The reasons should be obvious. Coronavirus would not be the issue it is in economic terms if we did not have such an interconnected world, where supply lines are stretched to their limits so that many companies are at risk from the slightest disruption to their systems, which coronavirus is already creating, and which could get much worse.

Far better to have entirely local economies. So that when the local farmer drops dead then all starve in that area.

Hmm, what’s that? Security comes from having multiple suppliers? Gosh, that’s right! So, having all the world as a potential supplier is safer then, right?

I have blogged throughout the austerity years and made the NHS such an issue at one point that I think I was noted as the fourth most active social media campaigner against the 2012 NHS reforms that increased the impact of market forces upon it.

Those reforms have failed. A healthcare system that was intended to, and did, deliver worse health outcomes in a political environment of hostility towards large parts of the UK population is indicative of a chronic political malaise within government during this period.

NHS England has had more market based reforms than NHS Scotland or NHS Wales. NHYS England has improved outputs better than NHS Wales or NHS Scotland.

One useful proof of this being the absence of reports from the usual suspects crowing about the outperformance of NHS Wales and NHS Scotland. They’d be there if it were true…..

Our new Chancellor should not try to find a new fiscal rule. He should have an economic rule instead. He should target full employment at low inflation. Only government spending can deliver that. Turn it on.

That’s actually what the Bank of England’s target is. One they’re currently hitting.

Whilst its respect for the rule of tax law is not great. Just read Richard Teather’s book on tax havens for them published in about 2005 as evidence of that: it got as close to endorsing the merits of tax evasion as a mechanism for undermining the democratic choices of government as I suspect it dared go.

Both Richard and I would go further than that. One of the merits of tax evasion is that it limits the amount that government may tax – those democratic choices.

So, our polymath notes this:

And comments that:

I presume KPMG did not ask to be associated with this feature from Mark Littlewood of the Institute of Economic Affairs, but as the biggest tax havens operator amongst the Big 4 accountants I doubt they object.

Except online advertising isn’t determined by the publication. It’s determined by you the reader.

The ad companies check up on what you read, see what it is that you might like, then advertise that to you. Different people looking at that same page will see different ads therefore.

Presumably Snippa saw it because he logs in to KPMG in order to fulminate over how much those who were asked to remain with the company after training now make.

The two issues were related though. Many of the new ‘toys’ were expensive exercises in centralising control. As the business had grown, the core management team had lost confidence in its ability to control a growing team. Incentives had changed and discretion had been removed from line managers.

Some issues that had devolved to them had become subject to central control and standardisation, in ways that were not working. Quite simply, the line managers had stopped managing because they were not given enough discretion to do so: from arranging shift patterns to making short term decisions on scheduling and many other matters where previously their on the spot knowledge had kept productivity high in ways that no standardised system could deliver.

The cost of that loss of flexibility, when added to management’s new toys, had eliminated the bottom line almost in its entirety.

This from the man who would plan the entire economy from the centre – see Green New Deal.