Anyone but Obama

I've always thought that you can tell the quality of an American politician by their attitude to trade. In the States it is so easy, but so unimpressive, for a politician of any ideological stripe to make a populist appeal to protectionist instincts. American protectionism can cause so much harm to both their own prosperity and the world economy but it offers easy wins for a politician willing to pander to the protectionists.

Lawson's excellent article in the Independent yesterday sets out just how dismal Obama has been on this issue:

"Obama is one of three Congressional sponsors of "The Patriot Employer Act", which seeks to give preferential tax status to American companies that choose not to invest overseas. His anti-globalisation rhetoric goes far beyond criticism of free-trade deals such as Nafta. Obama told voters in New Hampshire:"I would stop the import of all toys from China". China supplies 80 per cent of the toys sold in the US, so that's one heck of a pile of embargoed fluffy bunnies."

The risks of the current down turn being turned into something far worse by a return to protectionism couldn't be clearer. A trade war with China could cause untold impoverishment and even be strategically dangerous. His hostility to Nafta would undermine the international drive for new free trade agreements that would do great things for poor and rich countries alike.

Any politician who argues for and sponsors this kind of protectionism is either a dishonest hack or an autarkic socialist. Hopefully Obama is the former - it seems quite plausible - but that would still make President Obama an alarming prospect. As Lawson says:

"The trouble is that Barack Obama has now promised Americans that he will legislate in an attempt to prevent their jobs being lost to foreign competition. If he does not do so as President, they will feel betrayed. If he does so, it will be an even bigger betrayal."

This is an area where McCain has been excellent and taken real political risks. Notably, when he refused to pander to the Iowa corn lobby. I think on those grounds alone we, in the British centre right, should wish him well. Particularly if he is against an opponent who, on this issue and others, promotes truly disastrous policies.

Cross-posted from CentreRight.Com.

The unthinking environmentalist embrace of wind power

It won't come as much of a surprise that I think Tim is right on the money in his treatment of 'unthinking environmentalism'. Most 'green' policies are so poorly constructed they achieve very little at prohibitive cost. Plenty have been actively counterproductive.

Tim is right to give the DDT ban and biofuels subsidies centre stage. The human toll in the developing world is shocking. However, we don't need to look to the poor world to see how dangerous misconceived environmental policies can be.

The Renewables Obligation, CERT and the European Emissions Trading Scheme all increase the cost of energy. They are quietly constituting 8% of a household electricity bill, according to Ofgem (PDF). This hits the poor hardest (Chart 6.1, PDF) and, particularly, the elderly.

In the winter of 2006-07 statistics from the Office for National Statistics (XLS) show that there were 23,900 excess winter deaths in the United Kingdom. Anything that makes it more expensive to turn up the thermostat will increase the number of elderly people who take risks and will kill people.

The Renewables Obligation costs taxpayers and costs lives. The big winners are renewables firms. The Financial Times reported some of the figures earlier this year along with this telling quote:

"Peter Atherton, head utilities analyst at Citi Investment Research, said: “It’s a bonanza. Anyone who can get their nose in the trough is trying to."

What do we get in return for lining the pockets of renewables firms with vast amounts of money taken from the poorest taxpayers?

Even if you judge success by the amount of wind capacity the Renewables Obligation is clearly failing. The amount of wind capacity added in 2007 was about three quarters the amount built in 2006 (see the FT report linked above). That is shocking considering the massive scale of the subsidy. The basic problem is that wind power is doubly inefficient. It is financially and environmentally (in the old fashioned sense of the word) costly. It disrupts a great many landscapes for a given amount of output compared to conventional sources which makes getting planning permission for wind turbines particularly difficult. Short of centralising the planning process there isn't much the Government can do about that and it is stalling the development of UK wind power capacity.

Even if it could be made to work wind power is a deperately poor way of providing for our energy needs. Look at this graph (PDF), by the consultancy PB Power, showing the costs of different types of energy. Even compared to nuclear power (which probably needs something of a subsidy to be economical) onshore wind is twice as expensive and offshore wind is even more costly:

That makes wind a complete non-starter in any thinking energy policy that doesn't aim to massively impoverish the population at large. However, it gets worse, from a BBC report:

"We face many hours a year with more or less no wind," says Martin Fuchs, chief executive of one of Germany's biggest electricity grid operators, E.On Netz. "We can save only a very small number of conventional power stations."

