, by setting up a new expert unit to give councils and housing associations advice to get the best deal during negotiations with property firms. It would publish guidance to prevent developers claiming that building more affordable homes was not viable, permitting them to challenge 106 rules only if there were genuine barriers to building homes.

A more normal observation - backed by the more normal economics - is that if you want more supply of something allow suppliers to make more profit from doing that supplying. This increases the number willing to supply and so there is more supply.

Even in the current S 106 rules we see near all of the available profit being diverted into below market price housing. Which, we think quite naturally, reduces the amount of housebuilding. Do more of this and harder thus seems to us to be a very odd indeed manner of increasing housing supply.

A better solution would be to blow up the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors. Proper blow up. Kablooie. Which would have the side effect of doing away with S 106 and the duty, even the entire concept of, affordable housing. To replace it with all housing becoming more affordable as the supply increases.

The actual problem is that we nationalised land use back in 1947. As ever, government supply has led to a shortage. So, privatise land usage. Simples.

Or to put this more colloquially. Look, we’ve tried this land use planning thing for 76 years now. Housing is ever more expensive, your way just hasn’t worked, Matey. So let’s stop doing that then, eh?

So slippery slope is a fallacy, is it?

Well, given that one of us here has written a book on phlisophical fallacies yes, we do have to say that there is indeed a logical fallacy called the slippery slope one. That this action will inevitably lead to this next one and so on down that descent into madness. However, as those who have actually read this - or other - books upon philosophy and logic will recognise the fallacy is in assuming that what might happen will inevitably do so. If the second thing will happen as a result of the first, not might happen, then it’s not a fallacy at all.

Ahem:

Moves to ban smoking open the door to similar measures to tackle obesity, a former health minister has suggested.

Lord Bethell said that a tax on unhealthy foods should be next on the list, along with measures to stop junk food outlets opening near schools.

The Tory peer, who was a minister under Matt Hancock, welcomed Rishi Sunak’s plans to keep increasing the age that cigarettes can be legally purchased.

He said that the Government should make it “the first step of several” to overhaul lifestyles in Britain.

Lord Bethell said that there had been “a pull back” from efforts to tackle obesity, which was a matter of “regret” to him.

A government-commissioned food strategy in 2021 called for an expansion of sugar taxes, to cover foods as well as drinks, and the introduction of a salt tax, but the measures were never implemented.

Other measures promised under the Boris Johnson administration – including a proposed ban on adverts for such products online and before 9pm on television, and a ban on buy-one-get-one-free deals – have been pushed back.

Banning smoking is the start of that slippery slope. Discuss.

Small Modular Reactors: Why are we so determined to be at the back of the queue?

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) has just announced the winners in the competition to select suppliers of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).  GB Nuclear is supposed to be the driving force, independently choosing the latest and the best, but DESNZ has stepped in and included some of the least modern or qualified.  The six are: EDF, GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy International LLC, Holtec Britain Limited, NuScale Power, Rolls Royce SMR and Westinghouse Electric Company UK Limited.  These are all old tech: no advanced modular or molten salt reactors. They are high pressure and low temperature.  They are all low temperature despite DESNZs claim a couple of years ago that high temperature reactors are the future. DESNZ hopes to get around to ordering the first SMR by 2029 and actually having it running six years later. Four of the six are a long way from receiving design approval and EDF, for example, has no SMRs and has to go back to the drawing board. This should give them time to do so. None of those chosen is “rampable”, i.e. output can be varied by the Grid to match demand.  Modern ones are.

Three companies (Terrestrial, Arc Cleantech and Kairos) already have design approval in the USA or Canada or expect to receive it this year and have good high temperature / low pressure designs. They can also ramp up and down to meet demand. It would seem these and other companies have been put off entering the UK market for SMRs because of the slow decision-making process. This is disputed by GB Nuclear. The Americans and Canadians are linking their SMR technical approval systems so that either regulatory authority’s approval is automatically deemed to be approval by the other. approval by the other.[4]  The UK was invited to join but declined.  Approvals are slow so that will automatically ensure the UK falls even further behind.

This timeline means that the UK will be trailing the US, Canada, Poland, Romania and the Baltic States in SMR development.

A tobacco ban will make it at least as hard to get as cannabis

This is a bit of a shock to wake up to:

The government is creating the first smokefree generation, by bringing forward legislation so that children turning 14 this year or younger will never be legally sold tobacco products. This will prevent future generations from ever taking up smoking, as there is no safe age to smoke.

Prohibition has always worked so well, hasn’t it? For there will, of course, never be anyone at all who will supply a market even if it be illegal to do so.

