Tim Worstall

“He conceives that the business of the magistrate is not merely to see that the persons and property of the people are secure from attack, but that he ought to be a jack-of-all-trades, architect, engineer, schoolmaster, merchant, theologian, a Lady Bountiful in every parish, a Paul Pry in every house, spying, eavesdropping, relieving, admonishing, spending our money for us. His principle is, if we understand it rightly, that no man can do anything so well for himself as his rulers, be they who they may, can do it for him, and that a government approaches nearer and nearer to perfection in proportion as it interferes more and more with the habits and notions of individuals.”*

What sort of confidence can anybody have in somebody who even the EU fired for incompetence?

Nigel Farage

So here I am in Freiberg, getting stuff sorted out. Rent a flat, buy a bed, get lamps in, all this sort of stuff. Yesterday, went and bought desk, kitchen table, shelves.

Well, I say desk and kitchen table. Two cheap doors on four trestles, no point in wasting the shareholders’ money.

So I’d wandered up the hill (3, 4 clicks away), bought them for delivery. They give me the noon to 6pm delivery slot.

It is now exactly noon at pixel time. And the man turned up 20 minutes ago, unloaded, said thanks and I’ve already got the desk up and running.

There’s something terribly wrong with this picture isn’t there? Delivery early, but early enough to be really on time?

Or yesterday, I had to register in Germany (and no, I won’t be here more than 183 days a year!) So off to the Rathaus (yes, that and Ratskeller do still make me laugh) and the Tuesday afternoon possibility for you to register. And we have no common language. My German extends to “Wo ist” sort of stuff, where you speak English but with a heavy accent, no more. Their English was at a similar level and we weren’t going to get anywhere with schoolboy French or supermarket Portuguese, not in this corner of Europe. My Russian’s very rusty and I have a feeling that it’s still impolitic to use it around here.

But still, we got the registration done with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of embarassed smiles as we stumbled through various mistakes (no, you can’t put down my citizenship as Irish, that all rather changed around 1920 or so whatever g-grandpops thought about it). 15 minutes all told. Then round to the bank, with the registration, to open an account.

Only person there who spoke English (other than a very cute and pneumatic girl who backed out saying she was still studying English and therefore didn’t feel up to it) was the branch manager so he opened the account.

He made me a cup of coffee and by the time I had drunk it we were done: card and PIN on the way.

How the hell did any country ever end up with bureaucracy that works?

An efficient tax system is:

1. Comprehensive – in other words, it is broad based;
2. Complete – with as few loopholes as possible;
3. Comprehensible – it is as certain as is reasonably possible;
4. Compassionate – it takes into account the capacity to pay;
5. Compact – it is written as straightforwardly as possible;
6. Compliant with human rights;
7. Compensatory – it is perceived as fair and redistributes income and wealth as necessary to achieve this aim;
8. Complementary to social objectives;
9. Computable – the liability can be calculated with reasonable accuracy;

All of which facilitate the chance that it will be:

10. Competently managed.

In combination these are key attributes of a good tax system.

Comprehensible, Computable…..these both mean that it must be the letter of the law, not the spirit, which is obeyed.

Well done Richard, you’ve just undermined one of your basic points.

Help me out here. Isn’t it so low because he gives money to charity, the US system allowing such donations to reduce your tax bill?

Here, in all its glory, is a Telegraph editorial:

The remarkable thing about the silk cape on show at the Victoria and Albert Museum from tomorrow is not that it took 80 people five years to make, or even that it is woven from the gossamer of 1.2 million golden orb spiders, which produce undyed silk of a golden hue. No, the remarkable thing is that the spiders were let loose afterwards to skip happily through the undergrowth of their native Madagascar not a whit the worse for contributing to this work of art. Their web is deftly extracted by trained handlers.

Britain once had a silk industry, with weavers under broad windows busy making brocades, lustrings, paduasoys and suchlike rich textiles. If golden orb spiders were farmed like silkworms, the industry might thrive again, in Sunderland or Hull. To spin gold has a fairy-tale ring to it. These obliging spiders could be the Rumpelstiltskins of a start-up enterprise.

Facepalm.

Let us, for a change, get the labour theory of value the right way around. The labour which goes into the production of something cannot be paid more than that thing is valued at.

