It would be much tidier if all our names for Eastern European countries ended with "...ia"

If and when Kosovia ever comes into existence, that will slot in nicely.
Click to enlarge: Outline map from here.

Fun Online Poll Results & The Law Of Unintended Consequences

Thanks to everybody who took part in this week's Fun Online Poll. The response to the simple question "Ultimately, who is best-placed to decide what is produced?" was even clearer than I expected/hoped, as follows:

Consumers - 87%
Producers - 10%
Governments - 3%

What happens when governments (under pressure from producers) think they can outwit the consumer? Let's have a look at the winners and losers from Germany's car scrappage scheme, as covered in today's FT:

Winners:
New and nearly-new car dealerships (sales are up 11.9 per cent).
People who applied for the bung of €2,500 (1.2 million).
People who happened to own a second-hand car that was at least nine years old (the value of which must have increased to at least €2,500).
East European manufacturers of cheaper cars (exports to Germany expected to double this year), and to a lesser extent German car manufacturers.
German recycling plants (who are probably in line for more handouts to actually physically get rid of all the old cars).

Losers:
The retail sector (spending has fallen on everything else, especially on consumer electronics).
Owners and vendors of second-hand cars from one- to nine-years old. "The classic used car market, with cars older than one year is pretty much dead"
The taxpayer generally, who has to foot the bill (approx. 40 million people sharing a €3 billion bill so far, plus maybe another €1 billion bung for the recycling companies).
German motor mechanics (new cars require less servicing).

Can anybody seriously say that Germans generally are now better off, or do the losses not always outweight the losses, however slightly, remembering that there'll just as much friction if and when the policy is reversed (which they are already seriously considering)?

The next Fun Online Poll is another commonsense question.

Quangoes of the week

Just to put you all in a foul mood for the rest of the day, they're coming thick and fast now:
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Witterings from Witney covered the exploits of SOLACE - The Society Of Local Authority Chief Executives:

Serving council employees are operating a consultancy/recruitment company - a company which it is reported receives fees of £20,000 to head hunt chief executives and to recommend salary levels.

Having badgered them, WoW obtained a copy of the accounts for one of its subsidiaries, SOLACE Enterprises Limited, which he emailed me, these show that this subsidiary alone received £20 million of taxpayers' finest over the last two years.
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The Fat Bigot picked up on this story:

Former cabinet minister Alan Milburn is to return to the political front line in a key advisory role to Gordon Brown. The ex-health secretary is to head a new commission on social mobility. Mr Milburn, who is seen as a Blairite, will chair a panel of industry leaders to help people from disadvantaged backgrounds get on in key professions.

Following a reasonable argument based on personal experience, facts and logic, TFB concluded that "To suggest that a quango can do anything substantive in this field - and anything in proportion to the amount of taxpayers' money thrown at it - is a complete joke."
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Tim W rolled up his sleeves and tried to make head or tail of The New Economics Foundation's accounts.

To cut a long story short, the NEF receive about £3 million a year from "trusts and foundations, local, regional and national government and through consultancy contracts."

Just for fun, print off the accounts and try reading the 'Trustees' Report" over breakfast without choking on your cornflakes. Or take a peek at their website.
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UPDATE JuliaM stumbles across a taxpayer funded 'charity' which spends up to £1,000 per journey to help East Europeans who want to go home.

Relative poverty statistics

There's a brilliant post over on the IEA 'Blog, on how a simple boundary change could drive three million people into relative poverty.

"Cocaine victim numbers surge"

Shock! Horror!

The number of cocaine users admitted to hospital has more than quadrupled in eight years, it was revealed yesterday ... gasps The Sun breathlessly, ... The worrying statistics point to a dramatic rise in the drug’s popularity over the last decade..

It then continues with some hard facts ...
Cannabis poisonings nearly halved during the same period. Good stuff. Why is that not worthy of a headline?

The Government figures reveal 740 people needed emergency treatment after bingeing on cocaine during 2006/07, compared with 161 in 1998/99. Wot? Out of maybe half a million users, 740 overdoses? I'd guess that the bulk of these relate to crack-cocaine anyway, which is a truly vile drug, not the good old Bolivian marching powder that merely turns you into an arrogant arsehole and makes your nose bleed. Even if this guess is wrong, it's not much of a message is it "Kids! Don't do cocaine! There's a one-in-a-thousand chance you'll overdose if you take it regularly for a year! And going by these stat's, zero chance that you'll die!"

The majority – 629 – were men and their average age was 29. Yeah, so? Cocaine is taken predominatly by relatively wealthy men in their twenties, any fule kno that.

... the number of cannabis users needing treatment fell from 171 to 96 – and heroin overdoses fell from 1,962 to 1,530. Isn't that something to celebrate - out of one or two million cannabis users, only 96 needed treatment? Ditto heroin, with 300,000 users?

Last month the Government revealed drug-related hospital admissions had soared by more than a third since 2002. Many of the 215,447 admissions were for legal drug overdoses or accidental poisoning. So, er, by these figures, illegal drugs caused about 3% as many admissions as legal ones? And even legal drugs only accounted for 2% of all admissions (approx. ten million). Hardly a f***ing epidemic, is it?

H/t EUReferendum, who makes further very interesting points.

Misplaced loyalty (and that's putting it mildly!)

Here's Dennis Cooper's letter on the Tories' ultimate act of treachery on 5 March 2008, so far printed only in The Scotsman. The only other person to cover this story was Vindico.

"Assembly members' 8.3% pay rise"

This sort of crap prompts me to sum up a few basic facts:

1. There are core functions of the state such as law'n'order, protecting private property rights and defence that by definition cannot be delegated, however well or badly the state does it.

2. Apart from that, the state is pretty lousy at everything it does, in particular as a provider of services (health and education - which should be replaced by taxpayer funded vouchers).

