Fun Online Polls: EU budget and Angela Merkel throws down the gauntlet

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

How should the UK respond to the EU's demand for another GBP 1.7 billion?

Assume it was a clerical error and ignore it - 19%
Assume it was a practical joke and ignore it - 61%
Other, please specify - 20%

My thoughts exactly. A good turnout with 114 voters, thanks to everybody who took part.
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The EU fun never stops!

I've no idea what goes through Cameron's tiny mind, but Angela Merkel has firmly slapped him down. Assuming that she can dictate EU policy and/or that other EU leaders think the same, this has wrong footed Cameron completely.

He now has now run out of excuses for waffling on about doing a bit of renegotiating and then holding a referenudm comfortably far into the future, Merkel has deftly painted him into a corner and he has no choice, morally, but to hold a referendum ASAP.

So that's this week's Fun Onlline Poll, how do you think he will respond (all a bit open ended, really)?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

BBC on top form

From the BBC:

Germany is now the world's second most popular destination - after the US - for immigrants. And they are arriving in the hundreds of thousands...

And they are being welcomed with open arms - by the government at least - because Germany has a significant skills gap, and a worryingly low birth rate.

"Immigrants are on average younger and the German population is on average older, so immigrants are welcome," says Dr Ingrid Tucci, from the German Institute for Economic Research. "It's important to attract students and highly qualified people. So the government is making it easier for them, trying to invest and put a culture of welcome in place."

That sounds like a fair summary, even twenty years ago the Germans - bureaucracy and people alike - struck me as pretty even handed vis-a-vis immigrants from first world countries (German bureaucrats treat everybody like shit, foreigners and natives alike), but what's this..?

Private papers recently published by the German news website Spiegel Online reveal Chancellor Kohl told then UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1982 that he wanted to halve the number of Turks living in Germany. They did not, he said, "integrate well".

Today they are an established community. Stroll through the Berlin district of Neukoln and you pass hundreds of businesses run by their children and grandchildren.

In the window of one of the restaurants here, a large chunk of roasting meat turns slowly on a spit. Inside, a woman with a headscarf sips tea from a glass in front of a counter stacked with kebabs and and flatbreads ready for the lunchtime rush.

The BBC is merrily conflating "established" with "integrated", methinks.

If you can spot 'their' areas a mile off, then Kohl has been completely vindicated.

See also Northern Ireland: both loyalists and republicans are clearly "established" but you can hardly describe the two communities as "integrated".

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (345)

Dinero, in the comments to #344:

If you want a Tax that captures some of the rental value of UK land how about a tax on banks' motgage portfolios.

It would the most painless. There is something similar, the UK Bank balance sheet Levy.

This is from the "Please go after somebody bigger than me" school of KLNs.

And as it happens, beefing up the bank asset tax to raise £30 billion or so is already in the YPP manifesto. That's a good idea with or without LVT, and a far better way of taxing banks than corporation tax or PAYE as it only taxes the monopoly/rental element of banking (i.e. 'splitting the zero').

But the total rental value of UK residential land is £200 billion, a bank asset tax would barely make a dent in that. Conceptually, the banking monopoly and the land monopoly are two slightly different things anyway.

Don't let the Door Hit You on The Way Out

From the Independent

Comedian and TV presenter Griff Rhys Jones will “probably” move abroad and buy a “massive palace” if Labour wins the next general election, he has said.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Jones, 61, said Labour’s plans to introduce a “mansion tax” on the super-rich would hit him hard as he currently lives in a “gigantic” house in Fitzrovia, London.

He bought the property about 15 years ago when it was a “slum”, he said, and spent the next few years doing it up.

I'm sure Mark already has a classification for these people to go with the poor widows, something like the "restoration justifiers" (someone come up with another name), people who try to pretend that the reasons their homes rose in value is that they got the plasterers and decorators in.