Here we have 400 man years of labour going into the production of a cape. That labour cannot be paid more per year than one four hundredth of the value of the cape.

Let’s put the cost of minimum wage labour at £20 k a year. Including overheads etc. So our cape must be valued at £8 million. Very limited marketplace for that. The occasional trophy third wife of a billionaire maybe.

To produce an industry we’d need to get that price down…..which means the wages have to come down, doesn’t it?

It’s just not something to base an industry on so what are these people talking about?

In a speech to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, the Prime Minister will argue that European judges have become too powerful. He will say the court should not “undermine its own reputation by going over national decisions”, just days after its judges overturned the decision of British courts to deport Abu Qatada, the radical Islamic cleric.

What the hell do you think a supranational court is for if it isn’t to over rule national ones?

The only way out of this is to leave the jurisdiction of the court, which means leaving the Council of Europe and thus the EU.

No, I don’t think that the ECHR stupidities are sufficient reason to do that, I’ve plenty of other reasons for desiring that we leave.

But to complain about a supranational court being supranational is just stupid.

Here.

To say that that is the mistake that Marx made is a mistake: for he made more than one.

Got quite a bit right too, obviously. The bits he cribbed off Smith are just fine for example.

Sorry Nick, no, this isn’t true.

That treasure trove is the $3.1tn of tax, equivalent to 5.1% of global GDP, which according to international campaign group Tax Justice Network is illegally evaded in 145 countries, covering 98.2% of the world’s population.

That’s Ritchie’s report that is.

The majority of these flows are washed through tax havens. These secrecy jurisdictions act as cover from international tax authorities. Disturbingly, the obstacles placed by the global financial system that would allow individual countries to track down and repatriate this cash are prohibitively burdensome. This is why a new age of financial transparency and accountability is required. Five key reforms would lay the foundations for this:

And no, Ritchie’s report shows no such thing.

Let us, for a moment, assume Ritchie’s report is correct (and for once I’ve no problem with his basic methodology although I do of course with the conclusions he draws).

What he’s shown is that there’s a largish grey economy in many countries. And this grey economy ain’t people fooling around in tax havens. It’s the builder doing a job for cash, VAT off. Dozen eggs at the farm, no receipt.

This grey economy that Ritchie has measured just isn’t all about offshore at all. Tax avoidance might be, the black economy of illegal activities, the drugs etc, might well be, but this grey economy that is being measured here is pretty much a domestic phenomenon in each and every country.

So, however much you want to collect this tax, however much you want to get the tax avoidace industry, I’m sorry, but you’re spouting bollocks when you use this report to call for closing down offshore.

They’re just not related.

Let’s say £500,000 a year, a figure that includes bonuses, share options, pensions and benefits.

Silly but brave, given that both his editor and his editor’s boss at GMG would take a pay cut under this scheme.

Back in the ‘Ore Mountains, lookin’ fer slags.

Today is the day to buy a desk and a chair! Woo Hoo!

More typing when I don’t have to sit on the floor to do it.

We’ve experienced 30 years of public service “reform” which means that many public services, certainly those at local level, are already delivering serious value for money. All the fat was long ago pared away.

Rilly?

Employer:

ISLINGTON COUNCIL

Posted:

20 January 2012

Ref:

CR/2339/ST

Contact:

Emma Marinos

Location:

London

Industry:

Education , General , Government & Politics – Local government , Marketing & PR – Communications , Marketing & PR – PR

Function:

Marketing / PR

Level:

Senior Executive

Contract:

Contract

Hours:

Full Time

How can £20bn cash cuts and increased marketisation lead to a better NHS?

1) Markets (note, not capitalism, markets) promote innovation better than centrally planned or run systems.

2) Innovation leads to increases in total factor productivity.

3) Increases in tfp are synonymous with (as in, this is the definition of tfp) being able to do more with the same resources, being able to do the same with fewer resources.

A market driven health care service (note please, not a capitalist one) will be more efficient over time than a not-market driven health care service.

That’s how.