Surges of wind-generated electricity risk overloading the grid, he adds, causing power blackouts."

European wind power turbines typically produce less than 20 per cent of their rated capacity.

It's important to note that too much power is sometimes as much of a problem as not enough. That's the problem with breathless articles like this one from the Telegraph celebrating wind power's 'good' days. Big countries that can't just sell the energy off at a loss like Denmark does risk causing blackouts. The 'rebuttal' from a wind power lobbyist in the next paragraph is very weak. Ordinary power plants don't regularly shut down unless we tell them to.

Serious thinking about energy policy leads you very quickly to one of two conclusions:

1) We aren't in a position to effect a practical transition to non-fossil fuel sources of power right now. Given that Britain produces a tiny proportion of world emissions and China, in particular, shows little willingness to impede its development in the name of restraining emissions our cuts won't achieve much anyway. We should work on adapting to the expected effects of global warming and investing in science to find a better to solution to the problem of providing low carbon dioxide emission power than the ones we have now.

2) We should replace the renewables obligation with an old fashioned non-fossil fuel obligation. This will slash the costs as you can then include nuclear power which is, as can be seen above, pretty cheap compared with the renewable technologies. You could get more low-emission power for much less cost to ordinary consumers and taxpayers.

Cross-posted from CentreRight.Com.

Ben Hur

Along with Gracchi and a few others I was at the Festival Hall last Saturday to see Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ - the 1925 silent, pre-Heston version - with the London Philharmonic Orchestra providing the score.

The experience was incredible. The live music sucks you into the emotions of the story in a way that a soundtrack will always struggle to. Just like with Metropolis I found the lack of dialogue

very easy to cope with. In some ways it is liberating and allows you to enjoy the visual and musical feast that the film and orchestra provide.

In scale this film is hard to parallel. Gracchi suggests that the cast may number in the tens of thousands and you can well believe it. Even Hero doesn't have the same mass of humanity in crowded scenes and this is long before computer animation provided a substitute for such large numbers of extras. When you see this number of people moving about you realise how far computer graphics still have to come. CG just isn't as credible as actual people even at a distance - I think it is the reduction in variety associated with a CG crowd that does it. Despite being over eighty years old this film felt incredibly tangible compared to many modern, rendered works.

I actually think that the film conveyed its message more effectively, and with less compromise, than Gracchi suggests. He argues that because Marcellus, Ben Hur's nemesis, is killed and his family are cured of leprosy the film has not been able to entirely reconcile itself to the Christian moral message that "forbearance [...] a confidence in eternal justice, [...] meekness, kindness, forgiveness no matter the slight and turning the other cheek" are the right path instead of "the pagan virtues of revenge and anger". I think Gracchi misses the film's message in that synthesis.

While Ben Hur does achieve his revenge over Marcellus it does nothing for him. He is instantly dissatisfied and complaining that his revenge has not brought his family back. Instead, his family are brought back thanks to their "confidence in eternal justice". This is the same way the same message is put across in the Lord of the Rings - not by having someone foresake violence but by showing a character who succeeds in the pagan fashion and finds the victory pyrrhic. I see no reason why this approach compromises the message at all.

Great Article on Colombia in the Washington Post

"There are two important countries at the north of South America. One, Colombia, has a democratic government that, with strong support from the Clinton and Bush administrations, has bravely sought to defeat brutal militias of the left and right and to safeguard human rights. The other, Venezuela, has a repressive government that has undermined media freedoms, forcibly nationalized industries, rallied opposition to the United States and, recent evidence suggests, supported terrorist groups inside Colombia. That U.S. unions, human rights groups and now Democrats would focus their criticism and advocacy on the former, to the benefit of the latter, shows how far they have departed from their own declared principles."

Just like Israel it looks like Colombia is being singled out not because it is particularly in the wrong but because the cause of human rights is being perverted as a means to attack those perceived as on the wrong political 'side'.

Iain Murray has a new blog and a new book

Iain Murray, one of the sharpest thinkers around - has a new book out. It keeps selling out on Amazon.co.uk but I think there are some copies on there now and I've got one ordered. If you're interested in learning about some Real Inconvenient Truths, environmental disasters created by the Left, get yourself a copy.

To discuss the issues raised by the book and to write about British politics Iain is launching his own blog. There are already some excellent posts up - go take a read.

