Pro-business or pro-market?

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In the journal of the American Enterprise Institute, James DeLong reviews the National Affairs article "Capitalism After the Crisis" by Prof Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago. Zingales makes the important disctinction between being pro-market and pro-business. DeLong echoes Zingales, noting that:

Business, especially big business, is happy with crony capitalism, franchised monopoly, or any other device that will avoid the Darwinism of the free market. Of the billions of dollars now spent lobbying, almost none supports the free market as a concept or an institution.

Big businesses spend money lobbying for special advantage. They do not seek a level playing field, but laws and regulations which benefit their own circumstances at the expense of fair competition. Their aim is to use the law to make money, and legislators seem all too ready to comply with their objectives. Toymakers Hasbro and Mattel both lobbied for the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, and "even as the law has brought undreamt-of woe to thousands of smaller producers of kids’ products, the two big companies seem to be doing rather well out of it."

Although opponents of capitalism often treat pro-market and pro-business as the same thing, the reality is that it is regulation and government power which offer business a free lunch, while the market makes them work for it. Businessmen oppose monopoly when they are buying, but tend to favour it when they are selling.

Zingales suggests we should "put rules in place that keep large financial firms from manipulating government connections to the detriment of markets." The same could be done for other sectors of the economy. He says that:

The alternative path is to soothe the popular rage with measures like limits on executive bonuses while shoring up the position of the largest financial players, making them dependent on government and making the larger economy dependent on them. Such measures play to the crowd in the moment, but threaten the financial system and the public standing of American capitalism in the long run.

Unfortunately Zingales thinks that the Obama administration has chosen the latter path. And the 1,990 detailed pages of the Health Care Bill provide yet more ammunition for that view.

Dr Madsen Pirie is author of the recently-published "101 Great Philosophers."

A proposal for solving the pension crisis

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We need to wean people off the state pension. It’s a giant Ponzi scheme that sooner or later will become bankrupt. But we cannot simply scrap it. Too many people have based their future plans on its existence, and it is too late for them to make up for its removal.

In a new Think Piece I have drafted for the ASI, I propose phasing it out in such a way that those over 60 get a full pension, anybody under 20 gets no pension, and the rest of us see our pensions tapered away at a rate relative to the amount of time we have to make alternative arrangements. Mechanisms would be put in place to ensure that the poorest were not left without any support, and that nobody was blindsided by a sudden market collapse. But basically the onus would be on each of us to prepare for our own future.

This is an idea I have been turning over in my head for some time. It seems reasonable to me, and I’ve tried to address the objections that I envisage. But it’s far from a detailed plan, and I would welcome comments from others who may be able to see problems, improvements or opportunities.

Please read the full article here and then feel free to comment below.

On this day in 1989

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The East German government announced on November 9, 1989 that all GDR citizens could visit West Germany and West Berlin.

Up the proverbial creek...

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Britain's current-year deficit of 12.4 per cent of GDP will not automatically fall to 0. The Treasury's latest scenario foresees a gradual reduction to 5.5 per cent in 2013-14, raising the ratio of debt to GDP to 76 per cent, only a little above the Western European average. It is not made explicit how the deficit reduction is to be achieved—spending cuts are no doubt tacitly assumed—except that the growth rate of the economy is supposed to rise spectacularly to 3.25 per cent from 2011 onwards. If the average interest rate on the debt were to settle at 5 per cent, the interest cost on the projected 76 per cent of GDP would be 3.8 per cent of GDP a percentage point more than at present. To accommodate this and still achieve a reduction of the deficit to 5.5 per cent, non-interest spending would have to be squeezed by 7.9 per cent of GDP. Anyone who believes that this will be done has never understood democracy.

Anthony de Jasay, 'Who Is Afraid of the National Debt?', The Library of Economics and Liberty.

A proposal for solving the pension crisis

ASI Fellow and Associate Director of CentreForum Tom Papworth sets out how to solve the looming pensions crisis.

We need to wean people off the state pension. It’s a giant Ponzi scheme that sooner or later will become bankrupt. There used to be five working age people supporting each pension; now there are two, and in the future that number will shrink. It cannot go on.

However, we can’t just scrap it. Too many people have based their future plans on its existence, and it is too late for them to make up for its removal. To tell a 50 year old that they won’t get a state pension is unfair: they’ve worked for thirty years expecting it, and not prepared for a world without it. But I see no reason why we should not tell a 20 year old that they won’t get a state pension, as they have all the time in the world to make their own arrangements.

I have been considering a phasing out approach. Anybody over 60 gets a full pension; anybody under 20 gets no pension. The rest of us see our pensions tapered away at a rate that equals 2.5 percent per year off retirement. Thus, the 50 year old would get almost two thirds of a full state pension, and would have 15 years to make their own arrangements to supplement that amount. I would get slightly less than one third of a state pension, but would have three decades to prepare for a world where my state pension was meagre.

