Ever get the feeling you’re being propagandised to?

Apparently that sugar tax was very good, very good indeed. So say all the newspapers:

A repeat:

The amount of sugar consumed by children from soft drinks in the UK halved within a year of the sugar tax being introduced, a study has found.

The tax, which came into force in April 2018, has been so successful in improving people’s diets that experts have said an expansion to cover other high sugar food and drink products is now a “no-brainer”.

The research, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, looked at responses from 7,999 adults and 7,656 children between 2008 and 2019 to the annual nationally representative UK National Diet and Nutrition Survey.

It showed that the daily sugar intake for children fell by about 4.8g, and for adults 10.9g, in the year after the levy’s introduction.

Except pretty much none of that was true. Or even is true with the exception that there really was a sugar tax imposed on soft drinks.

As Chris Snowdon points out here. For example:

Firstly, the study doesn't claim sugar consumption halved, as the headline says, nor that "sugar consumed by children from soft drinks in the UK halved within a year of the sugar tax being introduced" as the article says. It found that sugar consumption by children from soft drinks halved between 2008 and 2019, with nearly all that decline occurring before the sugar tax was introduced in 2018.

That, of course, is a less than ringing endorsement of the success of the tax in reducing sugar consumption - and therefore obviously of the case for any extension. As Snowdown goes on to point out it’s also not had the slightest effect upon child obesity which is the background justification for the whole idea.

We’re being fed unsugared pap as propaganda here.

Which does make us think more kindly of that Welsh idea. It should be a criminal offence to lie in politics. As we’ve noted that is going to curb politics rather a lot. But it is going to be interesting.

This is clearly politics - it’s advocacy of a tax, that is politics. Somewhere between fact and what we’re being told there’s a certain error. So, who do we bring the private prosecution against for lying in politics? The authors of the original paper? The journal that published? The Press Association (we assume the reason everyone is running it is because that’s the intermediate source)? The individual newspapers? Or perhaps just all of them?

It really is going to be fun, isn’t it? Now, how does that crowdfunding lark work - if Jololyon can get piles of cash to pay lawyers then….

Tim Worstall

We always have enjoyed this social media carrying the news argument

Enjoyment comes in many forms of course:

Meta has claimed news is not the antidote to misinformation and disinformation spreading on Facebook and Instagram, as the company continues to push back against being forced to pay media companies for news in Australia.

Meta announced in March it would not enter into new agreements with media companies to pay for news following the end of contracts signed in 2021 under the Morrison government’s news media bargaining code.

The assistant treasurer, Stephen Jones, is considering whether the Albanese government should use powers under the news media bargaining code legislation to “designate” Meta under the code, which would force the tech company to enter negotiations for payment with news providers, or risk fines of 10% of its Australian revenue.

If that happens then perhaps Meta will do as it did in Canada, simply stop allowing news links on the site(s). That would be bad because:

Publishers have said the effect of a news block would be devastating. Broadsheet – which publishes city, restaurant and entertainment guides – told the committee in a submission it would lose up to 52% of its revenue should news be blocked. The publisher said it “would make it nearly impossible for the business to survive”.

The traffic from Meta is an essential part of the news business plan and ecosystem. Some of us here having worked in the online news industry it’s very much a part of the game to try to craft articles, headlines, that then go viral on social media. Pats on the back ensue from having done it successfully.

So, the actual argument being deployed by the news industry. We make lots of money from Meta sending us traffic but Meta must also pay us for running the articles - our copyright, d’ye see? - which send us lots of luvverly, profitable, traffic.

We do rather expect competent adults to be able to see through this but apparently some governments don’t have any of those.

There is that stated enjoyment of seeing an entire industry having enough brass neck to try it on in this manner. But we’d also make the observation that any government that can’t see through this perhaps doesn’t have enough competent adults to run the water systems, electricity industry and so on - all the things they claim they’ve also got to do.

