Decriminalising possession is not enough Mr. Clegg

Decriminalising the possession of drugs is better than not decriminalising it. But we're sorry to say that it's not actually enough: it is also necessary to legalise the production and supply of them.

Nick Clegg will today press ahead with plans to decriminalise possession of all drugs – despite charities warning the move will wreck thousands of lives.

The Lib Dem leader is to pledge that his party will bring forward plans to ensure those caught with drugs for ‘personal use’ will no longer face criminal prosecution. Instead, the maximum penalty would be a fine.

The move covers the powerful ‘skunk’ strain of cannabis and hard drugs such as crack cocaine and heroin, as well as ‘soft’ drugs including marijuana and amphetamines.

Not jailing people for ingesting the stimulant of their choice is of course a good thing. If we don't own our own bodies and cannot decide what to put into them then we are not free. And freedom and liberty are the aim and goal, of course.

However, this is not enough, welcome though it is. For there are two problems with drugs. The first is that above, the issue of liberty. The second is the issue of safety. It's all very well to say that we may partake as we wish, subject only to fines. But only with the legalisation of manufacture and supply can there be any form of quality control.

It's worth thinking back to the adulteration of food in Victorian times. The first investigations into what was actually going into processed foods turned up in The Lancet in the late 1840s and early 1850s. And there was most certainly all sorts of very dodgy stuff being added to food. Sometimes knowingly and sometimes not: we seem to recall people using cadmium salts to make sweets look pretty which really isn't something to be recommmended but they didn't know that then.

Legislation to deal with such adulteration really only started in the 1870s. By which time the problem was largely solved. For the information about the adulteration led to producers creating brands which promised no such adulteration. And consumers bought them on such promises. It's not from quite the same time or place but this is akin to Heinz tomato soup conquering the world. Early canning of soups was slightly hit and miss. Heinz kept better control of that process than other competing manufacturers and thus killed fewer people. This became generally known, the brand became a marker of quality and global domination beckoned.

To solve our second problem with drugs we need to allow those same processes free rein. Brands must be allowed, brands that claim to be free of brick dust, to be of a certain purity and also of a certain dose. Tax the heck out of them as well, of course, but legalisation, not just decriminalisation, is the solution to both of our problems about drugs.

Economic Nonsense: 19. Corporation tax is paid by businesses

It is always attractive to the political classes to impose taxes on business so that people can benefit from the spending this makes possible. Corporation Tax is one of these whose name suggests that it is paid by corporations. Many people suppose that this involves taking money from companies and transferring it via government into services for ordinary people. They suppose that corporations just shrug and accept the loss in profits this involves. This is a naïve myth. The tax levied by government is part of the price that people, not companies, pay. When you buy beer the price of your pint includes the tax the brewer has to pay to government. When you buy whisky it is even more, about 80% of the nominal price. The same is true for petrol and other fuels. VAT is included in what you are charged for goods and services.

The point is that Corporation Tax is paid by people, not by corporations. The tax that companies are charged forms part of their costs, and is reflected in the costs of producing their goods and services. Studies show that about three-fifths of the impact of Corporation Tax falls on the workers, reducing the wages they could otherwise be paid. Of the remainder, some falls on shareholders by way of reduced dividends, making it harder for the firm to attract capital to create more jobs. Some falls on customers, passed on to them in the form of higher prices, which lower demand for the firm's products.

Corporation tax thus acts to curb economic activity, hits growth, and makes people poorer than they would otherwise have been.

If firms tried to absorb the tax without passing it on in lower wages and increased prices, as some critics suggest they could, they would become less profitable and less attractive to investors, who would in turn respond by investing somewhere else instead.

The five things you need to know about TTIP

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a free trade agreement currently being negotiated between the EU and the US. I think it's a good idea. Here's what you should know about it: 1. Abolishing tariffs is only a small part of TTIP.

Tariffs are generally low between the EU and US, but for some sectors they are very high. The EU currently imposes a 10% duty on car imports from the US, and the US imposes tariffs as high as 40% on some clothes from the EU, like shoes. Getting rid of those high sectoral tariffs will allow for greater economic specialisation, and the EU and US economies are so large that even reducing small tariffs overall would boost wealth levels a bit.

2. The biggest costs to trade are from so-called ‘non-tariff barriers’, and getting rid of these could have a big effect.

Most of TTIP is designed to harmonise regulation where there is redundant double-regulation (or ‘regulatory incoherence’) of firms operating in both the EU and the US. For instance, cars may be just as safe in the US and the EU (or not – nobody's sure yet), but have to adhere to completely different safety requirements to achieve that. Harmonising car safety regulations could make it cheaper to build cars without reducing car safety at all. Because of different rules about egg washing that don't seem to make a difference to actual safety, US eggs couldn't legally be sold in the UK and vice versa. Some regulations are simply designed to make it more expensive for foreign firms to sell goods, to protect native firms. Harmonising some of these rules should reduce costs substantially.

