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August 2010

What if government ran everything?

As the Federal Government does for the Indian tribes?

But, it is the exception – many tribes still lack access to even the most basic of human necessities. Some haven\’t the infrastructure to provide running water, let alone business opportunities. The federal government continues to breach its trust responsibility, evidenced by staggering statistics: Native Americans have the highest rates of poverty, unemployment and disease of any ethnic group in America. Upwards of 70,000 Navajos have no running water. Many must travel several miles to wells and are forced to haul water back to their homes for family and livestock, while neighbouring non-Indian communities spring up in the desert like oases, so proud are they of their green lawns and swimming pools.

Hmm, what? You mean having government run everything doesn\’t create a nirvana, is not the promised land flowing with milk and honey?

Well, bugger me then….

Can you do that?

The closest experiment along these lines is probably Argentina\’s exit in 2002 from its dollar exchange-rate peg (embodied in its currency board) to a floating regime that depreciated the peso by 300% in the first three months.

I don\’t think you can, can you? Depreciate by 300%?

I think I know what they mean, the peso went from 1 to the dollar to 3 to the dollar (or maybe 4) but that would be a 66% devaluation (or 75%) rather that 300% wouldn\’t it?

The rest of the piece is what Argentina tells us about how tough it would be for a country to leave the euro.

Which indeed is true, it would be very tough and not a happy time for anyone.

But that isn\’t actually the question that needs to be asked. The one that does is whether leaving would be a more painful experience than staying in…..and in the absence of either full fiscal union or selective debt defaults there are plenty who would argue that staying in will be the more painful option.

OK, so this is about Paul Gauguin

When Williams made this argument for what he called moral luck, it provoked huge controversy. Wasn\’t an act either moral or immoral, regardless of the consequences?

Would Gauguin\’s abandonment of his family have been justifiable if he\’d drowned on the way to Tahiti? Or if he\’d been simply a bad watercolourist? The argument is being made that because he produced great art as a result then it was OK.

Bit morally suspect really….the ends justify the means, no?

Would Lenin and Stalin\’s massacres of tens of millions have been justified if communism had in fact arrived? Pol Pot\’s of a third of the population if agrarian socialism had in fact turned out to be what made everyone happy?

You see the problem and I don\’t see that there\’s a let out because great art rather than the perfect society was created (although of course I do see the difference between abandoning a Danish wife in Denmark with her five children and rounding up millions into camps).

But we cannot simply turn around and insist that the end never justifies the means either. Millions died defeating Hitler and that\’s generally regarded as morally just. (Generally, for there are those who insist that that end does not justify violence.)

Not sure there\’s anywhere to go with this well known moral conundrum except to say that I\’m deeply unconvinced that artists have any more of a get out clause than the rest of us.

Umm, no

Sion Jenkins, the former deputy head teacher cleared of murdering his foster daughter Billie-Jo, has been refused compensation for the time he spent in jail before he was released.

This may be how the system does work but it most certainly isn\’t how it should work.

Mr Jenkins was eventually cleared of killing Billie-Jo in 2006 after hung juries at two re-trials.

At the time of the application in 2008, Mr Jenkins said: \”I fulfil all the criteria.\”

However, the Ministry of Justice is understood to have rejected his request.

A spokesman refused to comment on the case but said: \”For the purposes of paying compensation, the applicant must be shown to be \’clearly innocent\’.\”

The definition of guilt should be exactly the one that we use in the courts themselves. Either guilty or not guilty.

To have any other measurement is to put the bureaucracy in the place of the law and courts.

Think it through for a moment….take, say, the Guildford or Birmingham bombers. Set up, as we know they were, they served long sentences, some dying in jail. Eventually they are freed and cleared. I\’ve actually had someone (someone who went on to become an MP) turn to me and say that, well, they really were still guilty, they only got off on a technicality.

So if they, the powers that be, are allowed to argue with the decisions of the courts, that not guilty does not mean clearly innocent, then we can see how the system will slip and slide can\’t we? It\’ll go from one schoolteacher through to any and everyone that \”they\” think the courts have \”let go\”.

And that\’s the damn point of having the courts in the first place. To make absolutely damn certain that \”they\” don\’t get to decide who is guilty or who is \”clearly innocent\”.

A question for legally minded peeps. Scotland has a third verdict of \”not proven\”. If upon retrial a prisoner has that third verdict, not proven, and is thus released, do they get compo?