Tim Worstall

Just kill the bureaucracy

A note from Germany:

Activists who campaigned for decades for legalisation say that the rollout, closely watched by countries around the world to see how the experiment plays out, has been hampered by that most German of substances: red tape.

The hotly disputed law passed by Olaf Scholz’s three-party coalition, which took effect in April, legalised cultivating up to three plants for private consumption, the possession of 50g (1.75oz) of cannabis at one time at home and 25g in public.

But euphoria at the market finally emerging from the shadows has been stubbed out by regulatory zeal and what activists call political chicanery in conservative regions where the opposition to cannabis is strongest.

Frankly, given the usual German proclivity for bureaucracy we’re surprised they didn’t make home growing mandatory.

But there’s also a note from Britain:

The planning system is the last unadulterated vestige of postwar socialist utopianism, created in 1947 by the Town and Country Planning Act and founded on the well-meaning but ultimately flawed belief that a small group of people should dictate the development of complex systems, like an economy. Or a city. So real reform by Starmer will mean taking on cherished ideas of the left.

The tales of the wholly and entirely vile corruption of the system are there. But so too is the vast cost of having that bureaucracy in the first place.

The correct answer in both cases is simply to kill the bureaucracy. Simply state that there is no regulation of the activity, there are no permissions required.

Now, the Soviets used to, when the system became constipated like this, shoot a few commissars, something that has its attractions. But given that we’re liberals, proper ones, we’ll run with just killing the bureaucracy, not the bureaucrats. The rest of the Carthaginian solution, razing the system to the ground, ploughing the land with salt, should still proceed of course.

Abolish the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors. Blow up, proper blow up, kablooie.

The result would be the most lovely housebuilding led boom, just as we had in the 1930s. The last time we actually had the private determination of the use of land. It would even solve this problem:

Green MP opposes 100-mile corridor of wind farm pylons in his Suffolk constituency

Adrian Ramsay, the party’s co-leader, will go against the Government’s net zero plans

Well, perhaps not solve, entirely, what could be considered to be gargantuan hypocrisy but at least we’d have to pay no attention to it when solving climate change.

Let’s just be liberal about it - we want to be free, to do what we want to do.

Tim Worstall

This might not be a good start

New people, new ways, new ideas - and not all of them will turn out to be good either. As, possibly, here:

Shein’s £50bn listing

Donald Tang, the executive chairman of the China-founded online fashion retailer, could be in the UK this week as the company prepares to list in London. Its executives have already met Labour MPs and received an indication of support for its listing, stating that “raising investment” is among its “missions for government”.

However, the flotation has faced strong headwinds: from questions over Shein’s valuation and alleged labour malpractices to an EU plan to impose import duty on cheap goods. Shein pursued a London ­listing after ambitions for a US listing were seemingly frustrated by US legislators.

Reynolds will need to make it clear that Labour will not simply wave any listing through, while at the same time the City fights to ­protect its status on the world financial stage in the face of an exodus of stock-market big names.

Whether the low value customs exemption remains and so on is, obviously, entirely a matter for the government of the day. But what is this idea that the government - or the Minister responsible - should be approving or not each individual stock market listing?

No, we really do not want to have that sort of political interference. Nor, obviously, the sort of sucking up to the Minister that the exercise of such a power would, inevitably, entail.

If the London Stock Exchange - a private company recall - desires or does not desire Shein to be listed then that’s up to the LSE. Or, rather, should be and keep the politicians out of it.#

Tim Worstall

This isn’t the way the world works

Putting millions of people on weight-loss injections is a “horribly flawed” plan, he says, that would do little to lift people out of the junk food trap that is making them sick in the first place.

“It’s the ultimate in cynical reductionism,” he says. “It’s a ‘let them eat cake’ moment, really. Let the poor people eat Ozempic and we’ll just keep giving them food that makes them obese and mentally unwell. That just seems morally wrong.”