Different regulatory regimes might allow for more experimentation, but the feedback mechanisms involved in regulation are so fuzzy that this kind of ‘discovery process’ rarely actually takes place.

3. The economic gains from TTIP could be pretty substantial.

The CEPR estimates that a successful TTIP that removed a lot of these ‘non-tariff barriers’ as well as all existing tariffs would cause an increase to EU GDP by €120bn (0.5% of GDP) and US GDP by €95bn (0.4% of GDP) in total. That’s modest, but would translate into an extra £400 annually for British households. 90% of those GDP gains would come from non-tariff measure cuts.

4. The only regulations that TTIP will prevent in the future are ones that discriminate against foreign firms.

This will include rules that mean that US and EU governments will have to consider foreign firms for public procurement in certain areas (but not publicly-funded healthcare, social services, education or water services). In general the EU is extremely restrictive about the impact TTIP can have on public services. EU governments can organise public services so that only one monopoly provider supplies it (eg, the NHS), and they can regulate whatever they deem to be ‘public services’ at any level of government. The only exception is where an EU government has already opened up a sector to foreign firms (ie, to avoid firms that have already invested from losing their money). This is a pity, I think – I’d like to see EU states sign up to an agreement that stopped them from discriminating against foreign firms in all areas. But TTIP is not that agreement.

5. The Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanisms in TTIP – the so-called ‘secret courts’ – are nothing new.

Pretty much every free trade agreement signed around the world includes an ISDS provision, which allows firms to challenge states that renege on their part of the deal. Since 1975 the UK has signed 90 ISDS treaties, and 3,400 exist around the world. In that time the UK investors have brought 43 claims against other states. Only two have ever been brought against the UK and both were unsuccessful. What’s more, ISDSes cannot compel a state to change its laws, only to pay compensation to firms if it has broken its treaty obligations. It might seem pointless to have this – the UK and the US both have strong rules of law. But TTIP also includes countries like Greece, Hungary and Romania which have much less reliable judicial systems.

Tribute to Prof John Hibbs

The late John Hibbs was a transport specialist who was a fellow of the Adam Smith Institute and published seminal works with us. A group of his friends and colleagues have put together what they intended to be a 90th birthday tribute book, but alas it became a memorial to him when he died 6 months before then. "John Hibbs - His journey by bus, coach and train" is a celebration of his life and achievements. It is more than that, though, because the personality of the man emerges through its pages and through what people who knew him say about him. He was a remarkable man, one who changed transport policy. His scholarship and his determined advocacy helped liberate bus transport and free it from a virtual state monopoly. But he also had an impact on train transport, and pioneered road pricing. He was committed to competition and deregulation, and put their stamp firmly on the ASI's transport output.

We shall miss him at our seminars and conferences, and this tribute reminds us why. It was an extraordinary life and it is entirely fitting that this book, compiled and edited by Michael Goldstein and Cyrrhian Macrae, puts that life on the record for others to admire and appreciate.

John Hibbs – His Journey by Bus, Coach and Train by Michael Goldstein and Cyrrhian Macrae, is published by Twig Books ISBN 978-1-907953-63-7 £9.99.

So the entirety of our housing policy is wrong is it?

For decades now we've been told that we should all live in mixed neighbourhoods. Mixed in terms of socio-economic class that is. That there should be council houses in the middle of Westminster, that to have the poor living in cheap areas, the rich in rich ones, would be a terrible betrayal of something or other. It now seems that this is entirely wrong:

Britain has prized the ideal of economically mixed neighbourhoods since the 19th century. Poverty and disadvantage are intensified when poor people cluster, runs the argument; conversely, the rich are unfairly helped when they are surrounded by other rich people. Social mixing ought to help the poor. It sounds self-evident—and colours planning regulations that ensure much social and affordable housing is dotted among more expensive private homes. Yet “there is absolutely no serious evidence to support this,” says Paul Cheshire, a professor of economic geography at the London School of Economics (LSE).

And there is new evidence to suggest it is wrong. Researchers at Duke University in America followed over 1,600 children from age five to age 12 in England and Wales. They found that poor boys living in largely well-to-do neighbourhoods were the most likely to engage in anti-social behaviour, from lying and swearing to such petty misdemeanours as fighting, shoplifting and vandalism, according to a commonly used measure of problem behaviour. Misbehaviour starts very young (see chart 1) and intensifies as they grow older. Poor boys in the poorest neighbourhoods were the least likely to run into trouble. For rich kids, the opposite is true: those living in poor areas are more likely to misbehave.