He digs deeper than I did

So, just to recap: a woman who used to live with a lord in a 365-room mansion, now in a household with a combined income of some quarter of a million pounds a year, has read a PR puff commissioned and paid for to advertise a price comparison website, and uses this as evidence that we should all just take what we\’re given by the state and shut up.

Welcome to the world of chattering-class leftism, readers.

Err, Laurie?

The distinction between sexuality itself and the submissive, identikit heterosexual performativity currently demanded of young women and girls is a crucial one. Only when we accept that girls have sexual agency can we ask why it is so often stripped from them by structures of violence, shame and abuse. Only when we understand that young women and girls have legitimate sexual desires can we demand to know why those desires are stolen, exploited and sold back to them by a culture that bombards them with images of perky, passive, pouting women whose defining characteristic is their erotic availability to men.

Yes, it\’s OK, I do know that there are more variations of sexuality under the Sun than anyone has quite managed to catalogue as yet (no one has as yet listed all of the examples of Rule 34 for example).

However, in a species which reproduces sexually it\’s really not all that much of a surprise that the general, widespread, most common, \”normal\” if you like, expression of sexuality is about sexual reproduction is it?

You know, Tab A, Slot A, availability or not for that activity, that sort of thing?

Umm, no Mr. Fry, no…..

And sometimes it\’s great for Stephen Fry going on a rant about something. For instance, during a discussion of Witchcraft he discusses how most witches put on trial in England were acquitted – and fewer than 500 hundred were killed for being witches, he says this about The Da Vinci Code…

\”We were much gentler than you might think. They were acquitted… We were apparently rather resistant to the idea of destroying witches in England, unlike views espoused in certain books – and I use the word book very loosely – like, The Da Vinci Code…\” *makes a spitting noise* \”It is complete loose stool water. It\’s arse gravy of the worst kind… that particular pan of that kind of material claimed that about 5 million women were burned or hanfed around Europe for being witches. There\’s no evidence there was anything like as much as that. Probably about 500 hundred. And they weren\’t burned, they were hanged.\”

No, not really true.

It\’s true that in England there were few to no burnings for witchcraft (although it was used for other offences) but Scotland was another matter.

Although many people might associate burning at the stake with witchcraft, it was much less used for that offence in Britain than in other parts of Europe – particularly France, Switzerland and the Nordic countries. In England witchcraft was a felony and thus punishable by hanging. Alice Molland is thought to have been the last person to suffer for witchcraft, at Exeter in 1684.  However, Scotland did burn witches and there are many recorded instances of both sexes suffering this fate.  On the 18th of May 1671 Janet McMuldroche and Elspeth Thompson were strangled and burned at Dumfries.  The following are the words of the warrant for their execution, dated two days earlier : “Forsamuch as in ane court of Justiciarie holden be us within the Tolbuithe of drumfreis vpon the fyftein day of May instant Jonet McMuldroche and Elspeth Thomsone were found guiltie be ane ascyse of the se[ver]all articles of witchcraft spe[cif]it in the verdict given againest them theiranent Were decerned and adjudged be us the Lords Commissioners of Justiciarie to be tane vpon thursday next the eighteen day of May instant Betuixt tuo and foure houres in the afernoone to the ordinare place of executione the toune of drumfreis And their to be wirried at ane stake till they be dead And theirafter their bodies to be brunt to ashes And all their moveable goods and geir to be escheat.
Note : (wirried means strangled and escheat means confiscated)
The last person to be burned as a witch in Scotland was Janet Horne at Dornoch in Ross shire in 1727.

It\’s also true that many (if not most) were strangled before the body was burnt but that\’s not quite a hanging. and it\’s also not true that this was common across Europe.

Bwahahahaha

So, when he asked the canteen at HM Treasury to send up a fish-and-chips lunch for himself, Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of ­England, and four aides, he was astonished to be told that it would cost £148.58.

A quick phone call from Mr Osborne established that if the men who run Britain’s economy descended two flights of stairs, they could eat the same lunch in the canteen with pudding and a fruit drink at a cost of just £32.88 for all six.

Determined not to pay the extra £115 charge allowed under a Private Finance Initiative scheme introduced by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown when he was Chancellor, Mr Osborne declared: ‘We will eat in the canteen.’

Accompanied by Mr King and their four advisers, Mr Osborne then walked down the stairs in the Whitehall building and sat at a Formica table with his lunch guests after lining up in the self-service queue and paying the bill with his own money.

Such a wonderful thing, PFI, eh?

When you put it like this Nick it\’s easy to shoot down

Nick Cohen on the Spirit Level stuff.