We do not have a system where people are “given” food. Many try to produce food. The people then pick and choose who food they would like to consume.

This is known as a free market in a free society.

Professor Tim Spector, the geneticist, microbiome expert and co-founder of the personalised nutrition company Zoe, finds the thought of Britain trying to jab its way out of an obesity crisis deeply disturbing.

At which point Tim Spector, professor or not, can go boil his head. Because the underlying insistence there is that the people should no longer be allowed to choose:

Given all these false dawns, Spector admits that he has lost faith in politicians of all shades. One solution, he says, would be to take health “out of the political game” and have it run by an independent cross-party group with a long-term focus. “A bit like when the Bank of England went independent. I would make improving the diet a cornerstone of health policy.”

A permanent bureaucracy choosing our dinners for us. And which we cannot change even by voting not to have it.

Head boiling seems a bit to tame. There is also this:

Obesity is driving a tide of chronic illness including heart disease, type 2 diabetes and depression, which is threatening to bankrupt the NHS.

As we keep pointing out obesity saves the NHS money. People who cannot even get that simple fact right, well, what are we going to believe of their statements on anything more complex?

Tim Worstall

Failing Chesterton’s Fence

Before you decide to get rid of something it pays to work out why it exists in the first place. Only if we can say that the original reason and cause no longer exists would it then be sensible to abolish the whatever it is.

This is not a tough piece of logic.

René Heiden pulls two glass yoghurt jars off the shop shelf, and lists the nearby supermarkets in which they can be returned once empty.

His Berlin grocery shop avoids single-use packaging in favour of reusable containers, a waste reduction model that is having something of a revival in Germany. But it’s surprisingly hard to get right.

Experiment away, of course. For that’s what a free market economy is, a constant merrygoround of experimentation. Technologies change, desires change, what’s the best meet of the two?

But it is still true that all too few stop to think about why we adopted the packaging we did adopt. Why? Because other ways wasted more of the thing being packaged. And the thing being packaged was and possibly is more valuable than the packaging. So, saving resources by economising on packaging could in fact waste more resources.

As we say, experiment away, that’s the only way we’ll all find out. But forcing people to use less packaging really might not be wise. Might, in fact, waste not save resources. For why did our forbears start using packaging in the first place?

Tim Worstall

Brexit has reduced trade costs

We agree, this isn’t what we normally hear but according to the Financial Times it is true. Brexit has reduced trade costs by reducing the problems of inspections, paperwork and bureaucracy at the border:

Goods entering the UK from outside the EU, which previously underwent rigorous physical or documentary inspections, are now entering with weaker checks or none at all, three agents told the Financial Times.

Of course, it’s possible to have different views about this. But that idea that Brexit would cripple trade by increasing border inspections and thus the costs of trade. This appears to be not wholly so.

A rough guide - rough, you understand - is that 50% of our trade is with the EU, 50% isn’t (that’s of the small minority of all trade that actually crosses the borders of the Kingdom of course). So, if non-EU imports are now being more lightly inspected then that makes - from the effects of trade barriers and costs - non-EU goods cheaper to us. Which is good.

Yes, yes, it’s possible to think that increasing the barriers on the other 50% of our trade is a bad idea. But then we’ve always backed unilateral free trade. Let’s lower the barriers on all.

But, Brexit means higher barriers on 50% of our trade, lower barriers on the other 50%. Are we thus evens? It’s possible to veer to the idea that we’re hugely better off. For the lower costs, the freer trade, is now with 7.5 billion of our fellow humans, the increased costs are with the 430 million left in that rump-European Union. We are, thus, about 15 times better off in our ability to trade with more people.

Which is good, you know?

Tim Worstall

We are so, so, looking forward to this

The Labour-led Welsh government has committed to introduce “globally pioneering” legislation that would in effect make lying in politics there illegal.

Our general view is that governments rarely know what they’re doing - Hayek was right about information flows to the centre after all. But our specific view here is that they’ve no clue. It is, however, going to be hugely amusing proving this point.