This entirely makes sense. Imagine that it really is inequality that causes so many problems. Inequality is going to be felt most keenly about those one lives cheek by jowl with. Forcing the poor to live in "affordable housing" among the mansions of the rich is therefore going to exacerbate problems, isn't it?

Not that these facts are going to make a blind bit of difference. Facts never do when ideology is involved.

Economic Nonsense: 18. Capitalism is disreputable because it is based on greed

This is a misinterpretation. Capitalism is based not on greed but on the legitimate aspiration of people to better their lives. Adam Smith spoke of "The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition," and of course it applies equally to women. It is this desire to better their circumstances that leads people to forego present consumption in order to achieve greater returns in the future. They invest in order to increase their wealth. That investment supplies funds to companies and provides the capital which they turn to advantage for the benefit of their investors. This is not greed; it is one of the most benign things that people have done. Far from showing greed to the detriment of others, it gains its returns by providing the goods and services that people want and need at prices they are prepared to pay. It is based not on selfish greed but on co-operation to mutual advantage. The investors make it possible for consumers to satisfy their wants, and they themselves make gains in the process.

Capitalism is benign because it is based on trade, and every act of trade is an exercise in co-operation in which people exchange what they have for what they prefer. Capitalism has to be social; that is how it works. Greed is selfish, not social.

The desire of people to better their lives is part of what it means to be human. We do not adapt to the environment as other animals do; we adapt the environment, and we do it in ways that are calculated to improve our lot. We seek greater security, greater command of the essentials of a decent and acceptable life. Capitalism is the most efficacious way we have yet found of achieving these objectives.

Logical Fallacies: 15. The red herring

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ochl99nWpuI  

The latest in Madsen Pirie's series on Logical Fallacies: 'the red herring'.

You can pre-order the new edition of Dr. Madsen Pirie's How to Win Every Argument here

Economic Nonsense: 17. The Industrial Revolution brought squalor and impoverished the poor

Life for poor people, which meant most people, was pretty miserable before the Industrial Revolution. It was short, full of toil and deprivation. Most worked on the land, rose at dawn, retired at dusk, and did hard physical labour. Starvation was an ever-present threat, and subsistence depended on adequate harvests. A bad year could be fatal. Life expectancy was low, diets were poor and disease was rampant. Movement into the towns and factories spurred by the Industrial Revolution was a step up for the overwhelming majority. They earned wages. They lived in housing that is today thought squalid, but was in fact an improvement on the pitiful country hovels they had lived in previously. Their food was better and life expectancy began to rise. They began to be able to afford luxuries such as pottery, metal utensils and tea.

The myth that the Industrial Revolution brought squalor and deprivation was propagated by Friedrich Engels amongst others, who failed to compare conditions in industrial towns with the conditions they replaced. It was a commonplace error until T S Ashton published "The Industrial Revolution" in 1949, showing how it brought social and economic progress, and lifted the living standards and life chances of millions.

It was the Industrial Revolution that generated the wealth that paid for advances in public health and sanitation. It led to the conquest not only of extreme poverty, but of curable and preventable diseases. Far from bringing poverty and misery to the masses, it did the opposite, lifting their material conditions at a rate and to a level never before witnessed in human history. It was one of the most benign events that people have brought about, and it set the world on an upward course which still benefits millions of people today.

Plain packaging: stop the nonsense

The Adam Smith Institute's President, Dr. Madsen Pirie, recently spoke at the "Stop the Nonsense" evening by Forest, Parliament Street & Liberal Vision. You can watch his speech below.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htahYj13x6w

Maybe there is no zero lower bound on interest rates

Tim Worstall has a fantastic piece on Forbes which neatly lays out a lot of the monetary policy views I have been making the case for here on the blog. In it he:

• Shows that many securities can hit yields below zero (such as, most recently, European governments' bonds), implying that the Keynesian 'Zero Lower Bound' argument that monetary policy is impotent when rates hit zero is false or irrelevant
• Argues that we should favour monetary stabilisation of boom-bust because it allows us to have a small state, which we have other good reasons for favouring
• We have a nice natural experiment showing that monetary policy works—and fiscal policy is unnecessary—the Eurozone vs. the UK and USA. The former has not done QE and it has slumped continually; the latter have done QE and had moderate recoveries

A standard part of the standard Keynesian economics of our day is that fiscal policy becomes necessary at the zero lower bound. However, this standard part of the standard theory rather falls apart if we find that there is in fact no zero lower bound to interest rates. The case for fiscal policy, for stimulus, may therefore be rather weaker than its proponents suggest. And the thing is, we do seem to have evidence that there is no zero lower bound. This comes in two different forms: one that unconventional monetary policy can take the place of fiscal even at that lower bound, the other that, well, zero doesn’t seem to be the lower bound.

I hope you don't mind a bit more of Tim, given that he already writes for us daily!