Their arguments, buttressed by decades of research from around the world, seem self-evident to him. Once countries reach a certain level of wealth, what affects the citizenry is not the growth in GDP but the level of inequality. Man is a social primate and people who worry about their status and feel too keenly the humiliations their superiors inflict on them become anxious, mistrustful, isolated and stressed.

To the first point, the growth in GDP, no, their book and research does not address this in any manner at all. What they do claim is that a higher level of such doesn\’t matter. This is, unfortunately for them, roundly demolished by the work of Andrew Leigh (he\’s a Labor candidate in Australia, harldy some foaming rightist). But more importantly given that Wilkinson claims to be looking at levels he\’s saying nothing about the effect of changes in those levels.

There\’s very good evidence indeed that it is the process of rising GDP which engenders the happiness, not the level of wealth. An economy where GDP is static or falling seems very much to be an unhappy society. Not least because in a static economy the usual rise in labour productivity will mean ever greater unemployment.

As to the second point, status, sure, being low on the totem pole leads to both stress and unhappiness. but they are measuring income inequality, not status inequality. There is absolutely nothing at all which would lead us to the conclusion that equalising incomes would lead to the abolition of status hierarchies….as our own history and the history of every human society shows. Precisely because we are social animals, social primates, there is always a status hierarchy. Without one based upon cash we\’d simply have some other determinant….religion, birth, size, murderousness, blondness, whatever. As we have in fact done in the past.

A glorious statement of ignorant leftism

Since when was giving people a choice a good idea?

The coalition\’s obsession with self-determination, whether on schools or GPs, penalises the least able

In short, no one should have choice because some are too ignorant to make use of it.

If uncertainty about preserves is a problem one can probably live with, or possibly enjoy, a similar helplessness in the face of big, irreversible decisions is, to judge by a new study, State of Confusion by Professor Harriet Bradley of Bristol University, something that should worry a government that advertises choice as an unmitigated good…….After surveying 3,000 people on their attitudes to choice, Bradley says: \”I believe most people want the state to make these big decisions for them.\” This is not only because, in many cases, consumers are well aware that the choice of, say, school or hospital is – unlike a commercial selection of jams or phones or holidays – an utter fiction. The process of choosing is itself oppressive when the issues are life-changing, relating to health, money or careers.

An obvious question presents itself. Did Professor Harriet Bradley choose to become an academic? Work, strive, to become a Professor? Decide to write a book?

Wouldn\’t she be happier stacking shelves in the supermarket if that\’s where the State would place her to relieve her of the anguish of having to make a decision?

And if not, why not?

Is there perhaps some special class of people who both should decide for themselves and also decide for the peons? Those special enough to cope with the difficulty of choice and to alleviate others of it?

Because if that is the argument then they can all go fuck themselves quite frankly.

Umm, no.

Within 10 years, the Gates Foundation is projected to have a GDP bigger than 70 per cent of the world’s nations.

The Gates Foundation won\’t have a GDP of course.

But even if we were to compare the size of the fund to the size of a country\’s economy it would still be nonsense.

So, to set up, we\’ll say that the Gates Fund will have $70 billion in assets (Bill\’s plus Warren\’s). OK.

There are approx 200 nations so the one dividing the bottom 70% from the top 30% will be the 60th (this is all very rough of course).

Country 60 seems to be Qatar with a GDP of $84 billion.

So, clearly, the Gates Fund will not have as assets more than the GDP of the bottom 70% of nations. The 61st, Angola, on its own is nearly there.

But we should go further. Assets are a stock, GDP is a flow. What is the flow to the Gates Fund? 10% would be rather a high return for I doubt very much that it\’s heavily invested in stocks or commodities etc. Bonds, short term commercial paper, Treasuries, sounds much more likely. So let\’s assume a 5% return. We can wibble about that but it\’s somewhere near the truth.

$3.5 billion a year is now our number which should be compared to the flow of a country\’s GDP.

Hmm, country 147, Barbados, manages that on its own.

Umm, using one list we actually find that the bottom nine countries have a GDP, in toto, of $3.8 billion.

More than the Gates Fund.

So, far from the Gates Fund being larger than 70% of the world\’s nations it looks like it might be larger than the smallest 5% nations added together. Or, if they are to be counted individually, larger than 25% of the world\’s nations.

But wait! We can go further!

