Wishful thinking by the Eurosceptics... but it would be ironic if it happened

From The Daily Mail:

Coronavirus could mark the end of the EU 'European project' if member states cannot agree to share rescue package debt, the bloc's economics commissioner has warned.

Paolo Gentiloni, a former prime minister of Italy, said it was essential for Germany, the bloc's most powerful member, to come to an agreement over debt with states which have been hardest hit.

He told Italian radio station Radio Capital: "The European project is in danger of dying out... It is clear that if the economic differences between European countries, rather than shrinking in the face of a crisis like this, instead increase... it will be very difficult to keep the European project together."

All empires fall apart eventually, or else there wouldn't be so many individual countries, most of which were once provinces in somebody else's empire or part of a different country. What triggers the final collapse is often some random external event, like the Japanese military successes in World War II prompting British colonies from India to Singapore to seek independence. Or a change in the weather leading to a famine, or whatever.

Fast forward to a history lesson in a few decades, history teachers will be struggling to explain that the single event which ultimately led to most southern Member States leaving the bloc was somebody eating a bat in China (yes, that probably never happened, but it'll do as shorthand).

"Climate change may be behind fall of ancient empire, say researchers"

From The Guardian:

The [Neo-Assyrian] empire emerged in about 912BC and grew to stretch from the Mediterranean down to Egypt and out to the Persian Gulf.

But shortly after the death of the king Ashurbanipal around 630BC, the empire began to crumble, with the grand city of Nineveh sacked in 612BC. By the end of the seventh century BC, the empire’s fall was complete. Now scientists say the reversal in the empire’s fortunes appears to coincide with a dramatic shift in its climate from wet to dry – a potentially crucial change in an empire reliant on crops...

Baldini added that the past can hold important lessons for the present – where fossil fuel use drives climate change.

That's hardly a blinding new insight. There are loads of examples of this happening in history, individual civilisations rising - and falling - as the weather became more - and then less - suitable for food production. The end of the Roman Warm Period ended the Roman Empire (probably).

Food production was the cornerstone of any empire until modern times, because if a few people can grow enough food for everybody, it frees up labour for empire-building (soldiers, administrators etc). Their downfall was usually a fall in food production in the areas they ruled over.

We note that:

a. That's not such a problem with a global economy, as it all evens out. Vikings in Greenland couldn't just export electronic components and then import food from somewhere else, they had to grow the food themselves or die.

b. The climate has always been changing, for better or for worse, independently of CO2 emissions, and we have muddled through somehow. Quite why "man-made climate change" (to the extent it even exists) is somehow worse than natural climate change (which clearly does exist) is never made clear.

c. What if it turns out - not that the Alarmists would ever admit it - that modest changes in global average temperatures have entirely natural causes, which are far beyond our control? Would it be panic over? Which strategies would scientists and economists be recommending then? Probably "muddle along and wait and see".

"Protests as five-week Parliament suspension begins"

From the BBC:

Parliament has officially been suspended for five weeks, with MPs not due back until 14 October.

Amid unprecedented scenes in the Commons, some MPs protested against the suspension with signs saying "silenced" while shouting: "Shame on you..."

Zero sympathies from me.

Rumours - well-founded as it turns out - that Johnson would suspend Parliament if he couldn't get his own way started circulating three months ago, before he'd even won his party leadership contest and thus by default (or by tradition or by custom, but with no particular legal force) become Prime Minister.

MPs have therefore had plenty of time to organise a vote of no confidence. It appears that they were incapable of agreeing on who would be the replacement PM. By default, it would have to be a moderate Conservative MP who is a Remainer (of which there are plenty) or at least in favour of a soft-ish Brexit (of which there are also plenty).

The template for this is the Chamberlain-Churchill handover. Technically, the Norway Debate was not a vote of no confidence, but it is accepted as having had the same effect. A majority of MPs from all parties had more or less agreed beforehand that Churchill - who was a Conservative MP, just like Chamberlain - would replace Chamberlain as PM. The whole thing took three days start to finish.

Today's MPs have been fannying around for three months and achieved precisely nothing. Corbyn had the mad idea that he might be PM; Lucas thought there should be an all-woman government and heck knows what Swinson wanted. Not exactly serious grown-up debate, in other words.

Today's statement of the obvious

From the BBC:

Bush was almost certainly the last US president to have fought in World War II.