This part we think is a masterpiece of illogic:

Major economies such as the USA, Australia and Canada are taking action to tackle sharp increases in youth vaping, and we risk becoming an outlier if we do not keep pace. Learning from other countries and our recent call for evidence, the government is therefore looking at measures to reduce the appeal and availability of vapes to children.

Well, OK, let us learn from Oz. They do have very much stricter rules on vaping than we do. They also have a markedly higher teen smoking rate, one that has been going up as those restrictions upon vaping are enforced. So, let’s learn, let’s not do that then. Except, of course, the insistence here is that we just copy them, not learn from them.

Yes, obviously it’s possible to go on carping at the details here. They still seem to think smoking costs the NHS money when it doesn’t, it saves it. The same is obviously true of the pensions system. This grates: “It is estimated that the total costs of smoking in England are over £17 billion.” for the estimate comes from Action on Smoking and Health, they’re like asking your barber if you need a haircut.

But enough carping and down to basics.

No.

We are all liberals here even if we might be slightly astringent on our economics. Consenting adults get to adult consentingly. This includes ingesting or inhaling fun products as defined as being fun by the person doing the inhaling.

And yes, this is indeed the hill we will die upon. Either we’re all adults who get to live our lives as we wish or we’re children who do not. We vote for being adults which means that bans like this we’ll not be having with.

In short, Prime Minister, Sec of State and Chief Medical Officer, it’s damn all to do with you. So be off with you. It’s not your business so don’t make it so.

Our thanks to Matt Brookes for that headline.

So, whadda ya want? More equality or more regulation?

It’s a fairly standard assumption these days that more equality, less inequality, is better. We’re not sure we share that idea but there we go. We’re also insistent that inequality is very much lower than it is regularly measured as. But again, there we go.

It is also a fairly regular assumption these days that everything must be regulated. We can’t just leave things be, there must be rules over who can do what about which and to whom.

There’s a certain tension between these two:

In the last several decades, despite widespread concerns about rising income inequality and increasing federal regulations in the United States, only a small group of researchers have tried exploring and understanding this relationship to date. Relevant empirical studies, overall, find regulations to exacerbate income distribution, thereby increasing income inequality within an economy. Recently, a similar association has been reported for the U.S. However, the existing analysis lacks evidence of a causal effect. Here, I unravel the causal impact of federal regulation of industries on income inequality across the U.S. states for the time span 1990–2013.

The reasoning should be obvious enough. As with large companies positively lusting after their own industries being more highly regulated in order to defeat any market insurgencies. Regulation keeps those in privilege in privilege. The more normal turnover of economic position that results from changing technologies and entrepreneurial adventure becomes constrained by the regulation which, umm, constrains the both of them.

Which leads to an interesting question. Which do you want? That regulatory state or a more equal one? Because you cannot have both.

This is, of course, delightful for our side of the argument. Kill the regulatory state as we wish anyway and gain also what everyone says they want, more equality. But it is also a bit of a killer for the way we’re actually governed, which is that all say they desire that less inequality while still passing regulations by the library-load.

But it does all lead to the possibility of a plan. We can increase equality in Britain by burning half the legislation and firing half of the bureaucrats. Some would say that this faces a problem, which half of each? But here’s what’s really bad about the current position - we don’t think it matters which half of either, things will still improve.

Violet Elizabeth Bott economics

From the recent JRF report upon poverty in Scotland:

Trapped in low pay – built on gender discrimination

While the National Minimum Wage and the National Living Wage (NLW) have created a more predictable floor within pay levels, the real Living Wage (rLW) is now the widely accepted minimum rate for good employers to pay or aim for. When we refer to ‘low pay’ in this report, we mean pay below the rLW.

Knowing the importance of the rLW, we show that 1 in 10 workers are in persistent low pay, that is, that they have earned below the rLW for at least four of five years. Very few people in low pay are able to sustainably move out of low pay with only 1 in 20 moving to pay above the rLW in the same 5-year period.

To translate, “We and our mates made up a number for nice wages. If anyone disagrees with us that earning below this is poverty then we’ll sthwceam until we turn blue.”

Just to emphasise how silly a number this is. At 1750 hours a year, that’s £19,075. For a single person that’s in the top 6% of global incomes. For a single parent with 2 kids that’s top 15% of the global income distribution. Yes, of course that is PPP adjusted.

That’s not, in fact, poverty. All it is is a little less than other people in the same country get - and more than some others of course. And we really do insist upon this - in opposition to all the Ms Botts out there - that a little bit of inequality simply is not the same thing as poverty.

Poverty is not having a bowl of rice a day - rather than this worrying about whether the second pair of sneakers is bought in JD Sports or Primark.