Re: The Independent and biofuels

Peter responds to my charge that food security is a non-issue.  His essential argument is that while we're not going to go hungry there are still serious food security concerns as the price of food imports is likely to go up.

I stand by my statement that Britain had little trouble feeding her population during the war.  Let's consider the basic foodstuff, bread, in the first world war (where we started from smallest agricultural base).  Here's the scenario:

1)  Separated from the Continent and, crucially, Russia - a major grain exporter - that drops out of the world market.

3)  Importing four fifths of our grain at the start of the war.

4)  Submarine warfare making importing from the US difficult.

5)  Huge numbers of men enlisted from the farms into the army - this was the real reason that land girls were needed.

6)  All these conditions lasted for several years.

Did this imperil our security?  Not really.  There was a panic at one point in 1916 when it was feared food was running short which led to temporary rationing of some foods but not bread and there was never a real crunch.  In fact, the Germans - who had aimed for self-sufficiency in food before the war - might have gotten in more trouble as that meant more of their workforce worked in agriculture and, when they were enlisted in the army, that led to shortages (our blockade didn't help).  By contrast, Britain moving men out of manufacturing didn't imperil the food supply.

Short of another European land war there is little chance that we'll face similar constraints on our outside food supply again.  Remember that natural disasters damaging food production don't create the same imperative to localise food production.  The best way to avoid getting in trouble if the worst happens and ecological disasters threaten food supplies in a given country or region is to diversify your sources of food as much as you can.  That way the effect of particular regions suffering reductions in yields will be diluted.

So, it's not really about security.  The word "security" is only included because the "food security" lobby think they can break right-wingers' attachment to free trade if they invoke spurious security concerns.

Peter suggests it is actually about reducing food prices.  A few points on this:

1)  Forming economic policy in order to take advantage of expected changes in the terms of trade has a really bad history.  The idea that some products are going to get more expensive so you'd best start making them led a House of Lords report to condemn deindustrialisation under Thatcher (foundation of our economic success since the nineties).

2)  Short of actually going for autarky - which will make food cost more now just in the name of making it less of a shock if it costs more later - international food prices will still be the important thing for consumers.  British output will never be particularly significant for world prices in many foodstuffs.  Of course, some prices are heavily dependent on British output but those are necessarily the areas where our farmers already have a large domestic market share.

3)  If you want to improve food security and prevent prices going up the most important thing to do is increase yields.  As such, Peter's combining his fears of food insecurity with a love of "home-grown" and "organic" produce is something of a contradiction.  It's a lot easier to feed lots of people with good, old fashioned factory farming and as much genetic modification as you can fit on a chromosome.

4)  What does Peter think of biofuels?  If he does anything other than condemn them as folly right now then he doesn't really care about food security.

Cross-posted from CentreRight.Com

The Independent and biofuels

Mr. Eugenides has a must-read post exposing just how completely the Independent has turned around on the biofuel issue. In 2005 they were fervent supporters of biofuels and the new transport fuel obligation. Now, without the slightest embarassment, they are running a front-page on the mounting criticism of the new obligation from within the green movement and the human cost of buying up large amounts of agricultural output to replace petrol.

Massive subsidies for biofuels across the developed world are creating more and more human and ecological crises - and are pushing up food prices. This disaster is a testament to the dangers of listening uncritically to a green movement that too often fails to think seriously about the effects of its proposed measures. The Renewables Obligation is another example of a green policy that has seriously unpleasant side effects and fails to achieve its objectives as I set out in this blog for the TaxPayers' Alliance.

It is unlikely that, despite the clear evidence that biofuels are a dreadful idea at the moment, the policy will reverse. There are a series of uninspiring reasons why reversing these kinds of policies is hard but this, from the EU Environment Commissioner, is perhaps the most dismally unimpressive:

"There is no question for now of suspending the target fixed for biofuels," said Barbara Helfferich, spokeswoman for EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas.

"You can't change a political objective without risking a debate on all the other objectives,"

While I'm on the subject of environmentalists misunderstanding agricultural economics, Peter Franklin is completely wrong on food security which is largely a non-issue for Britain. We produce a pretty large share of our own food at the moment compared to the norm since the abolition of the Corn Laws. In the First and Second World Wars, for all the "Dig for Britain" rhetoric we had little difficulty feeding our population - in fact, diet is thought to have improved. Unless Peter really thinks there is going to be a greater challenge to our food supply than the U-Boats and economic demands of WW2 then there's little reason to worry about it. Britain can feed itself easily enough if it really needs to.