Nobody move or sterling and interest rates get it!

Yesterday's Project Fear output, via MBK:

From The Times:

Leaving the European Union would immediately cause the value of the pound to plummet by as much as 20 per cent, while income tax would have to rise to counter cuts in migration, a respected think tank has warned.

A vote to leave would result in a “significant shock to the UK economy”, the non-partisan National Institute for Economic and Social Research has said, as it presented prospects for the UK up to 2030 in the event of Brexit.

From The Telegraph:

The Bank of England will need to raise its key interest rate or Bank Rate to 3.5pc by the end of next year if Britain votes to leave the EU, the newest recruit to the Monetary Policy Committee has warned privately.

Michael Saunders, who was chief economist at Citibank, and will join the rate-setting MPC in August, said the drastic rise would be needed because Brexit would cause the pound to collapse, which would send inflation sharply higher.

If we were to stupid enough to reduce 'good' immigration (younger, healthier, skilled/working, ready to integrate) then yes, income tax rates on everybody else might rise a bit, some people say that would be a price worth paying. I don't think it is, but clearly, if we reduced 'bad' immigration, tax rates would go down a bit, which looks like a win-win to me.

The rest of their logic seems to be [unspecified cause] = GBP falls = inflation rises = Bank of England has to increase interest rates.

There's no particular reason to assume that Brexit would cause GBP to fall that dramatically, but even if it did, what would be the knock-on effects? No need to ponder too hard, let's just look at the last two instances of this happening - after Black Wednesday in 1992 and between 2008 and 2012, when GBP fell by a quarter each time.

There was surprisingly little impact on consumer prices (putting land prices to one side) in either instance, and the Bank of England did not increase interest rates - during both periods it actually reduced them (leading to land price inflation).

So nothing to worry about, as per usual.

Short List

"Advisors to English kings in the Middle Ages who were called 'Thomas' and ended up falling out with the king and being assasinated/executed."

Thomas Becket
Thomas More
Thomas Cromwell

John b adds: Thomas Cranmer

An earlier treasonous - albeit probably fictitious - Tom got off lightly.

History of the 21st Century, part II

From the BBC, the BBC and the BBC:

Ukrainian government forces have retaken the rebel stronghold in the Syrian city of Homs in the south-eastern oil hub of Bentiu from pro-Russia separatists, officials, activists and UN chief Ban Ki-moon have said.

The Kiev interior ministry says the evacuation of rebels from is under way, but some local reports later said that Mr Machar has mobilised a rebel force to fight the government.

The first Pro-Russia buses left the Old City on Wednesday after South Sudan government troops were forced back amid heavy gunfire. Separatists have captured official buildings in dozens of towns in eastern Ukraine in recent weeks and at least two buses have arrived in rebel-held territory to the north, carrying a number of armed fighters.

President Bashar al-Assad's government in Kiev has sent South Sudanese troops to restore its authority under a deal brokered by the United Nations and the Red Crescent in Ethiopia. In a separate development, the US imposed sanctions targeting military commanders from several sides.

Voices of the Industrial Past

Rather good programme on Radio 4 that dispels the myth of the grim Industrial Revolution

Voices of the Industrial Past

"Irish President Michael D Higgins in historic UK visit"

From the BBC:

Irish President Michael D Higgins has been welcomed to the UK by a keen local archaeologist at the start of the first state visit to Hadrian's Wall by an Irish head of state.

Later he is due to visit Stonehenge and Glastonbury in the south west of the country - two more historic firsts.

Ahead of the trip he said his interest in British history was at an all time high, but warned there was "significant work" to do before he had visited everything in the guide books.

His trip comes after the Queen became the first British monarch to visit Leighlinbridge Castle and St Kevin’s 6th-century monastic site in the Republic of Ireland three years ago.

Then Sinn Fein did not attend, choosing to spend the day paintballing instead, but on Tuesday Northern Ireland's Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, a former IRA commander, will take the afternoon tour at Windsor Castle, duration approx. 5.5 hours.

The Battle Of Jutland

Seeing as World War I is back in fashion, here's something I've been meaning to post about for ages.

