Not a benefit of sex work legalisation we'd thought of but still....

We’re in favour of the legalisation of sex work simply because we’re in favour of the legalisation of near all activities of consenting adults. We’re really very sure that this is what liberty means, that consenting adults, where there’s no third party harm, getting on with things as they wish to is that freedom we’re all supposed to be aspiring to.

There are side effects of course, not all of them things we’d thought of:

The week before New Zealand went into full lockdown on 26 March, Lana*, 28, had taken a break from work at the high-end Wellington brothel where, since September, she had made around NZ$2,200 a month seeing two or three clients a week.

On 23 March, her university announced courses would move online. The following day she decided to stay with her parents in Auckland, and applied for New Zealand’s emergency wage subsidy for all workers whose earnings have fallen by at least 30% due to coronavirus.

Just two days later the money – a lump sum of NZ$4,200 covering 12 weeks of lost part-time earnings – was in her account. Full-time workers, who average more than 20 hours a week, get a lump sum of $7,029.

“The form only took about three minutes to fill out and I didn’t need to disclose that I am a sex worker,” Lana said. “I only needed to disclose that I am self-employed.”

Those who pay the relevant taxes - or perhaps, when we talk of social security taxation, the correct insurance premiums - in the good times should indeed be due the payouts in the bad. Legalisation of the profession means that both those taxes are due and paid and also that the societal safety net is there too.

We still stick with our very basic analysis, if adults wish to do this then why shouldn’t they? But there are, as we say, additional points we’ve not before noted.

F A Hayek was in fact a Conservative

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the publication, by Chicago University Press, of F A Hayek’s “Constitution of Liberty.” It remains a classic defence of personal liberty as that which makes civilization and progress possible. Hayek says that the legitimate role of government is to protect that freedom by laws that apply to all, including itself. 

At the end of that book is an essay, “Appendix: Why I am Not a Conservative,” in which he asserts that he seeks liberty, rather than the preservation of any current state of society. If society is not liberal, he supports changing it to make it so, rather than opposing changes, which is what he takes Conservatism to stand for. He uses ‘liberal’ in the way people outside of America do, to mean supportive of freedom.

Hayek was writing in the late 1950s, when some of the limitations on liberty that had been necessary to win the Second World War had not been fully removed, and when parties in the UK had accepted the ‘postwar consensus’ of a mixed, largely centrally-directed economy. Hayek did not want to conserve such societies, but to transform them into more liberal ones. 

In 1987, the Adam Smith Institute published the book, “Hayek - on the Fabric of Human Society,” a tribute work containing essays on Hayek by many distinguished scholars. My own essay at the end of the book was somewhat bravely entitled, “Appendix: Why F A Hayek is a Conservative.” 

I put the case that there is a small “c” conservatism that denotes an aversion to change, and the desire to hold on to familiar things and ways for the comfort and security they bring. There is also a large “C” Conservatism that denotes a political tradition rather than a character trait. 

That political tradition does not oppose all change, but is against attempts to impose deliberate change to remake society into a preconceived order. Instead it wants such change as takes place to be spontaneous and organic, the product of people interacting, and perhaps reacting to changing circumstances. It opposes utopian attempts to make society correspond with one dreamed-up in theory, as opposed to one that develops naturally in practice. 

What the political tradition of Conservatism seeks to conserve is not any given state of society, but rather the process by which society changes. It seeks to conserve a process, not an outcome. Crucially, I pointed out that Conservatives seek not only to preserve that spontaneity, but to restore it if it has been lost. This brings Margaret Thatcher into their ranks. She managed to restore a degree of spontaneity that had been lost by decades of state controls and central direction. 

She was once confronted by an interviewer with Hayek’s claim that he was not a Conservative, and replied that she thought he’d approve of what she was doing. He did indeed, and had dinner with her twice a year when he came for meetings of the British Academy. He approved of the fact that she had restored a large measure of spontaneity, and in doing so had extended opportunities for people to exercise freedom and creativity that were previously denied. 

In the properly understood meaning of the political tradition: F A Hayek was indeed a Conservative. 

Central planning failed but liberalism succeeded during this pandemic

Liberal democracies have many virtues. They are tolerant, relatively equal, and very good at producing prosperity.

But, say many, they cannot deal with crises, like wars or natural disasters. For that, you need communal effort, a single plan, and strong central leadership. 

When the virus began to hit, ministers boasted that the UK would fare better than most because of our national healthcare system, which could plan a total response, guided by experts.

They were wrong. While the National Health Service had modelled a pandemic four years ago, they had done little to prepare for it. NHS purchasers didn’t have enough PPE for their staff. Public Health England dismally failed to create enough tests. Three quarters of a million people volunteered to help, but weeks later, many still complained that no work had been assigned to them.

