Tim Worstall

So George has found an argument which he thinks is terribly persuasive. Libertarians, right wing loons generally, face a horrible problem because they believe in property rights.

The problem being that pollution affects property so therefore libertarians should be very much against pollution because of property rights but they’re not. In fact, they go all denialist over pollution precisely because they can’t bear to be confronted with the conflict between pollution and property rights.

Well, yes. Perhaps. Good enough for a bit of GCSE reasoning I suppose.

It does however betray a certain lack of knowledge about libertarianism, right wing loons generally and even such trivial matters as economics.

For, you see, exactly this argument, this point, has been made before. That there is indeed a conflict between property rights and pollution and so whadda we gonna do about it?

A point made in The Problem of Social Cost published in 1960. The answer being, to keep it short, that where transactions costs are low then private property rights will solve pollution problems and where they are high then regulation is needed.

So it isn’t that this conundrum is a new one for libertarians and right wing loons generally. It’s one that has been raised, assessed and answered: answered sufficiently that the man who raised, considered and answered the point was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1991.

Jeez, if you’re going to wibble about pollution and property rights you really ought to be aware of the seminal work on the point, no? And it’s not as if the UK has so many Economics Laureates that you could overlook Ronald Coase, is it?

This week Byrne was gifted the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) report, a hard-headed impact assessment of tax and benefit changes that found children hit hardest and non-working lone parents losing £2,000 a year. Half a million families with children under 5 will fall into absolute (not relative) poverty, despite all Cameron’s mendacious “social mobility” cant.

Really? Absolute poverty means less than $1.25 a day on a PPP basis according to the World Bank.

I sorta tend to doubt that’s really going to happen.

But there is another meaning of absolute poverty. Relative poverty is less than 60% of median earnings adjusted for household size. Absolute poverty is less than 50%.

So, absolute poverty is still relative, d’ye see?

Amazing what you can manage if you’re allowed to define the meanings of words.

It’s a predictable whingefest.

Everything is to do with deregulation and the neoliberal bastards. However, let us take one declamatory statement, at near random, and examine how well he knows his stuff.

Unregulated lenders, we now know, pushed millions of Americans into home loans they could not afford. Much-deregulated investment banks packaged those lousy loans up into investments that the nation’s ratings agencies promptly declared to be of the first quality.

Err, no, they didn’t. The ratings agencies that is.

What was done was securitisation, something that Fannie and Fredie were also doing, indeed, what they were set up to do. And Sallie Mae (?) has been doing it with student loabns since forever, credit card receivables are treated the same way etc etc etc.

There’s nothing new or strange about securitisation at all. To be against securitisation is to be against the 30 year fixed rate mortgage for example, and that’s really not a position I would expect Frank to adopt.

But more than this, the ratings agencies did not declare these securitisations to be “investments….of the first quality”. In fact, they did exactly the opposite. They rated different tranches of the securitisations differently: here’s some stuff which is AAA, yes indeed. But also here’s some AA, some A and by the way, this stuff over here is pure dreck, equity option type stuff, really not a bond at all.

It simply isn’t true that all those mortgages wrapped up into bonds were declared AAA.

At which point we could conclude one of two things: Frank has let his rhetoric get away with him which would be the polite thing to say or Frank is clueless on what really happened which is probably closer to reality.

Wadebridge responded. A packed meeting of 600 people last January set up a non-profit

co-operative to get 30 per cent of the town’s electricity from local renewable sources within five years. As it grew, more and more of the £10 million a year the town spends on energy was to be retained in the area, generating prosperity rather than going to distant companies, while by 2015, the co-operative was to be earning £300,000 a year for community projects.

Thus committed to realising David Cameron’s dual ambitions for a Big Society and a low-carbon economy, the town was originally on track – thanks to a generous national feed-in tariff set by the last government – to install more than 5Mw of solar electric capacity by April. Now, after a series of cuts to the incentive, this is stalling at just over 400 kw, less than a tenth as much, and is unlikely ever to grow much further.