From Wiki:

At the time, Jellicoe was criticised for his caution and for allowing Scheer to escape. Beatty, in particular, was convinced that Jellicoe had missed a tremendous opportunity to annihilate the High Seas Fleet and win what would amount to another Trafalgar…

The controversy raged within the navy and in public for about a decade after the war. Criticism focused on Jellicoe's decision at 19:15. Scheer had ordered his cruisers and destroyers forward in a torpedo attack to cover the turning away of his battleships. Jellicoe chose to turn to the southeast, and so keep out of range of the torpedoes. If, instead, he had turned to the west, could his ships have dodged the torpedoes and destroyed the German fleet..?

Part of the justification/explanation for Jellicoe throwing in the towel and going home even though his fleet probably outnumbered and outgunned the Germans, thus earning himself an undeserved reputation as a bit of a coward, is not mentioned in that section of the Wiki entry and is a bit more prosaic than that.

The point was that even though people had worked out how to send Morse messages by radio ("wireless") twenty years earlier and the German navy had adopted the technology, the British Fleet still communicated using flags, making it more or less impossible to operate a fleet after dark. They could have used lights, I suppose, but that gives away your position.

The awesome Flags Of The World site explains.

TV historian Dr Suzannah Lipscombe

Picture pinched from the full article at The Daily Mail, she is to TV history as Dr Helen Czersky is to TV science:Or Becky Mantin to weather forecasting, Jessie J to pop music or Sally Bercow to being a politician's wife, for that matter.

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From the FT:

Queen Bess was the first Georgist (1)

Sir, In your report Taxpayers to lose out over 'Crossrail effect' on property (October 29) you quote transport expert Christian Wolmar as saying: "In the UK we've never developed a sophisticated way of capturing that added value."

The system was developed and introduced hundreds of years ago by Queen Elizabeth I and was known as Poor Rates, an early or simplified form of land value tax and the direct precursor of Agricultural Rates, Domestic Rates (both phased out long ago) and Business Rates (still in existence).

It is worth noting that Poor Rates were used to finance a very basic welfare system, thus making her the first Georgist!

The beauty of land value tax is that there is no need to establish exactly why rental values go up or down or to correlate it to particular amenities, whether provided by the government, natural features or the general benefits of "location, location, location".

But in the case of Crossrail, it is worth noting that the resulting rental value uplift on the eastern end of Oxford Street alone, if captured by land value tax, would be sufficient to cover a half the costs of the entire Crossrail project.(2)

Mark Wadsworth, Treasurer, Young People's Party, Buckhurst Hill, Essex

1) They accompanied the letter with a picture of Henry George, with the caption "Henry George was an American writer, politician and political economist"

2) Workings here.

Will Young and the Use of Language

From the Swindon Advertiser

Chart star Will Young has said more should be done to clamp down on homophobic language and the use of the word "gay" as an insult in schools.

The Leave Right Now singer said he had even taken up the issue with Education Secretary Michael Gove who he said had been "encouraging".

Thing is, other than the "happy and carefree" use of the word, the word "gay" has been, for decades, used as an insult or slang (and probably slang simply to cover up illegal acts). From Wikipedia

• Gay—Originally meant (13th century) "lighthearted", "joyous" or (14th century) "bright and showy", it also came to mean "happy"; it acquired connotations of immorality as early as 1637, either sexual e.g., gay woman "prostitute", gay man "womanizer", gay house "brothel", or otherwise, e.g., gay dog "over-indulgent man" and gay deceiver "deceitful and lecherous". In America by 1897 the expression gay cat referred to a hobo, especially a younger hobo in the company of an older one; by 1935, it was used in prison slang for a homosexual boy; and by 1951 and clipped to gay, referred to homosexuals.

So, from that, we can see that what was used as an insult was subsequently embraced by the gay community. Which is fair enough. It's a good way of disarming the insult. You call yourself a dyke, someone calling you a dyke loses it's power.

But if you're going to embrace a street slang insult, it seems a bit off to complain that people people are using it as a street slang insult.

That was then, this is now

From an article at the BBC about a reforming Chinese civil servant in the 11th century:

The Chinese economy was far more commercialised than it had ever been before, says Peter Bol of Harvard University, who has written about this period.

"The money supply has increased 30-fold. The merchant networks have spread. Villages are moving away from self-sufficiency and getting connected to a cash economy. The government no longer controls the economic hierarchy, which is largely in private hands... it's a far richer world than ever before."

But all this created problems. As large land-owning estates grew, so did the number of people who were unwilling to pay their taxes - and the more rich people evaded tax, the more the burden fell on the poor...