There are two problems with this approach, as I see it. The first is that young people would have to pay in to a system from which they did not benefit. This would generate some understandable resentment. However, we cannot refuse to implement changes on the grounds that certain groups will in the future not benefit where those in the same group but in a previous generation did benefit. That argument, often deployed by students to oppose tuition fees (“You all got a free higher education, so it is unfair to deny it to us”), is the quintessence of Conservativism: a fundamental opposition to change. That same argument, 100 years ago, would have cut the other way: old people benefited from a system into which they had not paid; one generation was being taxed where the previous generation was not. That did not prevent the state pension being created and nor should it have.

I would suggest that we could counter the objection among younger workers in three ways:

• Firstly, by pointing out that the current system is a lie and that one way or another the state pension is ultimately bankrupt. It is better to taper it out than to reach a crisis point for which nobody has prepared.
• Secondly, by pointing out that they are in many cases paying for their own parents, just as their parents paid things that they benefited from (such as free childcare) which their parents never enjoyed.
• Thirdly, and this is perhaps the best bit, by pointing out that over time taxes will be able to fall, so that as they get older the tax burden will be reduced, meaning that they can finance their (probably superior) private pension out of the difference, and probably still be better off than their overtaxed parents.

The other objection that I envisage is that the state pension provides for people regardless of wealth, and that the poorest are not able to afford a private pension. While I doubt that this is as true as those who make that argument claim (in the pre-pension era millions of low paid people made private arrangements though Friendly Societies, cooperatives and other methods), I accept that there will be a demand for some arrangement to help the poorest. This could be achieved by a means tested benefit (like a tax credit) that was paid directly into the pension scheme of their choice. This would also benefit those unable to work for health reasons or due to caring requirements, and would be applied to those signing on as unemployed.

There would of course be a hard core that refused to make arrangements. As long as the above arrangements were made clear, however, nobody would be able to pretend that they did not know that they might face poverty in old age. But no government will be able to ignore that poverty nonetheless. I would therefore suggest that the mandatory retirement age be scrapped, so that a person has chosen not to prepare for their future – or not to do so adequately –can continue working. There may be a case on anti-discrimination grounds for banning companies from having mandatory retirement ages too. Once people became too infirm to work, they could be dealt with through unemployment and/or sickness benefits.

Before anybody accuses me of being callous I would emphasise that honesty from the outset and a tax credit for the poorest would mean that only those who wilfully refuse to prepare for their retirement will find themselves in this predicament. If this is unpalatable, however, then the alternative would be to compel people to make arrangements: a pension could be mandatory for all workers, just as car insurance is for all drivers.

While some might suggest that not everybody would be able to make an informed choice about pension provision, I find this argument unconvincing – and indeed patronising. With the exception of those who are truly not capable of making decisions for themselves (and these are indeed exceptions and should be dealt with separately), everybody is able to make an informed pension choice, just as they make informed investment choices in other areas of their lives.

Some measure would be necessary to ensure that pension funds were not completely at the mercy of the markets. When I signed up for a defined contribution scheme, my pension provider arranged that in the last decade of the scheme, 10% of my funds would be moved each year from riskier, more rewarding investments to the safest investment vehicles (AAA bonds – which I would hope would mean government bonds considering how casually the rating agencies handed out AAA ratings over the past decade). This should ensure that nobody is caught out by a sudden market slump. It may be necessary to make this sort of protection mandatory.

These proposals are certainly a work in progress. Some of the ideas are not original, though the basic plan to taper the pension away is not one I have come across before. I make them in the hope of stimulating a discussion that may help me revise (or even abandon) what has for some time seemed like a good idea.

Ethical is not what these people think it is

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We should, of course, all act ethically all the time: the problem comes with who is defining what is ethical:

Some supermarkets have a "dismal" ethical record when it comes to supporting British farmers, buying local, seasonal and sustainable food and saving energy according a Government watchdog.

That definition of ethical coming from something called Consumer Focus, who appear to believe that it would be more ethical for me to support Farmer Giles, one who is already by any historical or global standard rich beyond the dreams of Croesus (and already swallowing flagons of taxpayers' money to boot) as opposed to spending my money with Farmer Obiang: one still stuck in the destitution of peasant farming and looking to modest trade with such as myself as a way of feeding and educating his children. 

This is not a notion of ethics which I find worthy of the name. How and when did nationalism of this, green, sort become ethical and internationalism, the acknowledgement that we are all human with the same rights and desires unethical?

More importantly, how did our system of governance become colonised by the purveyors of this new religion (for an ethical framework can indeed be so described)? And yes, this is our system of governance, Consumer Focus is a statutory body which we paid some £45 million for last year according to their accounts.

