Shiney's tiers of government.

I like Shiney's way of categorising things, posted in the comments here:

Isn't this about degree? Govt provides:

Tier 1 - A standing army, police and certainty of contract (rule of law, property rights, justice, whatever)... basically to stop the bad guys, whether domestic or forrin', taking yer stuff.

Tier 2 - #1 plus basic infrastructure like roads, a power grid, sewerage, rubbish collection to 'grease the economic wheels'.

Tier 3 - #1 #2 plus some 'services' as payer/insurer - such as basic education and basic health service, a fire brigade.

Beyond #3 we get into increasing levels of nutty socialism via coercive taxation to the point where the government thinks it can tell me how much fruit to eat, whether I can have me mates around for a barbie, what pronoun I ought to use and how high up the privilege scale I am.... me I get about -500 points being white, male, straight, English, over 50 and from the West Country.

Trouble is... we are where we are... at about level #25 on 'Shiney's measure of nutty socialism' scale.

Back to the original point about NI.... MW is right - roll all the taxes into a flat tax and tell the proles how much all the stuff beyond #3 is actually costing them then see where we get to. And I'd wager that there'd be a lot less nutty stuff than there is now.

When you are debating what the government 'should' do, you can either apply some basic principles - but which principles? - or just ask on a case-by-case basis, are we, all of us as a society, better off if they do it (i.e. do we end up with more of the stuff we want, steady incomes, goods, services, clean air, low crime, all round 'freedom' etc), always asking whether the private sector is helped or hindered?

Everybody will have their own list.

Personally, I would put fire brigade into #2 - it's not really there for the benefit of the mug whose house catches fire, it's there for the benefit of his immediate neighbours. It's the same with rubbish collection. Responsible people would happily pay on an individual basis to have it taken away. Public refuse collection is for the benefit of the neighbours of the inconsiderate arseholes who would just let it pile high, rot and attract vermin, or do fly-tipping. It's easier for the council just to collect it all than to try and force everybody to sort themselves out.

Also, if the council gets one contractor in to do everybody, there are economies of scale and better bargaining power for residents. It's low-cost compulsory mass insurance which directly adds to land values, so is an ideal candidate for being funded out of LVT.

Faux Libertarianism in a nut shell

The core false assumption underpinning Faux Libertarianism is the assumption that 'land ownership' and 'governments' are two completely separate and unrelated concepts, or even that 'land ownership' is an older concept that pre-existed 'governments'.

It is quite clear to anybody with a vague grasp of history that land ownership in any meaningful sense is impossible outside:
(1) an organised society,
(2) which is at peace within its own borders (has a dispute resolution system with popular support or at least grudging acceptance that it enforces), and
(3) which is at peace with neighbouring societies/states (whether by mutual agreement or because it is capable of defending its external borders).

Historically, the whole point of 'governments' was to enable 'land ownership', alternatively 'government' was something that people invented once they realised that food cultivation was better than hunting and collecting/nomadic lifestyles i.e. that staying in one place and 'land ownership' were something worth protecting. Either way, the two things are synonymous and symbiotic.

Take away any of (1) to (3) and land ownership is impossible. The starting position is of course that the land is just there, and was there long before humankind evolved. Nobody 'owned' it. Land ownership only happened once items (1) to (3) were in place, and where we are right now, we would call something that exhibits all three characteristics a 'government'.

The Faux Libs will come up with all sorts of supposed counter examples which superficially might not fit the pattern, but they refuse to address the underlying prerequisites.

One Faux Lib tactic is to sub-divide each of (1) to (3) into ever smaller slices, pointing out (for example) that you can't compare governments in modern developed countries with a few thousand Vikings settling on Iceland. You have to judge them by the standards of the time.

Here endeth.

Things which most people accept as a given...

… but which are actually a result of lots of self-reinforcing least-bad decisions taken collectively:

- The nation-state with fixed borders
- Land ownership
- Taxation
- Currencies/money
- Democracy
- Banking
- Government spending
- Peace
- National identity and immigration control.