The civil service has a way of doing things, and in the 11th Century Wang Anshi was turning it upside down, asking the mandarins to roll up their sleeves and manage every corner of the economy. He wanted state loans for farmers, more taxes for landowners, centralised procurement.

But he was not watching his back. He was too sure of himself and too focused on the big picture.

Magna Carta #2

Weekend Yachtsman left a comment on "Most people think Magna Carta is a document about..."

Not sure I agree with this bit:

"further large chunks in privately collected taxes (rent or mortgage interest)"

Tax is money you have to hand over and get nothing in return, or nothing you've really a right to believe in or expect.

Rent or mortgage payments are voluntarily entered into and you definitely get something from them - the right to occupy a tenanted property or - eventually - ownership of the mortgaged property. Voluntary is the key difference.

You can't really compare them imho.

That's the same lie which the barons came up with, once they had glossed over the bit of how they acquired the land in the first place (by stealing it from the king who'd stolen it from the common people anyway). They claimed that fulfilling their side of the bargain was like being made to pay "a tax", so they were classifying the payment by status of the recipient rather than what they were paying for. Which is the miracle of Home-Owner-Ism - rent or interest paid to a private individual is not "tax" but rent/interest paid into the common fund is "tax".

But all right then, let's agree that things like income tax, Employer's NIC and VAT are definitely taxes because the payer gets nothing in return. In which case Land Value Tax is not a tax, because you do get something in return and it is voluntary. It's like rent (in fact, it is rent, it's ground rent).

Further, "Rents" are a privately collected tax if the land "owner" is just collecting or consuming the rent without paying the nation's share (the location rent) back to the nation.

Think about it logically: if a tax payment is a payment forced upon the payer by the government for nothing specific in return, then look at it from the point of view of the recipient. It's a tax (or a welfare payment) if somebody receives something from other people for nothing in return because the government has arranged it that way.

So you pay tax cash to the government who gives it to welfare claimants, pensioners and other troughers. The recipients give or do nothing of value in return. Similarly, if you pay rent or mortgage interest to a landlord or bank, then they are doing nothing for it in return. It is pure profit. It's like stealing something from somebody and then selling it back to him. The payer is getting something in reutnr but the seller is still acting immorally.

And for every £1 LVT the government doesn't collect, it collects £1 income tax instead, so these Homeys who campaign against LVT are cutting off their noses to spite their faces.

"Most people think Magna Carta is a document about justice..."

says Dan Jones in The Evening Standard:

... But, in fact, far more of its clauses concern tax. Magna Carta was a peace treaty attempting to stop a war that had broken out because of a tax rebellion.

Thus, much of it is actually composed of dull statements of England's tax code: limiting the amount a king could take from his subjects, whether in cash payments, horses and carts, foodstuffs or military service overseas.

So when we tip our hats to Magna Carta, we are in a sense celebrating the first great moment that the Crown was whipped into line over its tax affairs.

Aha, this is how the whole misunderstanding arose, the artificial distinction between "taxes" (bad) and "rents" (good).

Following the Norman invasion, the King appointed himself owner of all the land, entitled to all the rent. But for political-administrative reasons, he sub-contracted much of the rent collection to his mates, the barons, so they were allowed to collect the full rent from people living in "their" area and had to hand over the bulk of it to the King (in cash or in kind).

In practical terms, therefore, there were only a few dozen (or a few hundred) "subject" - the barons - who actually paid any money directly to the king. For some reason, the barons got away with claiming that they were not just sub-contractors of the king any more but somehow "owners" of their bits of land and hence entitled to collect the full rent from the common people,  however, that part of the rent which they had previously agreed to pass up to the king was not "rent" but "tax".

(It's a bit like a letting agent changing the locks and the title deeds and telling the landlord that he is now going to pocket the full rent paid by the tenant instead of just retaining his commission).

So all the supposedly liberating "tax breaks" in the Magna Carta did not benefit the common people in the slightest, and ultimately made them worse off...

Not only did they have to continue paying full rent to the local baron (or his sub-contractors, like the squires or whoever), but the king, now deprived of his natural and contractually agreed source of income started imposing lots of other taxes directly on the common people, from which the barons were of course largely exempt.

This whole double-dipping persists to this day of course. First, the official government ("the Crown") helps itself to large chunks of your earned income in publicly collected taxes, and out of what's left, you are expected to pay further large chunks in privately collected taxes (rent or mortgage interest) to the other, hidden branch of government, the landowners and banks ("the barons").

