Adam Smith Institute

100. "Nobody should be free to smoke in public places."

There are many things which people do in "public places" – a concept which now includes private property open to members of the public – which others find unpleasant. The question is whether they do significant harm to others. It seems well established that many smokers harm themselves, and are at risk of incurring diseases thereby. This does not justify state intervention, any more than our consumption of unhealthy food and drink justifies it. The state can warn us, but the behavioural decision in the light of that knowledge is our own. Most smokers do not appear to engage in criminal activity in support of or in consequence of their habit.

There is less evidence that passive smoke harms third parties. People who share living space over the years with heavy smokers might incur greater risks, but there is little to suggest that non-smoking patrons of bars and clubs stand a significantly greater health risk if others smoke. The bus which spews diesel fumes onto a crowded pavement, especially at the level at which children breathe, might well prompt greater health risks. Those who cough and sneeze in public places undoubtedly pose health risks to others, while the thoughtless use of mobile phones on trains and in restaurants might raise the stress levels of those who have to suffer it to health-damaging levels. Society usually takes the view that there must be a significant risk to others before it intervenes.

Some of those who support smoking bans claim that most smokers welcome them because it helps them to give up. Very few cigar smokers, also banned in public places, want to quit, though. And although many people would like to lose weight, few would regard this as a justification for society to ban caloric foods in order to help them diet. The principle should be consistent, and not single out smokers to ban.
 

On the State funding of political parties: why do they want more if they're already getting £1.75 billion? Isn't that enough?

All about bear raids, or, why Oxford shouldn't have a business school.

People lose weight when economic crisis strikes: so should we have some more economic crises to beat obesity?

For those worried that the US doesn't make anything any more: a list of what it does make.

One answer to why we haven't already rebuilt the energy infrastructure the way some would wish: given the regulatory burden, we couldn't even build the one we already have again.

Strange tort laws combined with regulatory burdens can be worse though.

And finally, Netsmith's life, loonie socialists and how to write a modern CV.

George Osborne's non-dom tax policy is now in tatters. It wasn't a bad policy, all in all, to make non-domiciled investors stump up a bit of cash to pay for the public services that they enjoy by dint of living here. The proposed burden was modest, and the policy had been tested out on the business community before it was announced. I don't think I would have proposed it (on the ground that the UK needs every investor it can get, and there are plenty of places round the planet who are willing to tear up the tax forms and welcome them in). But nobody really objected too much.

Indeed, it went down pretty well with the general public. Whereupon (unfortunately) Chancellor Alastair Darling thought that he too could stick these rich foreign investors for some cash to help fill his budget deficit – and, in haste to steal Osborne's halo and without any consultation, promptly overdid it.

So now we've had a stream of non-domiciled investors mumbling and grumbling that they might – or will – soon be leaving the country for more agreeable and lower-taxed places, like Bermuda or Switzerland, where policy is less fickle and arbitrary, and where you can plan your business for the longer term. The latest, according to reports, is Brevan Howard, a $22bn investment fund currently based in London's Pall Mall. But that's just the latest of dozens.

So at a stroke, Darling has killed off the UK's hard-won status as a buzzing international investment centre where non-dom enrepreneurs are welcome and left in peace to get on with making money for themselves and, indeed, all those Brits they work with and invest in.

To will back that status, Osborne – when Chancellor – will have to do far more than just promise a somewhat lower rate of tax. Investors' confidence in UK policy has, unfortunately, been shot away by the government's arbitrary, opportunistic attack on them. Osborne will have to say that he'll restore the status quo ante – and sign in blood that it won't change again during his term of office – before the big fund managers will think about returning.

99. "We should switch all our energy to derive from renewable sources."

This is not a practical proposition from the standpoint of either cost or technology. Wind-power is uneconomic without subsidies, and involves huge energy expenditure in construction and maintenance of its wind farms. Rooftop windmills in urban areas, for example, take more energy to produce than they themselves generate. Since winds are unreliable, wind power necessitates huge back-up sources to be on standby.

Solar technology used to use the silicon rejected by the computer industry, but now high purity silicon is being manufactured specifically for power generation. However, this is a heavily energy intensive process, undermining the energy payback from the technology. Although great strides are being made here and it looks as if solar power could be price competitive in a decade, it still won't provide a steady flow of power, nor the concentrations of power needed for industry.

