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If only the young Mr North read his own material

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8. It’s all part of the “invisible government” that we take for granted. That’s why toryboy morons assume we can get rid of it. To them, these non tariff barriers are just protectionist devices cooked up by Brussels bureaucrats with nothing better to do.

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Pete North

@PeteNorth303
22h22 hours ago
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9. So let us put this to the test shall we? If JRM thinks deregulation to African levels is right for the UK let him put his money where his mouth is. Let’s let him pick one, from three containers of baby milk, to feed the latest of his brood.

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Pete North

@PeteNorth303
22h22 hours ago
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10. Then let’s lace one of them with powdered floor bleach and ask him to take the gamble. What then do you suppose the arsehole’s view on non-tariff barriers would be? I wonder.

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Pete North

@PeteNorth303
22h22 hours ago
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11. And if you think I’m building a straw man here, here’s Tim Worstall of the ASI’s worldview. They really do think like that.

http://peterjnorth.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-freedom-to-die-horribly.html …

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Pete North

@PeteNorth303
22h22 hours ago
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12. This is the mentality behind the Toryboy think tanks and BrexitCentral. They really genuinely don’t have the first clue. This is why they only talk about tariffs. Anything else is light years beyond their understanding.

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Pete North

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22h22 hours ago
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13. You would think that think tanks claiming to represent commerce would have a better handle on this but in the end they are free market dogmatists who favour their own scripture over real world evidence. London free marketeers are cult.

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Pete North

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22h22 hours ago
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14. What they don’t understand is how regulatory controls add value. Most trades in goods are not one of purchases. They are part of established value chains. Business wants to stay in business and its only fly by nights who want one off trades.

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Pete North

@PeteNorth303
22h22 hours ago
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15. In this the essential element of any value chain is trust. Supermarkets can but with confidence if they can see that trusted institutions have certified produce – and that in turn is peace of mind for the consumer. It also reduces waste and improves quality.

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Pete North

@PeteNorth303
22h22 hours ago
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16. Trade analysts will often say that an FTA doesn’t necessarily reduce prices, but it does improve the quality of value chains and trade facilitation measures removing bureaucratic overheads increase the profitability. This is why we have regulatory harmonisation.

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Sigh.

Yep. I – we – agree that trade and business is a multiple iteration process. We all end up trading with those we trust. On the grounds of getting what we asked for. Without that powdered bleach, unless a box of powered bleach is what we actually asked for.

Which is why we don’t think that regulation by the bureaucracy is all that important. Because people do trade with those they trust, trust doing that job of regulation rather well. Regulation does have its merits, most certainly. If all are following it then it means that you can take a flyer on some supplier you don’t know, who doesn’t have a reputation nor track record. As long as new entrants can afford to meet the paperwork costs of the regulatory standards of course. But then it’s not entirely unknown for people to lie about having followed the regulations, so it’s less effective than it might be.

Note that this isn’t the view merely of some Tory Think Tank Boy. I supplied much of the world – for a decade – with its desires for one specific metallic element. As far as there was any international standard for the material I wrote it. The thing I was really selling was that I delivered what I said I would when I said I would. When I didn’t – mistakes happen – I corrected matters. That’s why I got repeat orders.

Quite, regulation matters, but who is doing the regulating? That trade works on the basis of trust means that trust – and verify! – works. The bureaucracy might be nice, might not, but it’s not necessary.

I did, in those metal days, have one intervention with that regulatory apparatus concerning international trade. A bloke in the US bureaucracy wanted a sworn statement that 10 kg of scandium oxide was not an animal product.

Most useful, that declaration, most useful to all concerned.

19 thoughts on “If only the young Mr North read his own material”

  1. If the Norths put as much effort into lobbying for their vision of Brexit as they did abusing people who are fundamentally on the same side, they might have got somewhere with it.

  2. North snr reminds me of the character Saruman from Lord of the Rings, who studied the Enemy for so long and in so much detail that he became convinced that he could never be beaten and so eventually ended up on the same side.

  3. Pete North talks very authoritatively, but what has he actually done in life, except parrot his father’s views and copy his father’s aggressiveness? He makes some good points at times, but as with his father it’s hard to disentangle the good points from the desire to do everyone else down.

    And is anyone really proposing that we get rid of all regulation on imports? That we have no laws against having poisonous food?

  4. How odd. That someone would expend so much time, energy, effort & emotion on a social media platform. The only people reading that will be those in total agreement with the author & those in violent disagreement who go there to engage in pointless angry argument.
    The one group of people who won’t be influenced by it are the very large group who might be undecided on the issues discussed & seeking information & guidance.
    But then, Twatter’s a complete mystery to me. A curious form of intellectual masturbation that’s of interest to no-one else but its users. A very small stage to strut on by equally small people, occasionally blown up out of all proportion by equally small minds in the legacy media, incapable of finding anything useful to write about.