But why hate inheritance tax if only 4% pay it?

One of those things that we’re seeing said out there. Only 4% of estates pay inheritance tax. Yet 30% of people are against the tax on the basis that they might have to pay it. Well, of course, it’s possible to blame the innumeracy of the general population, which is what many are doing.

An alternative to that is to actually think - yes, yes, we know, this is politics, cogitation is not a positive value here - and to wonder why? Why does such a large portion of the population hate this tax upon dead people? Who, after all, can’t complain that much, they are dead after all.

Yes, we are aware that there’s a darn good classical liberal argument for a 100% inheritance tax. We could - should - succeed by our own efforts not by membership of the lucky sperm club. There is also that opposing - and still classically liberal idea - than an increasing portion of the population economically independent of the State might lead to that desired outcome of a smaller state.

But leave aside the theory for a moment. Why do so many hate something that won’t affect them? One asnwer is that it doesn’t matter. Assume, for a moment, that we are a democracy - ahahaha. So, if the folks are against it then it doesn’t happen. You know, will of the people and all that.

But that point that only 4% of estates pay inheritance tax yet 30% think they will be affected. How do we explain that?

The most obvious point is that the incidence of inheritance tax is not actually upon estates. Yes, there is that Australian finding that people will time their death so that death duties do not have to be paid. But, you know. The real point is that the incidence of interitance tax is not upon the dead nor their estates.

Recall what tax incidence actually studies. Whose wallet gets lighter as a result of the tax? Given shrouds and pockets it’s not the dead, is it? It’s the people who inherit less money as a result of the tax. So the number of people against inheritance tax is not the number of people whose estate will be subject to it when they die, it’s the number of people who think they might inherit from one when someone does.

We’re all, as we know, part of that complex system that is society. Inheritance - even perhaps of modest amounts - is common enough among nieces, nephews, friends as well as direct descendants. The number of people against inheritance tax is not the number dying, it’s those not benefitting from those dying. Or, rather, benefitting less.

This does not, we are aware, answer the question of whether inheritance tax is just, righeous, or the robbing of those no longer able to complain. But it does answer why so many are agin’ it. The incidence of inheritance tax is not upon the dead, nor their estates. It’s upon those who inherit less as a result of the tax. And that might be greedy, a desire for unearned wealth, inequity producing or even bourgeois freedom generating.

But there are many more people hoping to inherit than there are estates being inherited from. Which is why the number of those opposing inheritance tax is higher than the number of estates being taxed.

Seems fairly obvious to us to be honest but we’ve not seen it mentioned elsewhere as yet. The opposition to inheritance tax is those who think they’ll receive less money as a result of it. Which, you know, is obvious, no?

An absurdity about climate change

This is not just an absurdity, it’s wrong:

NHS to ban ‘useful’ anaesthetic to hit net zero targets

But this is what we end up with when we’ve a societal frenzy - as with religious epidemics, to the extent that worshipping Gaia isn’t in fact a religion.

The NHS is banning an anaesthetic gas to meet net zero targets in a move that a leading climate expert has warned lacks any scientific basis.

The health service has said it is “decommissioning” desflurane by early next year in order to help reduce “harmful emissions”.

The first error is to even dream that the NHS itself should be net zero. For that’s not what net zero means.

We don’t even agree with the idea itself - we think that human utility will be maximised over time, the aim of the entire game, by having more climate change and emissions than the net zero target allows. But put that aside for the sake of the argument here.

Net zero means that society as a whole is net zero in emissions. Not that each sector, subsector and detail of society is zero in emissions. That’s the very meaning of the word “net” in there. We cannot all be zero emittive after all - CO2 emissions are an inevitable result of breathing. So, some emissions are to be allowed even if the aim is for the system to be that net zero. And those that are to be allowed are going to be those with the highest value, of course. Like, say, taking away the extreme pain of surgery by providing anaesthesia.

This extends further too of course. People value flying - the average British summer causes that. OK, so that 2% of total emissions that are from flying are something we value highly, quite possibly more than the less climate change that would result from its absence. We can even test this - Air Passenger Duty is at or at least around the levels of a Stern compliant carbon tax and yet the flying still happens. People value flying more than they do the lesser amount of climate change. Therefore - that maximising of utility over time - we should keep the flying at the expense of the extra climate change.

Which does bring us to an interesting result. When we actually examine human preferences properly, by revelation not expression, then we find that net zero isn’t a target that everyone wants. And that before we get to the logical truth that the entire point of net zero is that not every activity needs to be non-emittive.

Or as we can put it, carry on gassing the people in pain and put up with the extra millimetre of water upon Bangladesh.