Following public outrage, Public Health England at last returned the phone calls of idle and frustrated private labs, enabling thousands more tests to be produced. Engineering companies eventually got through the bureaucracy to produce innovative new ventilators. And after more delays, distillers were allowed to turn their skills to producing hand sanitizer.

In short, individuals and businesses came up with new ways to solve the crisis, while the central planners failed—and actually stifled that response. Command and control does not help you through a crisis. What helps you through is freedom and diversity.

We can hope at least, we can hope

The Guardian tells us that:

The public’s confidence in the government’s ability to handle the coronavirus crisis has fallen sharply in the past fortnight, with less than half of voters now having faith in decisions made by ministers, according to the latest Opinium poll for the Observer.

Given the performance so far this is not, perhaps, all that much of a surprise. The Guardian, of course, thinks that this is a bad thing. We think that it could well presage a cause for celebration. With perhaps a slight edit:

The public’s confidence in the government’s ability to handle….has fallen.

Our insistence being that government is not very good at doing things. There are, certainly, things that must be done. There are also things that government is capable of doing. Finally, there are things which only government can do. We insist that government should restrict itself to doing only those things which are all three, things which must be done, which only government can do and which government is also capable of doing. Even then we don’t think they’ll be done well as current events are showing us. Government, that is, is in our view something to be used as a last resort, when all else fails.

Having watched government attempting to do something the general view of the population is thus turning - and least we can hope it is - to our own view. Given that government isn’t very good at doing things we should be employing government to do fewer things.

After all, the finest argument in favour of minarchy is watching the State trying to do something.

Why the police got it so wrong on enforcing COVID19 social distancing rules

Too late now, but I think I understand why ministers and the police got into such trouble about social distancing.

Police, as you recall, hassled people sunbathing in the park, rebuked a man for sitting in his own front garden, and lectured us not to buy ‘non-essential’ items — whatever that means.

Meanwhile the Health Secretary, to say exactly how long people could drive in order to take exercise, bizarrely suggested an arbitrary ‘five minutes’.

What’s happened is that over the last 40 years, the British legal system has been overlaid with Continental law. 

Here, the test of an action was whether or not it was ‘reasonable’. The law accepted that life was complex, and left judges to decide each specific case. 

The Continental tradition, by contrast, specifies precise rules that apply in all cases.

Hence those journalists pressing ministers to say exactly what the rules are, ministers struggling to make up new rules on the hoof, and police enforcing things to the letter, not the spirit.

While the Great British public just wants to do what is reasonable. 

Let’s remember that as we unwind the lockdown. Don’t smother businesses with detailed opening rules. Just set the goals and leave people to do what is reasonable in their own unique circumstances. 

Of course it will be different after than before

The world after coronavirus will be different from that before, obviously enough. The world next month is always, has always been, different from that last anyway. We are asking you how, in precisely what manner, it will be different too. Even, how you would change things for the better as a result.

One point that caught our eye:

The boss of Dixons Carphone has warned that some sales that have shifted online during the lockdown will never return to bricks and mortar stores, as he prepares to reopen with “extreme care”.

The world does change, day by day. But one of the things that a crisis does is change the current coordination. Parts of the world operate as they do simply because that’s what most to near all other people do. It may even be sensible that they should already have changed as a result of new tech or whatever. But they haven’t simply because there’s a hurdle to overcome, everyone else needs to change at around the same time to make that new coordination work.

No real point in designing one’s social life around the coffee bar if everyone’s still in the pub - but if the crowd abandon the alehouse then every reason to use the caff as an individual.

That the old order has been broken - or even just paused - clears the space for the adoption of a new coordination. Well, maybe, if we like it.

As to what might happen some ideas. This thought that we should all be poorer for the sake of the environment. Sure, the air in cities is cleaner and so on. But we’re also being exposed to the costs of that, current estimates are that we’ll all be 25% poorer - that being what a 25% fall in GDP means. A reasonable thought is that having had the bargain so brutally explained we’ll reject it. On the plus side many are praising the new found communal mucking in and cooperation. As people realise that this is Burke and the little platoons, not the State organising or directing, we might well get more of that voluntary communalism free of that state.

It is true that the world after coronavirus will be a different one. Given the exposure we’ve all just had to the efficiency of government we can even hope that it will be a better one. About which, as we say, we’d like your suggestions.

Ministers are accountable but advisers are not

The Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty and his deputy Dr Jenny Harries have both appeared at Downing Street press briefings, saying that we should expect to be shut up for another 12 or 18 months.