  5. Bloke no Longer in Austria

    EU regulation usually comes as a result of lobbying by an interested party: involved corporations, environmentalists, NGOs etc etc. Each lobby tries to steer the regulation to its own advantage – the classic example and my own hobby-horse is the light bulb ban, which was engineered by Osram, Philips and GE.

    What he fails to understand is that one can have all the regulations in the world, but unless every aspect of a supply chain is micro managed by an army of inspectors in every country, then a determined and unscrupulous supplier will circumvent them, e.g. Romanian horse meat in our Shepherds Pies. Yes it may be only for a one-off trade or short duration, but that is all the trader will need and as long as he doesn’t have his collar felt, will re-appear somewhere else flogging something different.

    Like BiS, twitter is a mystery to me too. I read it for a laugh, usually to see how often people can apply anti-platonic logic and manage to hold two contradictory positions in the same tweet.

  6. “EU regulation usually comes as a result of lobbying by an interested party: involved corporations, environmentalists, NGOs etc etc. Each lobby tries to steer the regulation to its own advantage – the classic example and my own hobby-horse is the light bulb ban, which was engineered by Osram, Philips and GE.”

    Very true.

    But the lobbyists are the symptom, not the problem. They are a natural reaction to excess government power.

    Light bulbs are none of government’s business. But if government is going to intrude, the makers will beseech them.

  7. And there was me thinking that the role of the state was to make sure that if someone sells you something which is not what they said it would be, there would be consequences for that person of the jail variety.

    All regulations should be made optional and you would soon see which have any value at all.

  8. If you are the kind of cunt who is ok with putting bleach in baby milk you are the kind of cunt who doesn’t care that some pack of political pork are forbidding you to do so. Esp if said pork is far away and all hot air anyway.,

    North Jnr is a yobbo type. Who knows best. He has inherited his Dad’s ego without his Dad’s undoubted brains. Tho’ ego has spoiled North Snr who collects only the faithful these days.

    In fairness Jnr has upset a lot of council tax collectors.

  9. The Meissen Bison

    A bloke in the US bureaucracy wanted a sworn statement that 10 kg of scandium oxide was not an animal product.

    Unicorn fumets are made of this.

  10. Compared to the Law of Tort, regulations are mere piffle, mostly created to enable rent seeking by incumbent businesses.

  11. The Norths are a bit like the never-Trumpers. They purport to support the principle of what is happening but flail against it because it’s being done by “the wrong people in the wrong way – dammit!”

    I pretty much gave up on “EU Referendum” when it came out against holding the EU referendum.

  12. The amount of regulation a trade requires is proportional to it’s rarity (buying a mortgage), it’s expense risk (buying a mortgage), it’s supplier anonyminity (flagging down a Hackney), the danger of the product (buying radium). Almost everything else is protectionism. And common standards aren’t regulation, they’re the ability to know that the BS6 screw you buy from China will fit into the BS6 nut you buy from Australia..

  13. According to google Peter North is best known as a colleague of Rocco, nickname being the North Pole apparently

  14. ‘A bloke in the US bureaucracy wanted a sworn statement that 10 kg of scandium oxide was not an animal product.’

    When I applied for Social Security, the nice SSA lady told me I was eligible for death benefit from my first wife. She told me. When I told her I wanted to sign up for it, she told me I had to send her proof that she had died.

    WUT?!?!

  15. MC – Saruman studied the enemy so long and hard that he became the enemy. Nothing to do with knowing Sauron couldn’t be beaten.
    Its common enough outside of fiction too.

  16. Yes it’s sad. I gave up on North’s EU Referendum when it seemed to become more about attacking people on the same side for any pettifogging technical deviation from his personal, infinitely detailed, ideal than combating the EU.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if many people over the years who were potentially anti-EU arrived there and simply recoiled from the bitter sniping over old personal feuds – about which few knew and even fewer cared – and went away confused and disillusioned.

  17. @ Martin
    My reading was that he imitated the Enemy (capital E) because he believed Sauron could not be beaten by the honourable fighters and developed Great Orcs who could tolerate sunlight – a parallel for Nazis fighting against Bolsheviks. There are two interpretations (i) that he wanted a major satrapy under Sauron or (ii), less plausible, that hje imagined his superior-quality Great Orcs, combined his wizarding powers, could enable him to win.
    In Stalingrad, a quarter of a million Great Orcs killed over a million of Sauron’s Orcs until they ran out of bullets, but in the end they lost. In the book (but not the film) the Ents and Huorns (a parallel for the Commonwealth, supporting the very English Hobbits) destroy the Orcs at Helm’s Deep.

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