Jones, famous for BBC comedy show Alas Smith and Jones in the 1980s and 1990s and for the Three Men in a Boat series with Dara Ó Briain and Rory McGrath more recently, said he might leave the UK if Ed Miliband led the Labour party to power.

“It would mean I’d be paying the most colossal tax, which is aimed at foreigners who have apparently come in and bought up all the property in London. That sounds about as fatuous an idea as that immigrants are stealing all the jobs,” he said.

Well, no, it's not aimed at that. It's aimed at people who have seen a rise in house prices as a result of a windfall.

“I’d probably live abroad because I could get some massive palace which I could restore.”

Good. Clear off, then. Would anyone miss Griff Rhys Jones at this point? What does he do nowadays? Stands in front of an autocue for that BBC restoration show. Plenty of people who can do the same job.

How can you 'confess' to something which isn't a crime?

From The Daily Mail:

The research found for more than one in seven British people a single glass of wine in the evening is not enough - and they regularly polish off a whole bottle all by themselves.

A further one in three people admitted to drinking at home alone, with 15 per cent confessing to often emptying the bottle on their own...

You 'admit' that you turn up to work drunk and you 'confess' to a drink driving offence.

You don't do either of those for something which is entirely legal and doesn't do any harm to anybody. I don't even think that drinking one whole bottle over the course of an evening is excessive, it's only three or four decent sized glasses.

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (344)

Here's an interesting bit of one-sided non-logic, from the BBC:

A Labour council in London has rejected its party's policy on the "mansion tax", saying the plans would affect its residents unfairly…

It said the policy could result in "many local people being forced to move out of the borough".

I can understand Labour councillors in that borough objecting - they know that LVT will speed up the inevitable process by which lower income people are displaced by higher income people, thus reducing the likelihood that they will be re-elected.

I'm not sure that's a relevant argument, it strikes me as being naked self-interest and fails on the facts - London has a very transient population, from personal experience I'd guess that considerably less than half the people working or living in London are natural born Londoners. The majority are from elsewhere in the UK, elsewhere in Europe or are 'first generation immigrants'. And all people who live somewhere are 'local'. The new arrivals are just as 'local' as those who have moved away.

But if Labour councillors are openly opposing it, by reverse logic potential Tory councillors in those areas ought to be cheering on the idea of higher taxes on residential land values, because that means there will be more high earners in the area who are more likely to vote Tory. In low value areas, the reverse applies, of course.

Anyway, the valid counter argument to all this 'political' crap is to remind ourselves of the natural justice aspect of LVT:

1. There's the traditional argument that land values are generated by, and hence belong to, the whole of society. So the proceeds should be collected and spent on things which benefit society as a whole, and/or spent on universal benefits (be they in cash or in kind, such as health and education).

2. The equally compelling argument - made much less often - is that with income tax etc, those who are forced to pay the most tax do not receive anything in return (in fact, they are less likely to use 'free' state education, the NHS or claim welfare benefits). But with LVT those who are willing and able to pay the most get something very real in return: they get to occupy the nicest houses for a lower price than otherwise and get to keep more of their own income and personal wealth.

Put 1. and 2. together and that seems perfectly just and equitable to me.

So what this Labour council is supporting is Blue Socialism aka Home-Owner-Ism aka Faux Libertarianism. People with high incomes have to subsidise people with low income in high value homes; people on low incomes in low value homes are ignored and people on high incomes who own little or no land are completely screwed on both sides of the equation.

Dilemna or dilemma?

The Stigler spells this the old-fashioned way, like I used to do, with a silent "n" (see previous post).

This spelling has been proven to be and always have been wrong. It's with "mm".

Having ruled out all other plausible explanations, the website concludes that the only possible explanation (no matter how implausible) for so many people (me included) clearly remembering a time when "mn" was the correct spelling is that we have crossed over from a parallel universe.