3. Every layer of government adds another layer of waste, corruption, meddling and inefficiency.

4. There are a few things that have to be done or decided or harmonised at national level, let's say immigration, declaring war, signing treaties, the basics of criminal law and legal system. And (being realistic about it) collecting fuel/alcohol duties and a 20% flat rate income tax* to pay for core functions, old age pensions and health and education vouchers. Apart from that, I can't think of much else.

5. Everything else could and should be down to (up to?) local councils - policing, planning permission, licensing laws, transport infrastructure, public spaces, refuse collection, pay rates for public sector workers etc. Sure, local councils are on the fiddle as well, but at least that's only one level of waste and corruption, not four or five, of which the EU is probably the worst. And if any of this costs money, they should fund it out of local Land Value Tax** - if that spending makes an area more desirable, then councils can collect more tax, and vice versa. And if people decide they don't want to have (for example) licensing laws, public transport or restrictions on land use, then they can of course elect a local council which does away with them.

* VAT and National Insurance are the worst taxes, in terms of economic inefficiency, and they are also regressive (see Table 4 of this), so getting rid of them boosts the economy enormously and reduces need for welfare payments.

** And out of rents from social housing, which is currently ring fenced and earmarked so local councils do not currently benefit if they collect more in rent, it all has to be handed over (or is knocked off a council's entitlement to funds from central government). So under this system councils in so-called 'deprived' areas with lots of social housing would have a much larger income base than now, so even less need for redistribution from rich to poor areas.

"UKIP anger at prince's EU speech"

Well bloody done to Nigel Farage, is all I can say.

And why the f*** does Labour MEP for the North West 'region' and all-round treacherous shithead Gary Titley think that Nigel " ... should apologise to the British people he represents"?

Nigel represents me, AFAIAC, and I'm not offended in the slightest.

Light blogging (3)

No posts today because I had to leave home at the crack of a sparrow's fart and make my way to the West Country. I'm using this computer now I've finished what I was doing and they've all gone home.

They have a great poster up, which just says "Discard Giscard". Damn! Why didn't I think of that!

New online petition re EU pensions.

I have added a new petition to my 'online petitions' section, which calls for:

"legislation requiring all Members of the Houses of Parliament to declare in the Register of Members' interests whether they are in receipt of any pension or other benefits or emoluments payable by the European Union..."

It is rather frightening that such backhanders do not need to be disclosed.

I hope that everybody signs up!

William Hague is a deceitful, evasive half-wit

Andrew Marr kicked off by asking him, quite reasonably:

"Now we all understand why the Conservative Party doesn't like this treaty and why you want a referendum. What we don't understand is what you're going to do if this goes through Parliament and becomes law, and you're returned to power. Are you then going to pull Britain out of this treaty that you regard with such distaste?"

I watched the original interview, and I have read the transcript on the BBC website* and I struggle in vain to find anything like a "Yes", a "Perhaps", a "We'd have a retrospective referendum, like in 1975" or a "Don't know", let alone a straight "No".

* Apparently I have to 'credit The Andrew Marr Show' for using this excerpt. Fair enough, I just did.

After the Euro (1)

One of the things that might speed up the dissolution of the EU is when the tensions and frictions between the Northern and Southern Euro-zone countries becomes too great and half of them leave in a huff.

Now, as a lesson in non-financial economics, although the idea of a single currency is superficially attractive, the simple facts are ...

1. There was a global single currency for a couple of millennia. It was gold.

2. Over the past couple of centuries, most countries use their own paper currencies, backed only by future government tax receipts. Sure, there was a transitional period, where currencies were linked to a gold-standard, and subsequently the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, but this gradually fell apart.

3. There have been dozens of currency unions over the years, most of them have fallen apart again, for good or bad reasons.

4. If currency unions were such a good idea, they would never have fallen apart, and progressively more countries would have signed up, and we would expect to see a few large blocs, let's say one or two currencies per continent.

Ergo, tensions between the members of the Euro-zone will flare up sooner or later (my guess is in six months to three years) and a lot of them will leave. Of course, the Euro-zone is only a subset of the EU, and membership of the latter does not really require membership of the former, but this will lead to even greater frictions at EU level.

Especially if Germany tells France to stop pissing about with trying political pressure on the ECB to keep interest rates down. The Germans have a powerful collective aversion to devaluation and hyperinflation as a result of what happened in the 1920's. If Germany forces France out the Euro-zone for bad behaviour*, then the EU's days are pretty much numbered as well.

* When Germany forced the UK out of the ERM, there wasn't even any malice involved. The Germans had to double their interest rates to prevent inflation taking off as a result of Helmut Kohl's rather reckless promise to convert East German to West German Marks one-for-one, when the real exchange rate was actually about ten-for one. But we know what the Frogs are like for going off in a huff**.

** See also the cheese-eating surrender monkeys leaving NATO and, forty years later, considering rejoining.

Goblin King's golden hello

The email-o-sphere is bristling with rumours that Eastern Europeans are claiming child benefit and tax credits and sending the money back home.

This is old news, an email on this from a HM Revenue & Customs officer did the rounds a year ago*.

Basically, tax credits are based on the lower of this year's and last year's earnings, as most Eastern Europeans have annual wages lower than the income disregard (equal to the tax-free personal allowance) they automatically get full-whack tax credits for the first year, which is about £8,000 for a bloke that comes over here for a year and leaves wife and two kids at home in Poland or wherever. Which is about double the average earnings in Eastern Europe, or the 'A8' countries as they are called in Newspeak.

Which sounds a recipe for chaos to me. Oh yes, that's what we've got.

*If anybody would like me to forward it, please send an email to ... gmwadsworth-at-gmail.com.