My word, what has happened to halt this scheme?

The cuts were understandable since the cost of solar panels has fallen steeply, boosting demand for them and income from the tariffs far beyond original projections: the former tripled between June and October alone. First, the Government imposed a cap on the supposedly limitless finance. Then it slashed the tariff for big installations over 50 Mw, so as to concentrate it on householders. And now it is planning immediately to halve it for everyone else, to reduce it even further for multiple installations and to specify that buildings must meet high energy efficiency standards before they qualify.

Oh, OK, I get it.

They were going to be self sufficient with the aid of millions of pounds of money from other peoples’ electricity bills. Money flowing in from national consumption. Now that the external cash isn’t coming in they won’t be self sufficient.

Not that relying upon 65 million people to send you money is really self sufficiency in the first place…..

At the ASI.

Mass employment in manufacturing just isn’t coming back

Sir Christopher said party donations should be capped at £10,000 and state funding increased to remove the taint of corruption.

This after wibble about how large donations are seen to be for preferential access.

Look, maybe donations do buy influence. Maybe the unions’ money gets them Labour MPs as lapdogs, just as hedge fund money gets the attention of Conservative MPs.

Heck, I’ve been at a dinner or two where a political party was trying to shake down a couple of rich men (erm, angling for a donation).

But all of that is far better than the idea that the taxpayer be forced, at gunpoint, to pay for politicians and their parties.

1. 1.    Where to locate a head office.

This requires deciding in which country a head office will be located. Sometimes the decision relates to what are called ‘intermediate holding companies’ instead.

The importance of the decision is determined by the fact that a company usually has to pay tax in the country in which it incorporated. So, choosing to locate a company in a high tax territory such as the USA (which has amongst the highest corporate tax rates in the world) can be expensive[4]. However, quoted companies usually need to be incorporated in a major financial centre such as London, New York or Frankfurt. The result is that tax cannot be minimised in those locations.

Oh dear.

Absolutely no one incorporates in London or Frankfurt. They are not legal jurisdictions in which one can incorporate. England and Wales perhaps, Germany maybe, but not London or Frankfurt.

Further, you do not have to be incorporated in England And Wales to be listed in London.

US quoted companies are, almost without exception, incorporated in Delaware, not New York.

It’s not looking good for the accuracy here, is it?

Well of course I agree. But he either has no clue what he’s talking about or he’s ignoring the fact that his government is one of the biggest supporters of large corporate tax avoidance there’s ever been. As I explained in a report I wrote for the TUC last May, In December 2010 George Osborne announced the biggest tax loophole ever deliberately introduced for large companies by a UK government when he announced that any UK company moving its treasury function out of the UK to a tax haven would have its tax bill on that treasury operation cut to 5.75%.

The distinction that R. Murphy makes between tax planning (entirely legitimate, morally and legally) and tax avoidance (morally illegitimate and yet still legal) is that tax planning means using the allowances, deductions and reliefs allowed in law as Parliament meant them to be used.

Tax avoidance is using them in ways other than Parliament meant them to be used.

That is Ritchie’s argument, I’ve not misrepresented him.

George Osborne announced the biggest tax loophole ever deliberately introduced

So it’s not tax avoidance. It has been deliberately introduced by Parliament to be used in that manner.

It is, in fact, tax planning and tax compliance to use the allowance exactly as Parliament intended.

At the ASI.

Another spotting of luddite loons on the loose.

The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has said Beijing tax authorities are reviewing their ruling that he pay a multimillion dollar penalty for alleged tax evasion.

Absolute nonsense. The taxman is perfect, knows exactly how much we should pay and we should just hand over whatever is demanded.

Remember, these are dedicated public servants, without error, nothing can or should be hidden from them and anyway, it’s not your money, it’s the States.

So we’re told at least.

Sarah McKinley, 18, shot and killed Justin Martin with a 12-gauge shotgun after calling police and asking in a near-whisper: “I’ve got two guns in my hand. Is it OK to shoot him if he comes through the door?”