Biofuels currently use food crops such as wheat and maize, and drive up prices, affecting poor people most. The US and the EU have gone for them as an easy option that pleases the farm lobby, but they are not efficient. The crops it takes to fill the tank of a 4x4 with biofuels would feed someone for a year. Many also maintain (Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth amongst them) that they produce more emissions than they replace. If technology can obtain biofuels from plant waste and cellulose, they will be a more viable source, but this might be years away.

A more realistic approach would accompany research into efficient renewable sources with technology to use fossil fuel cleanly so that coal-fired power stations, for example, can capture the carbon produced. Clean fossil fuel technology can give abundant, secure and low-cost energy, which renewable sources currently cannot.
 

There was a protest across the road from the ASI last night. Not directed at us, but rather at our neighbours, the Department for Children, Schools and Families.

There is plenty to protest about. Like the fact that Britain has plummeted down the international league tables of school performance in maths, literacy and science. Or the fact that 350,000 pupils a year fail to get five good GCSEs including maths and English. Or even the fact that children in deprived areas do far worse than those in wealthy ones, with the gap growing wider.

But the protestors weren’t there about that. They were protesting about one of the good things the department is doing – its city academies programme. More specifically, they were protesting against the new academy which is due to replace Pimlico School in September. Frankly, their opposition puzzles me.

After all, city academies (independently run state schools) do much better than the schools they replace. Their test scores and GCSE results are improving much faster than the national average, even though they admit more pupils with special educational needs or eligible for free school meals than their area average. Most tellingly, existing academies are three times oversubscribed, which is to say a lot of parents want to send their kids to them (a good indicator of quality, in my opinion).

The funny thing is, the reason the protestors don't like academies is also the main reason for their success: they are free from local authority control. They have more power to shape their own curriculum, to hire and reward staff, and to deal with unruly pupils than do other state schools. Rather than being weighed down by rules and regulations, they can innovate and tailor tuition to their pupils' needs.

Academies are not perfect, of course. They should be even freer from the state. They should focus less on fancy new buildings and more on teaching. Most importantly, they should be much easier to set up, so that more children get to attend them. But whatever the protestors say, the country needs more academies, not less.
 

According to Bloomberg, the Danes have developed an innovative new approach to caring for the elderly. Junksmith plans to retire there someday...

This is one way of looking at it: that the banks themselves are issuing new shares means that they think they are over-valued.

On bank and financial market regulation: should it be rules based or principles based?

Praise for the design of the credit market bail out.

How regulation has been effected. For example, marijuana wasn't made illegal in the US: you just had to have a licence and they wouldn't issue any licences.

Comparing the costs of locking up people from an area with the costs of policing an area to prevent the crime and thus the need to lock people up.

That decline in Russian oil production might not be peak oil you know?

And finally, imaginary animals, kosher or not? plus winning a caption competition.

... Dr Eamonn Butler writes about the problems in the financial sector and the government's £50bn bailout. Click here to read the article.

98. "It is more rational to plan for the satisfaction of our future wants and needs than to expect blind chance to do it."
 
This is true, but often the statement is used to claim superiority for a centrally planned society and for government intervention in the economy. Neither of which it is correct. We all plan individually for the satisfaction of our wants, and imperfect though we are, we tend to do it more accurately than government does, and in less costly ways. We are not leaving it to blind chance if we fail to plan collectively, we are planning individually. We know more about our circumstances than any government can, we know more about our needs and preferences, and we have a bigger stake in the outcome than any bureaucrat can ever have. We plan for ourselves, they do not.

The free society produces an overall order out of all of these millions of inputs. It directs towards the satisfaction of our wants the activities of distant people we will never meet, and has us helping to meet the needs of strangers.

This spontaneous society is better at meeting our needs than any alternative which can be dreamed up by a single human mind, or by a small elite. The larger society contains information from all of us, and produces an ordered outcome not sought deliberately by any of us, but more rational than blind chance could produce, and certainly more rational than anything government could ever achieve.

It meets our needs efficiently and continually directs resources to those who produce the most from them. It enables millions of us to pursue different goals at the same time. Any attempt to plan what society as a whole shall do, or what it shall produce, forfeits that versatility, that spontaneity and that problem-solving ability. It substitutes the priorities of the few for the needs and aspirations of the many.
 

