Obama is wrong about the difference between capitalism and communism

President Obama recently told Cuban kids not to worry about the philosophy of communism or capitalism, but just go with what works. I have little problem with that because most people are indeed not bothered with matters of philosophy, and we know what works – and it isn’t communism. So if they do what works they will end up as capitalists.

But I do get angry when it is suggested that there is ‘little difference’ to choose between these two philosophy. The trouble is, that there is very little difference between communism and what’s called capitalism these days, largely because our politicians do not understand the philosophy themselves.

Maybe it’s just my recent speed-dating of Ayn Rand rubbing off on me, but I think we need to promote a much deeper understanding of the principles underpinning our system, in particular their ethical roots, nature and results.

Obama, for example, is at pains to point out that capitalism is just fine, provided that we make sure it has a proper ethical dimension. Which shows that he thinks that, by itself, it doesn’t, and that it somehow needs to have morality regulated into it.

Yeah, well what about the ‘moral' basis of communism? It’s not capitalism that murdered 3,000 people a day when it was going strong (add them up: Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot’s purges just for starters). And capitalism at least treats people like human beings rather than as tools in someone else’s thinking, and respects their lives, families and property. In Cuba, you have a cow and because your family is starving you kill it to eat. Then you go to jail because it’s not ‘your’ cow, it’s the state’s cow. How moral is that? 

Sure, you have to be nice to communist leaders if you want them to talk to you and maybe then have an impact on them; but there must be ways of letting them know that as a matter of plain fact, it’s communism that stinks, not capitalism, both in theory and practice. The general mass of their own population, of course, already know that.

The liberal case for 'Leave'

The EU referendum campaign is presenting us two competing choices. On the one hand a vision of Britain as part of a steadily-integrating EU (at whatever speed) or a vision of Britain completely outside it.

For the Remain side, we are required to anticipate what may happen over the next generation which, if the last 40 years are anything to go by, will mean a gradual growth of EU power into more and more areas of competence - the ratchet towards “a country called Europe”.

The vision of Britain outside generally uses a number of arguments employed over a long period: of the need to regain our sovereignty and become a self-governing democracy again; to have the flexibility to deregulate; to spend the UK’s EU contributions on something better inside the UK; to drive forward better trade deals with countries beyond the EU; and to constrain immigration.

However let’s take this from a different angle and set out a third vision - a Leave proposition that rejects some of the arguments outlined above. In short, a liberal case for Leave.

Read more.

Why not get all Marxist about the libraries?

We've another of these dirges about how the libraries are under such great threat:

Nearly 350 libraries have closed in Britain over the past six years, causing the loss of almost 8,000 jobs, according to new analysis.

In a controversial move that sparked protests by authors including Philip Pullman and Zadie Smith, councils across the country have shut their reading rooms in an effort to make deep savings.

Children’s author Alan Gibbons warned the public library service faced the “greatest crisis in its history”.

All of which brings out our inner Karl Marx. Who did insist that the forces of production (ie, technology) determined social relations. And if we're to be a little more narrow about this, technology determines, or at least should, how we go about doing certain things. The economic historian Brad Delong has long pointed out that the university teaching style of a lecture is really just a hangover from medieval days. When books were vastly expensive (a scholar might hope to accumulate a library of perhaps a score volumes over a lifetime) then having one person reading that very expensive product to 200 made some sort of sense. When a copy of the book costs less than the hourly wage of the reader perhaps less so.

So it is with libraries. When books were much more expensive than they are today then increasing the Solow Residual (in exactly and entirely the manner that Uber and so on do today, the sharing economy) through reuse and lending made great sense. But technologies change, relative prices change. It may or may not be true that we have reached that tipping point just yet, where the value of the books being lent is less than the cost of running the lending system, but we think we can all see that that is going to happen at some point.

The point is thus not that libraries are closing, nor that we should all fight the power to prevent it. What should actually be the discussion is, well, do we need libraries any more? And if we still do then when won't we?

But of course, as C. Northcote Parkinson pointed out, there's nothing as conservative as a bureaucracy considering its own existence.

Ooooh the outrage over Tesco and the other supermarkets

That Tesco's brands a few of its products with the names of fictitious farms is amusing, as is the outrage that this has brought forth from the usual suspects. But then matters take a turn for the worse as we get a question of such driveling stupidity as to potentially make our brains leaks from our ears. Or possibly to ponder whether this has already happened to the questioner. We refer to this from Yvonne Roberts:

How have we allowed a system to emerge that squeezes the whole supply chain in the name of profit and seduces us into ignoring our carbon footprint for that dubious consumer privilege called “choice”?

For this is the point and purpose of having an economy in the first place. Both Adam Smith and Frederic Bastiat tell us that we must always look at economic questions from the point of view of consumption. And we can and do go further than that ourselves: the point of this whole economy thing is to maximise the consumption possibilities of the population. What is to be consumed, how such consumption is to be valued, being the choice of said population. If choice is what said people value then an increase in such choice is an addition to the value they gain from consumption: which is, again we insist, the reason we have this whole structure of markets, exchange, production and all the rest. This is the very purpose of our efforts: to increase consumption opportunities.