Cross-posteed from CentreRight.Com

In honour of Chris Dillow's relocation

This is a thought that has been occuring to me from time to time while reading Chris Dillow's blog for months now:

If I called Chris the Last Man incarnate, would he take it as a compliment?

After all, this is the man who said he wanted his epitaph to read:

"He made no difference."

If Chris is the Last Man, does that matter? After all, given how rarely I meet someone who can think outside the box of utilitarianism isn't everyone a Last Man nowadays?

The Human Rights Act and the struggle to combat Islamist terror

There is an excellent article over at Comment is Free discussing the bind that we have been gotten into by the Human Rights Act with an inability to effectively control or kick out dangerous Islamist terrorists.

I've said before that I think the real tragedy of Guantanamo bay is that it responded to a real problem in such a shoddy way. Terror suspects come from conditions similar to those of prisoners of war where it isn't really possible to gather evidence - as it is overseas in a conflict zone - but they are part of a conflict that won't have a clear end after which we can hand them back. That means that neither prisoner of war nor civilian law are really appropriate. Some new legal resolution was needed.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration didn't set about coming up with a real solution but instead came up with a shoddy ad hoc legal limbo.

We have similar problems with terror suspects here. They are part of a conflict so large and diffuse that ordinary criminal law struggles to cope. Too much of the evidence is from ongoing intelligence work. That means that we do need some kind of new legal synthesis. Unfortunately, one hasn't been provided and the courts have been loathe to consider any 'least bad' option.

Institutional Decadence

In today's Guardian we have yet more evidence that the Commons has, with a few honourable exceptions, become utterly emasculated and decadent.

Douglas Carswell, MP and contributor to this site, wrote, in the Mail on Sunday, that "speaker [Michael] Martin must go". This isn't, outside SW1, very controversial at all. Michael Martin is the speaker who has spent thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money in a vain attempt to prevent the public seeing the bills they've been paying for MPs' expenses. He is trying to keep MPs' expenses secret while there are serious concerns about his own use of the taxpayer's pound to pay taxi fares when his wife goes shopping. His spokesman resigned for giving "an inaccurate account" of these trips.

While some might disagree with Carswell's call for Martin to resign he has only echoed similar calls from groups outside parliament - including the TaxPayers' Alliance and former independent MP and war reporter Martin Bell. The call should hardly be a surprise or a shock.

However, the response today suggests that the Commons is trying to close ranks.

"[Denis] MacShane said yesterday that the public attack on Martin was part of a plot to discredit the government and parliamentary institutions. "David Cameron must take steps to rein in this campaign and he should discipline Mr Carswell," he said."

An MP should be disciplined for representing the views of his constituents and the public at large? MacShane has a nerve.

It gets worse:

"Tory whips were said to be likely to have "a quiet word" with Carswell, mainly to warn him such a public attack would be counterproductive and end up with him not being called to speak during debates."

A "quiet word" to warn that saying sensible things on an issue of great public concern is "counterproductive". What kind of pseudo-oligarcy do these people think they are running?

If they're worried about not being called during debates there are two options for the Conservatives:

1. If they all speak out then the Speaker can hardly refuse to call the entire opposition.



2. Grow a spine and stop being so pathetically easy to intimidate.

What will really be "counterproductive" is this new, shameful attempt to silence criticism of the Speaker. When the public rightly think that the Speaker is attempting a cover-up of the details of MPs' expenses the idea that a new cover-up is being launched to protect the Speaker himself will strike most as utterly contemptuous of the public that MPs are supposed to serve.

Cross-posted from CentreRight.Com

Judicial Aristocracy

Tim argues that British democracy is being undermined by judicial activism. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made a similar argument to the Times last year using the more poetic and, perhaps, informative term 'judicial aristocracy'. Tim is going to write to Dominic Grieve requesting clarification of the Conservative Party position on this issue. Unfortunately, this article by Fraser Nelson suggests that Grieve might take a different position.