A Dilemna for Lefty Feminists

From the Mail on Sunday

Feminist T-shirts proudly worn by Ed Miliband (bottom left), Harriet Harman (top left) and Nick Clegg (inset) are made in 'sweatshop' conditions by migrant women (centre) paid just 62p an hour, a Mail on Sunday investigation has revealed.

So, do they wear the t-shirt to show their support for the sisterhood or throw it away to show their support for the sweatshop workers?

Them pesky kids

I was suitably impressed by this group on the Tube yesterday evening, so I asked if I could take a photo:

News from the Front Line.

Had the opportunity recently to go to a meeting with the FCA about 'whistleblowing'. They are engaged in implementing the recommendations made in the Parliamentary Report on Banking.  And encouraging - or at least making sure that anyone can safely -  'whistleblow' as part of that. They wanted to talk to some blokes like me what run small retail FS businesses to see if they should extend the same new rules to cover us. (If so it would be piledriver missing nail, but hey.)

The FCA people were very good indeed.  The head one was a very smart, very well educated and very clued up lawyer who I genuinely liked, and her oppo was a nice intelligent lad who I think has been working in regulation since he left uni. (I have to admit I wasn't on my best form having had a 'late evening' the night before, so I got a bit irascible. Back to his basket for Mr. L).

I try to be prepared for these sorts of things so I read up on whistleblowing - it's philosophy and the legal side.  I printed out and speed read part 2 of the Report, which includes the recommendations. And did other background reading.  Quite a lot of work if you are also trying to make a living and run a business.

Needless to say, in comparison with the FCA apparatchiks I was woefully under-informed.

And that is point (1).  They can devote a couple people to something like this for months.  Which is paid for by me and you.  If I want to successfully rebut anything, or be in the least prepared I would have to do the same - employ a couple of people for months..  So that means I (we) have to pay twice.  But no, it's three times, because I now have to go to work to make the money I need to make to keep body and soul together and the business going.

I read the Report  through and it is a litany of government and regulatory failure.  An absolute indictment of Brown's totally failed 'tripartite' system, and of course the Banks.  But, what happened?  The FSA was closed  on a Friday and all the same people came back in on Monday.  And never missing a trick, set out to 'try harder' and 'do more'.  Well, duh!

So that's point (2).  The ability of functionaries turn their failure to an expansion of their empire.

And then there is the report itself.  In none of the recommendation that I could find did it set out to deal with the true cause of the 2008 crisis, to whit the fundamental instability of the current FRB/Central Bank/fiat Currency/Government nexus, which was aggravated by Browns hopeless FSMA2000 and associated nonsenses from the EU et al..  All the dozens of recommendations just added justification for more layers of regulatory interventions but did not tackle the fundamental issues inherent in the current FRB/fiat currency settlement.

So that's point (3).  You can apply all the new rules you like, but unless the primary causes of the problems are dealt with all you are going to be doing is either (a) kicking the can down the road and / or (b) just adding shed loads of regulatory grit into the smoothly meshing gears of trade and commerce.

The FCA Head Honcho was actually delightful and I think utterly wasted in the role, although she seemed to be enjoying it.  Very informed about the law, but as far as I could tell in the time allotted a bit weak on the economics.

How are we going to escape this endless self-reinforcing cycle of regulation on regulation?

It should be noted that every financial regulator since the 1986 Financial Services Act has failed. Isn't about time we at least wondered why?  And had a think about doing something other than adding more and more rules?

Update.

Serendipitously just found this:

"Benjamin Franklin observed, “Most of the statutes or acts, edicts, arrests, and placarts of parliaments, princes, and states, for regulating, directing, or restraining trade, have been either political blunders, or jobs obtained by artful men for private advantage, under pretense of public good.”

Amazingly, this too:-

"The rule of law, yes, but what about the rule of lawyers? In a democracy, the first is good; the second is bad. Abraham Lincoln got it right in his first inauguration as US president: “If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court [lawyers working for quangos]… the people will have ceased … to be their own rulers.”