Profit is simply a method of keeping score along the way. If you make a profit in your production process then that means that you are adding value. The value of your outputs is greater than the value of your inputs. More accurately, the alternative uses of those inputs would produce less value added for consumers to enjoy. Thus profit is a good thing, losses bad, for losses indicate that you are subtracting, rather than adding, that value which can then be consumed.

If growing a pig in Belgium, slaughtering it in Germany and eating it in England produces more value for the consumers to consume than to grow, slaughter and consume a similar pig in England then so be it: this is the very point of it all, to produce the greatest value of output that may be consumed from the limited resources at our disposal.

Choice, consumers, consumption, these are not things to be disdained from the comfort of an Islington eyrie, they are the entire damn point of having a society or an economy in the first place.

Take the Easter egg. The salt may have come from China; palm oil from south east Asia; whey from New Zealand; sugar from the Caribbean; cocoa from South America, on and on. Britain imports food from more than 180 countries.

Ain't it just fantabulously wondrous?

Yes, this is how school competition works

School competition works in exactly the same manner as other forms of competition that is. It's something that happens at the margin, that margin then dragging up the performance of others:

There is no evidence that academies perform better than council-maintained schools. The white paper highlights impressive improvements in primary schools – 85% of those are still maintained. 82% of maintained schools have been rated good or excellent by Ofsted, while three times as many councils perform above the national average in terms of progress made by students than the largest academy chains. Where a school is failing, there is no question that action must be taken – but converting every school to an academy will not tackle those issues.

Think of a different arena to study the effects of competition. We know very well that the firms who export are those at the productivity boundary: exporting firms are near always significantly more productive than the other domestic firms in that same sector. Now think of the flip side of that statement: imports from Germany into Britain expose British companies to the finest and most productive German forms. This is one of the major channels by which trade improves productivity. Domestic firms must compete against those imports and near by definition those imports are coming from firms with greater than average productivity. Thus the domestic firms have to pull their socks up.....or be replaced by those who do.

Imports are not, of course, a majority of the UK economy: but that exposure to the best does improve matters over the whole economy. Now back to academies and schools: that some small portion of the education system are academies is exactly what, entirely analagous to that effect from trade and imports, is improving the non-academy state sector. To state that non-academies are improving too is not some symptom of a failure of the program, it's evidence of the success of the program: competition works.

At which point, turning all schools into academies. If it works, as it does, if it's working, as it is, then why not? After all, we do all believe in evidence based policy making, don't we? Good, academies, the competition and freedom to experiment that they bring, are improving the school system by their existence. Thus let's do more of it so as to have an ever better education sector.

Unless, of course, we'd prefer to return to the policy based evidence making of yore which insisted that competition was a bad thing....

The NHS is not investment, it is current spending

We'd like to leave aside our well known biases on the subjects of the European Union and the NHS and make a still important point. Brexit itself is going to make no difference at all to domestic policy: what will is the policies adopted once the UK is again free to adopt whichever policies it wishes. And the NHS, sure, we're not wholly in favour of the current form of the organisation and think the same provision can be done better. But leave those both aside and consider this statement:

Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat MP and former health minister, backed Hunt’s EU stance.

He said: “I don’t agree with Jeremy over the current funding of the NHS.

“I’ve been very clear that I’d like to see the government investing more in the NHS and social care. But we could not even have that debate if we vote to leave the European Union.

Spending upon the NHS is not investment. Yes, parts of such spending are: building a hospital which will still be there in 30 years' time is investment. But by far the vast majority of NHS spending is upon wages and consumables and is thus current spending. We could, of course, just dismiss this as being pedantry, a symptom of "investment" to a politician being public spending upon anything said politician approves of. But sadly the issue goes deeper than this.

It is not just an apocryphal story that the original founders thought that after the backlog of problems had been cured then spending upon the NHS would go down: they really did think that it was investment. Get over the hump of untreated disease and costs would decline even as tax revenues from the newly again healthy would rise. That could indeed have been described as investment: if it had actually happened. It didn't of course, that nascent NHS went from consuming 3 to 4% of GDP to the current 9 to 10% and more (all figures are a bit hazy as exactly what is NHS spending is a bit hazy).

We're not going to get to a proper and rational discussion on what amount should be spent on the health of the nation, nor how that should be raised nor allocated, until we get over that 70 year old delusion that health care spending is an investment. It isn't: it might be just, moral, necessary, better organised in another manner, just perfect the way it is. But it's most definitely current spending and must be recognised as such before we can have a proper discussion about it.

For example, the correct question is, at heart, how much of current production of the economy should be devoted to health care? No, not how much should we borrow to "invest" in it, but what portion of current income should be devoted to it? That's what that essential division into capital and current spending aids us in seeing: and given that that's what we must see before we decide thus we must see it. Further, the insistence upon seeing it as current spending aids us in viewing that "how much" question in its proper light: what other things are we not going to have as a result of having health care?

Or as an economist would put it about everything, there are always opportunity costs. Thus the true price of something is what we give up to get it. There is no cute let out by calling it investment and thus that is the correct lens through which to view health care spending whether it's done through the NHS or not. What won't we get as a result of more NHS and is more NHS worth more or less than what we must give up?

After all, we can only find the right answer if we ask the correct question in the first place.