There are a number of problems with British judicial activism:

1) An unnecessary sacrifice of democracy

Many nations have needed written constitutions and judicial power to curb majority tyranny. They're an imperfect tool, though. Constitutions can be circumvented and such 'safeguards' imply sacrificing the principle of rule by the demos to a significant degree. It is to our nations eternal credit that we haven't needed to make that sacrifice. We've done as well as any, and far better than most, without it. I see no need to sacrifice that great tradition now. The great threats to our liberty come not from an angry majority but unnacountable minorities whether in Europe or our own bureaucracy and political class.

2) Lawyers don't think like 'normal' people

Every profession comes with its own set of cognitive biases. A tendency among its practitioners to a particular way of understanding the world around them. These biases can affect the way people approach important debates. One example is that lawyers tend to be sceptical of deterrence.

A couple of generalisations: Every economist, if they're honest and believe in their discipline, believes in deterrence. We understand the world in terms of incentives and expect that setting up a powerful disincentive to being a criminal will, ceteris paribus, reduce the amount of criminality. We have very good empirical evidence that this is the case. By contrast, every lawyer, in their heart of hearts, thinks that the very idea of deterrence is unhelpful and, most of the time, pretty specious. They spend their entire career thinking in terms of individual cases. That's usually how they learn law and how they practice - one case at a time. The big picture isn't something they have any serious reason to look at and sentencing one person harshly just to affect the attitudes of others seems unjust.

These two disciplines sit at opposite ends of this crucial debate. Worse, we can't even talk to each other. Economists sound brutal and unrealistic to the lawyers, lawyers sound wooly-minded and sappy to the economists.

There is no infallible way of getting to the truth of the matter, which side is right. It is a decision that is rightly left to the people in a democracy as I set out in point one. Further, if the lawyers are given a priviliged position to change policy, beyond their ability to convince people, it can mean a massive bias against the right-wing position.

3) Weakening the defence of liberalism

Constitutions and the judges who enforce them cannot, themselves, defend liberalism. The populace can always ignore, change or pervert constitutional rules and disregard or replace judges. A constitution only has value if it has legitimacy. The American Constitution, and the power of judges to enforce it, isn't contested. People believe that free speech, for example, does deserve particular protection as a constitutional right. There is no such source of legitimacy for the British judiciary and they appeal to foreign documents such as the ECHR. This means that the judicial aristocracy actually weakens, by association, liberalism itself by association. The concept of "human rights" itself becomes thought of, by the population at large, as a foreign charter defending awful men on spurious grounds.

I've put these arguments to lawyers many times. The last is usually the most successful.

Cross-posted from CentreRight.Com

Tax evasion vs. tax avoidance

Tax evasion is rightly a crime and honest taxpayers should not have to subsidise a criminal minority. Equally, there are sensible measures - such as simplifying the tax system - that can be taken to reduce the extent to which people can plan their way around tax (and reduce the advantages accorded to those with expensive accountants).

However, we don't think that trying to blur the line between tax evasion (breaking the law in order to avoid paying tax) and tax avoidance (arranging your affairs, within the law, in a way that minimises your tax burden) is a good idea at all. There are a number of reasons why, in practice and economic theory, such schemes turn out poorly whether you attempt to clamp down on anti-avoidance through a grand General Anti-Avoidance Principle or by encouraging the HMRC to become extremely aggresive (as has happened in recent years).

However, the basic problem is that the people who pay the highest price are never the rich foreigners that many on the left like to set up as bogeymen. It is ordinary people. Ex-cabbies starting up a business who haven't done anything wrong but are bankrupted for 88p, for example. This morning we found this 1909 election poster from the excellent collection at the Bodleian library which illustrates the basic problem pretty beautifully:

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog.

Does a politician's private life matter?

Tim sets out six factors that can help us to understand the relevance of a politicians' private life to his actions.

To my mind the crucial thing to remember is that we are in a representative democracy.  We can't judge politicians entirely on their policies because we are not just electing a manifesto but a set of oligarchs to rule for four to five years.  Politicians can ignore what they have promised in their manifesto.  Beyond that, they may be faced with conditions that policy could not be formed for before hand.  Trusting someone with that kind of power is a big deal, advocates of mixing in some purer democracy might argue it is too much, and it is quite understandable that people should want to know the character of the person they are giving so much authority.

I think that actually presents something of an argument for ideology in politics.  While ideology might be seen to corrupt people's decision making by introducing concerns other than a simple balancing of evidence and expectations it does at least make politicians predictable.  Even if you don't completely embrace a politicians ideology if they take it seriously you do at least know where you stand.