That’s potentially very damaging. It must surely convince any business, struggling to survive its loss of customers and income, that they might as well give up now. That might well convince their suppliers to do the same. The result is more people out of work, with all the uncertainty and misery that causes. 

The medical experts are advisers. It is not their job to make policy announcements at a Downing Street press conference. But that is what the 12-18-month prediction amounts to. 

Advisers advise, but ministers decide—and they should decide this sort of issue on the basis of advice from a range of experts who have expertise on the subject. Like psychologists and social scientists who can identify the damage that a lockdown does to individuals, families and children. Or economists who understand the escalating damage being done to business, employment, and wealth creation. And businesspeople who could explain how firms might re-open yet still trade safely.

On this day was written a book

Adam Smith (1723-1790) is best known for his pioneering work of economics, The Wealth Of Nations (1776). But the book that actually propelled him to fame was The Theory Of Moral Sentiments, published on this day in 1759.

It was a sensation—and made Smith into a hot intellectual property. Thtat’s because moralists had been struggling for centuries to work out the principles that made some actions morally good and others morally bad. To Clerics, the answer was obvious: the word of God. And believers relied on the Clerics’ moral authority to guide them. Skeptics, on the other hand speculated about whether we had a sixth sense, a ‘moral sense’ that would guide us towards good. And so it went on.

Smith’s breakthrough was to place our moral judgements as a matter of our deep psychology as social creatures. Human beings, he argued, have a natural ‘sympathy’ (today we would say ‘empathy’) for each other, particularly those nearest to them. That empathy enables them to understand how to adjust and moderate their behaviour in order to win the favour of others and preserve social harmony. It is the basis of moral judgements about behaviour, and the source of human virtue.

Writing exactly a century before Charles Darwin’s The Origin Of Species (1859), Smith was not sure why such beneficial social behaviour should prevail. He put it down to Providence: today we would put it down to evolution.

The Theory Of Moral Sentiments was an intellectual sensation, a best seller. Churchmen, of course, did not like it very much. But it impressed Charles Townsend, a leading intellectual and senior member of the British government—roughly the equivalent of the Chancellor of the Exchequer today. He sought an introduction to Smith through their mutual friend, the philosopher David Hume (1711-1776). Townsend immediately hired Smith, on a salary of £300 a year for life, to be tutor to his stepson, the young Duke of Buccleuch. It was a small fortune—and it gave Smith the independence and experience to start writing the work for which he is best remembered today: The Wealth Of Nations.

Well, yes, that's how prices work

A complaint from within the NHS about the prices of PPE:

“I’ve been offered surgical masks at three or four times the price; I’ve been offered FFP3 masks at 10 times the price… It is blatant profiteering, in my opinion,” he said.

...

“This particular one was a company we’d used before and, although we have seen a hike in some prices, to see coveralls going from £2 as they were in January to £16.50 was outrageous."

Something is in short supply compared to current demand. The price goes up. Sure, this is profiteering. But also:

Mr Hulme continued: “I get probably get between five and 10 emails a day from various companies saying they can offer me PPE, some of them I don’t trust because they’re not companies that we’ve used before or they’re not on the supply list of the NHS.

The lust for those profits leads more people to try to supply that item in that short supply compared to current demand. Further:

Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, said earlier this week that trusts are being forced into “hand-to-mouth” workarounds, including washing single-use gowns and restricting stocks to key areas.

The desire not to pay those higher prices leads to those workarounds which reduce demand.

Back to basics here, demand has risen compared to supply. We’d like a system which was able to try to balance these two. Increase supply, reduce demand. This is what, as the above shows, the price system does.

Rising prices achieves exactly our goal - and people are complaining?

The tricky business of valuing lives

Many people wonder whether the aim of flattening the Covid curve is worth the cost of the lockdown.

But they daren’t say that because all they get is abuse from people so say that lives are more important than money and you can’t put a price on human lives.

In fact, we do that all the time. An expensive new by-pass may reduce accidents in a busy town. But how much should we spend on it in the hope of saving one life? Remember, every pound spent on that project could be spent on other things we value, such as teachers and nurses.

Or again, a speed limit of zero would save 1800 deaths each year. But we also value mobility and the other benefits of transportation. We have to balance these values when we set the limits.

Even our National Health Service balances the cost of a treatment against the extra years of quality life that it might buy for a patient.

The lockdown will reduce infections and deaths. But it also generates escalating bankruptcies, uncertainty, worry and misery. Perhaps the doctors, when they recommend extending things for another 12 or 18 months, are only seeing half the story. It’s time we had a wider debate on our wider values, and how they might be balanced.