“Well, you have to do whatever you can do to protect yourself,” a dispatcher replied. “I can’t tell you that you can do that, but you have to do what you have to do to protect your baby.”

The dispatcher then heard a gunshot over the telephone line.

Police found Martin’s body, knife in hand, slumped over McKinley’s sofa, and determined the mother of a three-month-old baby – whose cancer-stricken husband died on Christmas Day – had acted in self-defense.

“Our initial review of the case doesn’t indicate she violated the law in any way,” assistant district attorney James Walters told the Oklahoman newspaper. “He should have thought about it before he went into someone’s home.”

80mph speed limit ‘risks rise in road deaths and obesity’

Obesity?

and a potential rise in obesity due to more people taking advantage of shorter car journeys.

Eh? They’re raising the speed limit on motorways for cock’s sake.

A motorway journey is not a subsititute for a waddle around to the corner shop for lardy buns.

A MONK who used to teach at one of England’s premier Roman Catholic boys’ schools has been jailed for five years after being found guilty of abusing pupils under his charge in the late 1980s.

Richard White, now 66, was a geography teacher at Downside School near Bath when he was identified as a possible risk to pupils, but no legal action was taken. Instead, Father Nicholas – as he was known at the school – was warned about his behaviour towards a 12-year-old and was switched to teaching older boys.

No, don’t know him at all, just after my time there.

But something really doesn’t ring true about this at all. A monk teaching geography? Surely not.

Every public school I’ve ever heard of reserves that subject for the games masters I thought.

You know, on the basis that it’s a simple enough subject that they should be able to work out which end of the book to start reading to the class from?

Certainly for years I thought that a geographer’s uniform was some variation of a tracksuit.

The Budapest protests must be heeded in a region walking a line between budding democracy and revisionist nationalism.

Could anyone parse that sentence for me?

I’m not in favour of what Fidesz is doing myself but what on earth does what they’ve said there mean?

For example, what is the conflict between democracy and revisionist? Even, between democracy, budding or otherwise, and nationalism?

I think we’d all agree that Scotland is becoming more nationalist as time passes and I’ve not seen anyone complain that that is either an affront to or incompatible with democracy.

In effect a deeply neoliberal government has done all it can to completely gut the Hungarian constitution and leave single party rule in perpetuity. In the process it is silencing the opposition, rigging the judiciary, stacking all government positions with its place-people, over-ruling local government and ensuring a flat tax system for the benefit of the rich in perpetuity.

This is totalitarianism back in Europe.

Apparently he doesn’t actually like a Courageuous State in reality.

At the ASI.

More about why social rents so too are subsidised.

At the ASI.

Far from MP’s bars being subsidised they should be making a profit.

Her government’s savage deflation destroyed a fifth of Britain’s industrial base in two years, hollowed out manufacturing, and delivered a “productivity miracle” that never was, and we’re living with the consequences today.

Strange that manufacturing output was higher when she left office than before she took it really.

What she did succeed in doing was to restore class privilege, boosting profitability while slashing employees’ share of national income from 65% to 53% through her assault on unions.

And you don’t know your economic statistics, do you?

GDP does not split into labour income and capital income.

A goodly part of that fall in labour income is in fact the introduction of VAT, the raising of VAT, the raising of employers’ national insurance payments and the rise in self-employment.

One day, if I get bored enough to work out how to use Excel, I’ll prove it too.

Yet government is nothing if it is not asserting moral imperatives and if it is not trying to act in a moral way

Government is a method of working out who empties the rubbish bins not a form of moral imposition.

As long as it’s consenting adults and they’re not frightening the horses the morals of the populace, the actions of the citizenry, are not the concern of government in the slightest.

It’s one of the reasons I despise conservatives: they’re just as eager to impose their strictures on us all as the socialists, the puritans and the various flavours of moral idiots are. It’s just that they are different strictures.

Fuck off will you, we’re free people in a free land.