Roll on the regime change when we can have (and if we don't have then we'll just have to change regime again, won't we?) the Bonfire of the Quangos.

Obama lays an egg: An electable Republican renaissance

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Could Obama do more for the cause of libertarianism in America than any other political figure since the founding fathers? The similarities between Jimmy Carter’s courteous paving of the way for the Reagan years, and Obama’s dazzling ability to boil economic waters are starting to suggest that one cliché is earning it’s place in the political lexicon: history repeats itself. Only Reagan didn’t have Fox News in his corner.

The victories of Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie in Virginia and New Jersey, both of whom skirted the traditional, socially conservative rhetoric, favoring an economic platform that resists the President’s tea party provoking profligacy, can be weighed against the failure of their fellow Republican Doug Hoffman, who stuck to the old school with grassroots heavyweight Sarah Palin in his corner. Economics won the day, not abortion and gay marriage.

There are signs here that the Republican base is moving. Social issues are, inevitably, going to become more “progressive" with every passing year. The sooner conservatives realize that by leading with these issues they’re feeding the preposterous, but highly effective “religious + Republican = prejudiced / stupid" equation, perpetuated by their competitors, the sooner they can take advantage of the fact that, yes, America is an essentially libertarian nation. Avoiding Palin-esque embarrassment, their policies would win every time. The stimuli taking them in this new direction are the financial crisis, Obama’s spending, and critically the ever-growing conservative media.

Constitutional boogey-men like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are feeding grass roots conservatives a new, non-religious, economic diet. And it delights the palette of rednecks and independents alike.

Two evils

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As I was riding the tube a couple of weeks ago I noticed one of the “text" polls in the paper as I was thumbing through it. The question was straight forward, “Do you Trust David Cameron?" the results, while admittedly not scientific, were both astonishing and yet not surprising. An overwhelming amount of respondents, over 75%, voted No.

While your average bloke on the street could tell you that most people don’t trust Cameron it is surprising to me how much we would rather jump from one boiling pot to another instead of just jumping off the stove. It is a sad state of affairs when we vote for a particular candidate or party that we distrust because we distrust the other more. I believe that democracy cannot continue to survive if it is reduced to choosing between the lesser of two evils because it fundamentally undermines the purpose of the vote.

To a large extent political parties are responsible for this democratic failure by eliminating the need for individual beliefs in elections. Political parties may ultimately prove to be the end of government accountability to the people. Politicians realize that money means more than a happy constituency so they respond more to the party than to the people. Any individual with real aspirations to make the world a better place must first conform to the party standards if they have any hopes of ever reaching political office. This not only waters down the quality of candidates, but reverses the role of government from employee to employer of the people.

It is no coincidence that the countries with the most powerful political parties are the most authoritarian. Perhaps it is time for people to look outside the political box, and maybe we can find a candidate that is truly trustworthy.

It's for your own good

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"For your own good" is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.

Janet Frame, Faces In The Water.

Yes, you can have too much education

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Yes, it really is possible to have too much education. Not just in the sense of the absent minded professor either (as the saying goes, the more educated you become you know more and more about less and less until as a senior professor you know everything about nothing).

It is entirely possible for both an individual to have too much education and for a society to be educating too many people too highly:

The oversupply of college graduates started in 1999 when Chinese leaders decided to counter some of the effects of the Asian financial crisis by boosting university enrollments. They had hoped that a generation of well-heeled educated urbanites would boost domestic consumption and help reduce China's dependence on exports. Enrollment rose quickly, from 3% of college-age students in the 1980s to 20% today......Some 6.1 million graduates entered the job market this summer, 540,000 more than last year. In 2008 the employment rate for graduates was less than 70%. This year nearly two million of graduates, many of them postgraduate diploma holders, are expected to be left without job placements......An explosive report released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in September said earnings of graduates were now at par and even lower than those of migrant laborers.

That has to be a blow, the highly educated scions of the urban middle classes are valued at less (for their labour at least) than the peasants just in from the fields. Yes, education itself is valuable and life enhancing, but this idea that we should push as many as possible through the universities simply does not make economic sense. Our own experience in the UK is that trying to get 50% of all to have a degree is, well, it's already been reported that an Arts degree for a man is not cost effective, it detracts from lifetime income. It's one thing to say that education is good (as I've said it is, as part of personal development) but this mania that it will be the economic salvation of us is nonsense.

For us to take people out of the workforce for three years, at great expense to both themselves and the taxpayer, simply doesn't work as part of economic development. We are actually destroying value, not building it, by doing so.

As is so often true the American vernacular seems to have recognised this long before the policy makers (how about that for the wisdom of the crowds?). One discussion on the correct form for the plural of Starbuck's barista (baristae? baristas? baristi?) ended with the sage observation that it was in fact "liberal arts graduates".