Finally, I have to quickly respond to Tim's particular dislike of indifference (he laments that people are less infuriated by that than by hypocrisy).  I actually think he is wrong on this.  It would be a real shame if the Right were to replicate the Left's weakness for unserious 'caring'.  The idea that, for example, even if someone's prescriptions for responding to climate change are lunatic it is, at least, good that they care cannot be something the Right accepts.

Cross-posted from CentreRight.Com

Apologies for my absence

Sorry for the lack of posts. I'm afraid I've been both very busy and short of the little ideas of which posts are made. The blog will recover soon enough, hopefully over the weekend.

Eco-towns

A few months ago Mike Denham wondered, on the Burning Our Money blog, whether the new eco-towns would be "The Crap Towns Of Tomorrow". After all, the last generation of government sponsored new towns hardly matched up to the initial, idealistic visions. Even the relatively successful schemes like Harlow are now themselves candidates for "regeneration". The less successful new towns have become bywords for urban blight.

Classic mistakes are already beginning to be made. On Monday the BBC reported that those living in or entering the new eco-towns will be kept to a 15mph speed limit. Caroline Flint says that she will "make no apology for setting the bar as high as possible" because there is "a unique opportunity to deliver a programme which will genuinely revolutionise the way people live".

This attempt to use housing policy not to deliver the kind of lifestyle people want but the kind that Ministers think they should want is not just unpleasant and dictatorial, it is almost invariably a dismal failure. Harlow's town centre is in need of regeneration after 60 years, while older centres have been well maintained over centuries, because it couldn't attract the shoppers and other ordinary people whose patronage provides the economic incentive to keep a place looking pleasant. Similarly, the eco-towns will only be a success if ordinary people want to live there.

Outside of major cities a heavy majority of people drive to work. As there is no way for the government to make the eco-towns immune to the impracticalities of public transport and only a limited range of jobs will exist in towns with populations of 5-20,000 residents of eco-towns will drive to work as well. A 15mph speed limit - not just in the centre of town but also on approach roads - will be a endless source of frustration and make eco-towns an undesirable place to live.

While shortages of housing supply will mean that someone will live in the eco-towns, if it is only those with no other choice - who leave when they can - the new towns will quickly fall into unloved neglect. Most of those who profess to care so much about the environment will stay in market towns built millenia ago. It is easy for Flint to 'set the bar high' if she isn't going to be the one facing the frustration of trundling along at half the national urban centre speed limit.

Eco-towns are likely to prove expensive - both financially and in terms of destruction of the natural environment they are built on top of. Unless they are stopped or seriously rethought that cost might be paid just in order to create new urban planning disasters and, as Mike predicted, "The Crap Towns Of Tomorrow". Politicians much prefer the noisy idealism of forcing people to walk to work and 'eco-towns' to carefully thinking through the possible unintended consequences of their actions. Housing policy needs to be brought closer to ordinary people or we will keep seeing the same mistakes being made, decade after decade.

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog.

Ignore me...

I'm not anti-American...

...but if I was this article from the peerless alt-magazine for expats in Moscow - the Exile - would explain why. Hysterical.

Obama

Chris Pope, a friend working at the AEI, provides a fine example of why I seriously dislike Obama:

"Like all Obama's stuff, it is very eloquent, at times beautifully emotive, but where it verges on policy it dives into nonsense:

"Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many."

Well, actually, the unfolding chaos is caused by a housing market bubble.

Any fool who has been paying attention to the news over the past year knows this. Obama knows this. we all know this. Trying to scapegoat corporations, accountants, lobbyists and "the few" is demagogy that is as deliberate as it is mendacious, and as dangerous as it is unserious."

On the same subject, Andrew Ferguson has an absolutely brilliant, must-read dissection of Obama's speeches. My favourite section, although the article should be read in full:

"That's a clue, anyway. The sentence may not have any positive content, Walker seems to be saying, but it does have an indirect meaning, an implication, as a kind of self-referential gesture for the people who claim it. When Obama's supporters say "We are the ones we've been waiting for," what they mean is that in the long roll call of history, from Aristotle and Heraclitus down through Augustine and Maimonides and Immanuel Kant and the fellows who wrote the Federalist Papers, we're number one! We're the smartest yet! Everybody--Mom, Dad, Gramps and Grandma, Great Grandpa and Great Grandma, maybe even the Tribal Elders--they've all been waiting for people as clued-in as us!