So much so that if they actually carry this through then it will be worth moving to Wales in order to have standing to contest matters. Private prosecutions are allowed, of course they are, upon criminal matters. So, if political lying is a criminal matter private prosecutions may be brought.

Of course, “lie” has several definitions. Saying something that is untrue, saying something untrue that you should have known is untrue, saying something untrue that you know is untrue as one order of meanings.

But just think of the joy to be had here.

“Inequality is increasing” - no, the usual measure, the Gini, is lower than it was in 2008.

“Renewables are cheap” - have you even looked at the varied prices being paid under CfD and so on?

“Building more houses won’t make them cheaper” - What?

And so on. It's possible to be as cynical as we are and just assume that lips moving means lies being told. It’s also possible to be less realistic and assume that at least some of what is said could, perhaps, be true. But this new law will give us all the ability to take those making the statements to court, to get them to prove their claims.

Which will be most fun - for we don’t think that many such claims will survive the process. In fact, we’re really very certain that absolute truth telling will mean the death of politics.

Tim Worstall

So, why does anyone believe the United Nations?

We’re told, by one of the United Nations bods:

Economic growth will bring prosperity to all. This is the mantra that guides the decision-making of the vast majority of politicians, economists and even human rights bodies.

Yet the reality – as detailed in a report to the United Nations Human Rights Council this month – shows that while poverty eradication has historically been promised through the “trickling down” or “redistribution” of wealth, economic growth largely “gushes up” to a privileged few.

In the past four years alone the world’s five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes, while nearly 5 billion people have been made poorer.

This seems somewhat at odds with a more evidence based approach:

Global economic growth seems to do just fine at reducing poverty. So, is this just some bureaucrat worried that folk might get rich without the tender ministrations of a bureaucrat?

Olivier De Schutter is UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights

Ah, no, this is the UN expert on that extreme poverty that economic growth is so good at killing off.

He’s taking short term numbers - including the effects of a global pandemic, lockdown and the associated inflation - and using them to argue that the one true cure for absolute poverty we’ve ever discovered, that economic growth, doesn’t work in curing absolute poverty.

He then ends up arguing that we should instead, plump for being poorer than we can be so that we can be more socialist.

So, remind us. Why does anyone listen to the United Nations?

So, nationalisation - industrial policy with strong conditionalities - causes shortages, does it?

This would seem to be a problem:

Labour’s plan for a net-zero economy powered by wind turbines and electric vehicles (EVs) risks being thwarted by a huge drop in factory apprenticeships, British manufacturers have warned.

But clearly, this is a problem that could be solved by the government really taking a grip on apprenticeships. Instituting some industrial policy with strong conditionalities, say?

The number of new apprenticeships has fallen by up to two fifths since the introduction of the government’s “broken” levy system, new research shows.

There has been a 41 per cent decline in the number of apprenticeship starts for those under the age of 19 since the scheme came into force, according to analysis by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD). For those aged between 19 and 24, participation has fallen by 36 per cent.

The levy, introduced in 2017, requires employers with an annual wage bill of more than £3 million to pay 0.5 per cent of payroll costs into a fund for training. It has come under fire from businesses such as AO World, Timpson, Tesco and the Co-op, which have argued that inflexibility, unsuitable courses and programme lengths are the biggest barriers.

As a result £4.4 billion raised by the levy had been kept by, or returned to, the Treasury over the past five years, rather than being spent on apprenticeships. It has also led to a decline in training opportunities and to the emergence of lower-quality schemes.

Ah. yes, the shortage of apprentices has been caused by the government getting a strong grip on the sector - the problem itself is industrial policy with strong conditionalities.

Such a pity we didn’t have any warning, some sort of heads up. After all, it’s not as if the Soviets nationalised farming and then everyone starved, is it?

Nationalisation causes shortages. Why didn’t we know?

Tim Worstall