Berkshire Hathaway has some 233,000 employees, Microsoft 90,000. The wealth in the fund has been created off the back of them. Just because I can\’t be bothered to look it up let\’s say that it\’s 50% of the total stock of those companies. So, we\’re talking about the wealth made by some 160,000 people here….or the income made from the wealth of 160,000 people. But most societies only have about 50% of the population actually doing anything contributing to GDP so let\’s again, just for simplicity, say that this is equal to 400,000 people in a country.

400,000 puts us at around country 175 or so, Brunei, Bahamas sort of level. Oh, the Bahamas has a GDP of about $7.5 billion.

So, err, the income from the wealth of 400,000 rich world people equals about the income from the wealth of about 400,000 rich world people (assuming the Fund gets a 10% return).

Yes, yes, a lot of dodgy assumptions there but the general point is true. The Fund is simply not all that large in comparison to the GDP of countries, it\’s actually not all that far off the GDP we would expect from a similar number of rich world people whether they were working as a company or as a country.

Quelle surprise really. The productivity of rich world people seems to be the same as the productivity of rich world people…which of course is why they\’re all rich world people.

Gosh.

Joanna Blythman

Lordy be, painfully naive eco-wibble.

Clones are bad because, well, industrial farming is bad. Industrial farming might well be bad but that\’s got bugger all to do with whether cloning is bad or good.

There is only one valid point that she manages to make:

Both the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) accept that cloned animals suffer from more infections than conventionally bred livestock.

But she doesn\’t make enough of it. As Matt Ridley went to great lengths to point out in Red Queen, the point of sexual reproduction is the mixing of genes and thus the possibility (but not certainty) of managing to keep a step ahead of the parasites and pathogens that afflict us.

A population of clones is of course susceptible to one such parasite or pathogen which will sweep through the entire population. That\’s actually a legitimate concern about cloning, that it reduces the ability to beat the ever evolving parasites and diseases.

As we can see when we study bananas. The Gros Michel varietal was largely replaced in the 50s by the Cavendish, as Panama Disease took hold. For, you see, bananas are clones. All genetically, within a varietal, exactly the same.

Which leads us to an interesting thought. Are the British really upset by eating clones? Given that the banana is the nation\’s favourite fruit (even though is an herb) it would appear not.

It\’s the same old problem at heart

Bit of the Ben Goldacres here:

What don\’t usually make the news, however, are the hundreds of cases when the social workers\’ failure is the very opposite: where, aided by police and courts, they seem determined to remove children from responsible parents, to consign them to an often miserable life with foster carers or to adoption.

False positives and false negatives….whatever system you\’re going to use to do anything you need to make sure that you don\’t veer off into acting hugely on false positives just as you want to minimise the false negatives where you should do something but don\’t.

Unfortunately, it\’s the way of this particular universe that we inhabit that the two are intimately linked. You\’ll almost always get more false positives if you try to minimise false negatives. At which point there has to be a rather hard headed analysis of the costs and benefits of each.

Assume that the cost of a false negative, a child who should be taken into care but isn\’t (to be extreme, for of course not all children who should be in care or adopted are facing death…a shitty life perhaps, but not necessarily death) is death.

Assume that the cost of a false positive, a child taken into care or adoption who doesn\’t need to be, is a shitty life (might well not be a shitty life but this is just an assumption for our model) and heartbroken parents.

So, how many shitty lives and heartbroken parents do we think is worth not having a dead child? Ten to one? 100 to 1?

No, you cannot say \”infinite\” because that would mean that every child in the country should be taken into care to prevent Baby P.

And we are ignoring the point that life in care is often worse than what a child is being \”saved from\”.

But you do have to come up with some sort of calculus of how many people\’s lives you fuck up in order to prevent one death.

And the big problem here is that which afflicts all politically made decisions, the point that Bastiat made. We can see the results of false negatives but we don\’t see the results of false positives. One reason being, over and above the politics side, is the secrecy of the family court system. We\’re not actually allowed to see the results of the false positives….and therefore we can quite safely conclude that the system is erring to that side. If it wasn\’t, then they wouldn\’t insist upon being secretive, would they?

Fair taxes

Later on Mr Cable returns to the subject of \”fair taxes\”, when asked what he would consider a success after five years as business secretary. He even goes much further than Labour ministers ever dared by using the \”R\” word (redistribution) and spelling out exactly what he means – \”a tax system that means people at the bottom end of the scale pay less and at the top end of the scale pay more.\”

Given that our current tax system does this then I assume we can say that the current tax system is fair then?

Please note that he doesn\’t say \”pay more as a percentage of their incomes\”, just \”more\”.

Good, so that\’s settled then.