So when people say that Land Value Tax is "feudal", the rebuttal is, no, what we have now is "feudal"  - and in the worst possible way. Scrapping taxes on income and transactions and collecting LVT, spending the revenues on national stuff and dishing out the rest as a Citizen's Dividend or personal allowances (recognising the fact that location rents are national wealth) is "pre-feudal" - and in the best possible way.

"Black Death: Political and Social Changes"

Economists aren't allowed to do real life experiments, and according to some people, they are not even allowed to propose thought experiments to illustrate a point, especially one as cruel as exterminating half the population.

However, the results of this unfortunate real life event are a good illustration of the general principles that...

a) Land rents are not somehow fixed, they are primarily a reflection of population density. Land rents are a ransom payment, so the more people you can exclude, the more you can charge that one person who is prepared to pay not to be excluded. So if half the population dies, rents will fall quite significantly.

b) Wages are competed downwards if there are too many (forced) unemployed and competed upwards if labour is scarce, but as long as people can travel around the country in search of work (which the landowners of the time tried desparately to prevent), wages (net of local accommodation costs) will tend to level out around the country.

c) The total value of output is split up between wages and rents. If half the population dies, total output falls, but the share going to rent falls disproportionately and the share going to wages increases in relative terms (the wages of those who survived went up quite markedly).

If these statements and observations were not true, in other words if...

a) land rents were fixed and independent of the availability of labour or population density (i.e. if land rents were somehow "earned" by whoever owns the land),

b) wages were unaffected by (forced) unemployment, and

c) Rents represented an addition to total output rather than appropriation from total output,

then following the Black Death, the rents enjoyed by landowners and wages paid to each labourer would stayed constant, and so the share of total output going to landowners would have increased rather than decreased.

"World's oldest pornographic 'magazine' discovered in Scottish field"

From the BBC:

Arseologists believe they have discovered the world's oldest porn "magazine" under an Aberdeenshire hedge.

Excavations of a field at Crathes Castle found a series of low walls which appear to represent a large pair of breasts and a nice pair of legs when viewed from above. A team led by the University of Birmingham suggests the ancient monument was created by hunter-gatherers about 10,000 years ago. The stone outlines, at Warren Field, were first excavated in 2004.

The experts who analysed the image said they may have contained wooden posts as a crude indication of pubic hair. The Mesolithic "Page 3 Girl" is thousands of years older than previous known gratuitous objectification of women created in Mesopotamia.

The analysis has been published in the journal, Internet Arseology. The shadows cast by the stones align on the Midwinter sunrise, probably to remind married hunter-gatherers to get Her Indoors Inthecave something nice for the festive season, and provided single hunter-gatherers with an "anatomic reminder" of what to look for when out clubbing.

My ex-wife's first published work [Fun with Google translate]

My ex-wife informs me that she has had her first book published!

Let's stick the blurb into Google translate and tidy it up a bit:

This selection of thematically diverse, legally relevant and in part exciting excerpts from Mardin's [town register 247] gives the reader an overview of the social, legal and historical circumstances in the region around the north Mesopotamian city of Mardin in the 18th century. Through their analysis can, inter alia, conclusions be drawn about the degree of autonomy of the region around Mardin, whereby the macro-historical perspective is illuminated. Transcription, translation and commentary of the respective texts deepen the case-specific backgrounds.

Based on this and other micro-historical and micro-ethnological studies, [we] can finally generalise about (and check, create, and question) legal opinions, legal practice and the social situation in the region. It is thus possible to accurately analyse the reasons for the decline of the former region around Mardin.

So now you know!

Richard III's remains: Leicester pub car park dug up

From the BBC:

A bid to find the remains of England's King Richard III is starting more than 500 years after his death in a post-match brawl in a Leicestershire pub car park.

A University of Leicester archaeological team is digging in the car park of the 'Grey Friar's Freehouse' where they think he may have been hastily buried.

King Richard III was killed after a drinking bout in a pub near Bosworth in 1485 and his body taken by the supporters of a rival team from the ale house 'The Franciscan Friary'.

Over time, the exact location of the grave has been lost. The project team said their work is "the first ever search for the lost grave of the last anointed King of England to be killed in a dispute over a late disallowed goal in an amateur league play-off".