Government must therefore set a policy framework that forces the close collaboration of monetary, financial and fiscal policy to induce a sustained rise in credit from our very wounded and risk-averse financial system. The British government, along with other western governments, must replace its redundant inflation target with a target for the growth of the value of the goods and services we produce – the growth of GDP in cash terms. It should say that every instrument of policy – quantitative easing, interest rates, government borrowing, guarantees for new bank lending – will be used to sustain the growth of money GDP by 7% a year for the next five years.

This is NGDP targetting.

Of course, Willy being Willy he doesn’t understand that this is a direct outgrowth of Friedmanite monetarism.

Nor does he understand that it’s all about money, the money supply, the monetary stance. None of the rest of his blather about government subsidies and direction of investment is necessary at all.

But then if Willy understood the genesis of his pronouncements, the implications of them, then he wouldn’t be Willy, would he?

The occasion of Peter Tatchell’s 60 th birthday.

Man’s a loon of course.

His various forays into the world of economics have been laughably ignorant.

Certain of his campaigns have been based upon very, very, odd readings of the world.

Yet, as Sellars and Yeatman didn’t put it, he’s not been wrong but wromatic, nor even right but repulsive.

On balance, he’s been a Good Thing.

On which note Happy Birthday to Mr. Tatchell, someone who probably wouldn’t accept one but most certainly should be offered a peerage.

For we should cherish, promote, reward and acknowledge the loons that we are privileged to have among us.

Ouch, these numbers hurt:

A fifth of all council house tenancies may be fraudulent, according to investigators who have conducted the first large-scale examination of the problem………

Fraud investigators matched 27,000 tenants – the entire tenant roll of two councils and four housing associations – against mortgage and credit databases.

At the time they stated: “Where there is a valid polygamous marriage the claimant and one spouse will be paid the couple rate … The amount payable for each additional spouse is presently £33.65.”

This has subsequently been increased to £38.45 a week for second and subsequent spouses, while the husband and his first wife are paid the ordinary couple rate of £105.95.

As well as income support, a husband with more than one wife is also eligible for possible housing benefit and council tax relief because of the larger property needed to accommodate his family.

OK, so they’re going to do away with this system. Apparently it applies to some 1,000 families in the country (where valid polygamous marriages have been contracted abroad and then a subsequent move to the UK).

Shrug. 1,000 families is less than a rounding error in the system.

Under the new system of Universal Credit, which will replace all mean-tested benefits from next year, polygamous marriages will not be recognised at all.

Instead, a husband and one wife will claim as a couple – with any other adults living in the household claiming as single people.

And that’s the new system.

Now, the benefits system is of such awesome complexity that I have no idea of the answer to the next question(s).

Will this actually reduce the benefits bill?

Imagine the maximum Moslem family possible: one man, four women. We’re moving from one couple plus three extras to one couple plus three single people. This may or may not mean more paid in benefits, less paid, I dunno.

Now move it to the more likely situation: those religious enough to have such a multiple marriage are likely religious enough to be fruitful and multiply. So in fact we’re moving to a system of one married couple with children and three single parents with children. All of whom get to make their own claims on the welfare system independently. As we are quite deliberately and specifically not recognising the specific circumstances of the polygynous marriage.

Is this going to save money? That’s not the only lens through which to view the decision, of course, but will it actually save money?

Given the way the system does pay out for single parent families I have my doubts but does anyone actually know?

At the ASI.

The stupid people whining about the living wage. Why not just cut taxes on poor people?

Seriously, is it entirely necessary to be ignorant of finance to write for The Guardian on finance?

Greece is on the verge of a breakthrough in talks with its creditors that could wipe out up to 70% of its debts and alleviate the crisis in the eurozone.

No it bloody isn’t.

They’re on the verge of a deal whereby some of their creditors take a 70% haircut on their debt.

But not all of their creditors take a 70% haircut.

Therefore the total debt will fall by some amount smaller than 70%.

We get the great man’s words:

This was a transaction relating to Indian assets that India wanted to tax, and thought it could tax. But it was recorded ‘elsewhere’ in a tax haven structure. And the result is that the legal form of recording it ‘elsewhere’ has meant that Inida’s laws have been subverted and tax is not due.

Yes, that’s right. A ruling on the law from the Supreme Court is subversion of the law.

Rather than, as most of us would take it, a declaration of what the law actually is.