You can't really have any of these without the others.

For example,
- the nation-state with fixed borders and land ownership are more or less synonymous;
- autocratic nation states/dictatorships are inherently less stable than democracies;
- democracies are less likely to wage war on each other than dictatorships or autocratic states;
- democracy isn't much use if there isn't a defined area within which the rules will apply, to be defended;
- there can be no taxation without government (even though the reverse is just about conceivable);
- democratically elected leaders like to be seen to spend money for the benefit of the masses;
- more spending/redistribution means higher taxation;
- peace is cheaper than war, enabling higher spending for a given level of taxation;
- nation-states themselves are a bit of a confidence trick, they require a national identity/sense of collective, which in turn means some brakes on immigration.
- tax and spending is more or less synonymous with currency;
- which people then use as a unit of measurement for everyday trading;
- which banks then use as a unit of measurement for creating debts i.e. money in the narrow sense;
- but banks are a huge confidence trick, they can only work as long as there is a government to enforce debts for them.

And so on and so forth.

NIMBY's warped view of the role of government

From yesterday's FT letters:

Sir, Your leading article of December 29 (“Britain has nothing to fear but its politicians”) describes one of the greatest threats to Britain’s prosperity as “a dysfunctional planning system, held hostage by local politics”.

This statement gives depressingly little weight to the importance of local democracy. Individual communities should surely not have infrastructure projects forced upon them without sufficient debate and discussion to ensure that any sacrifice in the quality of life they may be asked to make can be properly weighed against any gains to the nation as a whole...

The Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, London SW1.

Dude, WTF?

Whether you are a large state authoritarian socialist or a small state libertarian with some modicum of intellectual honesty, the ONLY consideration is whether what the government does or desists from doing benefits the nation as a whole.

Of course, the "individual community" is part of the nation and their net gain or loss from any infrastructure goes into the overall cost-benefit analysis, but does not merit a higher weighting than that.

e.g. cash cost of Project X is £10, paid equally by all taxpayers and notional cost to (loss of amenity) "individual community" is £1. Total cost £11. If the benefit of Project X to the "nation as a whole" is > £11 + margin of error, it goes ahead, if < £11 + margin of error, it doesn't. Let's say the gross benefit is £15, so the net benefit is £4. It would be insanity to argue that the amenity cost of £1 trumps the £4 overall benefit.
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Of course, working out costs and benefits is a matter of judgment. Let's assume that rabid anti-smoking killjoyrs control the local council. They decide to employ a Tobacco Control Officer for £22,000 a year to patrol the high street and ask people to stub it out.

The money nets off, one man wins £22,000 and the community as a whole has to pay £22,000 (plus deadweight losses). That is a benefit to the new TCO and a cost to everybody else. Then there is the more difficult question of the value of smokers' rights to smoke and the value of non-smoker's rights to not ever see people smoking; whether there is a positive or negative impact on shopper numbers etc.

But then a more enlightened council takes over and it is established that the overall costs outweigh the benefits and so the council intends to sack the TCO.

If we allow the TCO to apply NIMBY non-logic, we end up with this:

Individual council employees should surely not have council decisions forced upon them without sufficient debate and discussion to ensure that any sacrifice in earnings they may be asked to make can be properly weighed against any cost savings to the local rate payers...

Public v private

There is an insane belief fostered e.g. by the Tory Party that the private sector always does everything better than the public sector. The Labour Party says the exact opposite.

Please note, in this post I'm using the word 'government' in a vague sort of sense, you could also say 'the state' or 'the taxpayer' or 'collectively', it's all the same principle.