Is this what Obama means too? No one who's wandered through an Obama rally and heard the war whoops and seen the cheerful, vacant gazes would come away thinking, "These are the smartest people ever." I'm sorry, they just aren't. What is unmistakable is the creepy kind of solipsism and the air of self-congratulation that clings to his campaign. "There is something happening," he says in stump speeches. And what's happening? "Change is happening." How so? "The reason our campaign has been different is about what you, the people who love this country, can do to change it." And the way to change it is to join the campaign, which, once you join it, will change America. Because this is our moment. The time is now. Now is the time. Yes, we can. We bring change to the campaign because the campaign is about change. We are the ones we've been waiting for. Obama and his followers are perfecting postmodern reflexivity. It's a campaign that's about itself. The point of the campaign is the campaign."

Quasi-revenue-neutral tax reform

Polls suggest that voters increasingly want lower taxes, even if that means lower spending. Tax cuts are popular. This poses quite a conundrum for politicians who aren't willing to take serious measures to control spending and have no room to borrow.

Revenue-neutral changes to the tax system seemed like the way out for a while but they are a political nightmare because the losers will hate you for it and the winners will prove fickle and ungrateful.

The new solution politicians appear to have hit upon is the quasi-revenue-neutral change. The most politically successful example was the Conservative increasing of the Inheritance Tax threshold 'paid for' by a new flat rate charge to non-doms. The secret is to find a change that is revenue neutral from the Treasury's point of view but a tax cut from the perspective of ordinary people.

There is a problem with all this. It's quite hard to get large sums of money out of the rich 'other'. There aren't very many of them, they leave or use the advantages that made them rich to hide their money from you. Charges on non-doms, of whatever political colour, appear unlikely to raise money. Attempts to crack down on tax avoidance drive ordinary people to bankruptcy but don't yield much by way of revenue. In order to finance their plans Menzies Campbell's Liberal Democrats had to define "rich" down to £35,000 each, in a two-earner household.

With his Vehicle Excise Duty proposals Alistair Darling must have thought he was onto a winner. He could raise revenue from "gas-guzzlers" and give it to the working poor. Unfortunately, there aren't that many Hummers out there and they're already heavily taxed. In order to get substantial amounts of revenue he had to increase VED on the kind of cars ordinary people drive. We crunched the numbers and once it started to be reported that cars as humble as a Nissan Micra would be paying more tax the political logic of the changes looked a lot more suspect. To find out how much your car tax will go up visit www.taxpayersalliance.com/whatsmycartax/

Darling's plan failed and the Budget became a disaster. As the News of the World reported: “for the first time since Labour came to power in 1997, support for the government has SLUMPED after a Budget”. This is another example of quasi-revenue-neutral tax changes failing to deliver the political goods.

Cross-posted from CentreRight.Com

Universalist conservatism

While I am no apologist for the BBC I think that Conor Burns is being a little too aggresive in his attack on them for calling the victors of Iran's election "conservatives". Conservatism can be understood as a passion for institutional stability - a wish to preserve something in an established order. In that sense, a conservative in one country could favour free-markets and democratic governance and, in another, theocratic tyranny. There is no universal conservatism and a conservative could be a man of good sense in England but not in Iran.

Hayek's critique of conservatism is rooted in this problem. If your passion is for preserving then you concede the future to your enemies; if the fight is between conservatives and socialists you will move slowly to socialism. That is why I think that conservatism needs liberalism (in the European sense of the word).

I think that the Iranian "conservatives", clearly defending an established order we would not want to defend, highlight a dilemma for all conservatives. At what stage is there too little worth conserving? At what stage do we concede that conservatism needs to be set to one side in favour of the more radical medicine of liberalism?

I set out the ideas in this post, in more detail, a while back on TCS Daily.

P.S. All this doesn't mean that the BBC's article isn't sloppy. Whether or not the Iranian election victors were 'conservative' or 'reformist' doesn't get at the crucial distinction among Iranian hardliners - clerics or soldiers? The BBC's analysis is weak because they don't draw that distinction so can't properly analyse what the change means for Ahmadinejad. That leads to false enigmas like this one: "However, many of the conservative winners are critics of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."

Cross-posted from CentreRight.Com