Have you seen the movie Happy Feet? It was a blockbuster last year, and with good reason. It’s very funny. Produced in Australia the film is set in Antarctic waters. But in political correct times there does of course have to be an issue with 'mystic beings' degrading the environment with marine debris.

Imagine what happens to the 6-pack ring carrier that holds cans of beer or coke, thrown away carelessly from a cruiser. In the movie little Lovelace, the young Rockhopper penguin, wears it around his neck as a souvenir. Alas! Poor little Lovelace is growing fast and the ring around his neck is getting tighter. So tight that later on a killer whale whose teeth got caught with the necklace thrashes Lovelace in and out of the Antarctic waters leaving him hanging on for dear life.

Well, now the other side of the story has been told by one of the major manufacturers of this ring carrier, Illinois-based ITW Hi-Cone. The ring is non-toxic and photodegradable within days and couldn’t strangle Lovelace at all. But nevertheless the ring carrier:

…has been in the environmental spotlight since the late 1970’s. People often associate it with animal entanglement. But it has been illegal under federal law to distribute non-degradable ring carriers since the (US) EPA crafted regulations in 1994 at the direction of Congress. All three major manufacturers of ring carriers currently produce them with 100 percent photodegradable plastic.

Photo-degradation means that the sun will break the bonds of the plastic polymers, because scientists have put weak links in place. Therefore the ring carriers lose 75 percent of their strength in a few days and fall apart completely in four weeks. The movie's Antarctic setting, with its thinning ozone layer, would expose Lovelace’s necklace to even more ultraviolet radiation and speed up the photodegradation. For all its entertainment value, Happy Feet is nonetheless another example of poor eco-science.

On this day, in 1752, Adam Smith was appointed professor at the University of Glasgow. Though still in his twenties, his fame already preceded him. Through the offices of a wealthy family friend, he had already given a series of private lectures on philosophical subjects in Edinburgh, which had caught the attention of the intelligensia of Scotland's great capital.

Most people today think of Smith as an economist. But in fact he was more of a social psychologist. At Glasgow he taught logic, ethics, rhetoric and belles-lettres (the arts of using language effectively and finely) and jurisprudence (what today we would perhaps call politics).

And it was his work on ethics that made him truly famous. His 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments analyzed the human social psychology of morality. A hundred years before Darwin's Origin of Species, it took the view that our morality persists because it is useful and helps our species to prosper. That human beings are social creatures; they need the reinforcement of others who appreciate the good they do, and their behaviour is changed by the disapprobation of others whom they hurt.

His book brought him the commission of personal tutor to a young nobleman, with whom he toured France and Switzerland, meeting other leading intellectuals of his day, and giving him the material to flesh out his other great book, The Wealth of Nations.

Learn more about Adam Smith here.

News from the Pope's visit to America:

A salesman from KFC walked up to the Pope and offered him a million dollars if he would change "The Lord's Prayer" from "give us this day our daily bread" to "give us this day our daily chicken." The Pope refused his offer.

Two weeks later, the man offered the pope 10 million dollars to change it from "give us this day our daily bread" to "give us this day our daily chicken" and again the Pope refused the man's generous offer. Another week later, the man offered the Pope 20 million dollars and finally the Pope accepted. The following day, the Pope said to all his officials, "I have some good news and some bad news. 'The good news is, that we have just received a check for 20 million dollars. The bad news is, we lost the Wonder Bread account!'''

Those conferences on poverty: amazing how they're all in such desirable places to visit, isn't it? Mauritius? And of course there's a certain lack of anything useful being done at them as well.

All too many people misunderstand this: yes, services can indeed be productive uses of labour.

Although when Adam Smith called government unproductive labour, he didn't mean quite this unproductive.

Nor did he mean this entirely foolish piece of European Union legislation.

Just as there are no free lunches, there won't be a free carbon cap either.

More on that 10p tax rate abolition: planned and callous so we are told.

And finally, British eating habits are indeed improving.

... ASI Fellow Tim Worstall writes about the importance of taking the poor out of income tax altogether. We particularly like the bit where he describes us as "bleeding heart classical liberals". Click here for the article.