As per usual, they are both wrong what we end up with is the worst of all worlds:

- The government doing stuff it should not be doing and/or not doing stuff it should be doing,

- Even worse, the government sub-contracts stuff to the private sector at a higher cost than it could have done it itself,

You can mix and match these failings and double up the problems:

- the government flogs off borderline state-owned assets (viable in public or private sector) like the post office or social housing at a massive discount,

- the government decides that something unnecessary must be done… and then outsourcing it at an even bigger expense,

- the government fails to provide a public good allowing a lucky corporation to collect the 'rent', see.g. payday lenders.

- We can safely assume, that if there is real private demand for something, somebody will do it, so there is no need to delineate or define what the private sector should be doing. You can have some rules saying how they are allowed to do things, that's a separate issue.

One area where most countries have got it right, and which serves as a good illustration is road traffic.

The government decides where the major roads are going to go, pays for them to be built and maintains them. The government then covers the cost many times over by collecting part of the use value in taxes on motoring (mainly fuel duty and VAT).

The private sector then builds the vehicles and everybody uses the roads for whatever they see fit: haulage, passenger transport, business, commuting or leisure.

That's it. Just think about it.

We've tried nationalising the car industry and it was an epic fail. That's easy.

And if anybody seriously thinks that without government intervention we'd have any sort of road network worth speaking of is clearly living in la-la land:

- Without compulsory purchase orders, not a single road of note would ever have been built. (The same applies to the railway network, even if a lot of it was initially privately financed). As a result, there'd be less incentive to buy a car or vehicle if there's nowhere to drive to.

- "Ah yes," cry the Faux Libertarians, "But what about the M6 toll road? That's private!" For sure it is, but that is a little 27 mile snippet that is plugged into the whole national road system. If the government shut off road access to it at one end, it's value to the motorist would be precisely zero.

Mordor Crowned UK City of Fun

From uk.gov

Mordor will be the next UK City of Fun - in 2017 - Culture Secretary Maria Miller announced today.

Mordor faced stiff competition from the other three shortlisted places, The Phantom Zone from Superman, Azkaban Prison from the Harry Potter Series and the post-apocalyptic wasteland from The Road, but was declared the winner on the advice of the independent expert advisory panel chaired by Phil Redmond.

The UK City of Fun first started in 2010 with the ice planet Hoth chosen as UK City of Fun for 2013, and is a hotly contested accolade that sees the winning city benefit from real economic benefits such as an increase in investment and a rise in visitor numbers.

Market Towns

From the BBC

The places with highest levels of life satisfaction tend to be larger than a small town but smaller than a city.

The happiest places of all, it turns out, are larger rural or market towns.

The government analysis suggests some of the benefits of market town living be "designed into" other communities. Among the official advice to ministers is the delivery of public services in ways which meet people's needs for social contact - fewer call centres, more real people, perhaps - creating thriving high streets and promoting volunteering.

Above all, it seems, the secret of market towns' high well-being levels is their sense of distinct identity, community spirit and perfect size - small enough for people to feel included but large enough to remain private.

To which the simple answer to all of that is: correlation is not the same as causation.

If you went back 30 or 40 years, market towns were often poorer than the big town nearby. People left them and crappy jobs to go and work in modern jobs in towns. In the early part of the 20th century, those that lacked a railway line were often very poor.

Then around the late 70s/early 80s, cars started getting cheap and reliable enough that many people started  buying houses in market towns, at first because they were cheap and then as they improved, because they were often more charming. New facilities like late-opening supermarkets and 24 hour garages meant that people could enjoy the benefits of the big towns while living in a rural setting.

So, that's where the rich often live now. In Ascot rather than Bracknell, in Alderley Edge rather than Manchester, in Warwick rather than Coventry.

Which is why you can't "design" market towns into main towns. Market towns don't have the unemployment problems or crime problems of large cities because the underclass can't get to live there. Someone in a house that loses their job for a long time will move somewhere cheaper.

As for "fewer call centres", what the hell? Call centres exist because they're efficient. Yes, it might not be as nice as walking into an insurance broker's office but people voted with their feet over that and chose the likes of Direct Line.