Amazingly, government often isn't very good at doing things
We're quite onside with the idea that there really are things which must be done by government. We're also entirely happy with the thought that there are things which government should encourage, incentivise, aid markets in doing and so on. We do though think that it's important to distinguish here. Between those things which must be directly done and those things which need to be encouraged, could be done better with a bit of intervention and so on.
For example, a decent vaccination campaign will produce "herd immunity." Those who cannot be vaccinated will still be protected as the diseases have no corner of the population in which to hide. Thus we're all in favour of government having a role in making sure that vaccination takes place, that herd immunity is achieved. We could, as the NHS does, simply get government to pay for vaccinating all children. We could also, as in much of the US, simply provide an incentive. Children can only go into the public school system, that one that has already been charged for through taxes, if they are vaccinated. Either works and so we're fine with either.
However, there is that set of things - a rather larger set than most suspect - where government might direct, encourage, foster, but should not be doing. Say, space rockets:
A new research paper by Edgar Zapata, who works at Kennedy Space Center, looks closely at the finances of SpaceX and NASA.
...
Zapata estimates that SpaceX launches cost NASA around $89,000 per kilogram of cargo delivered to the space station. There's no telling what precisely would have come from a cargo spacecraft developed by NASA, but Zapata estimates that it would be $272,000 per kg.
For future commercial crew missions sending astronauts into space, Zapata estimates that it will cost $405 million for a SpaceX Dragon crew deployment of 4 and $654 million for a Boeing Starliner, which is scheduled for its first flight in 2019. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but Zapata estimates that its only 37 to 39 percent of what it would have cost the government.
This is not something limited to rockets of course. We've no doubt at all that there is a government role in both health care and education. But perhaps it should be limited to making sure that it exists, providing a financing method for it, rather than actually being the producer of the services? Or train sets or generating plants or water pipes or....well you get the idea.
A currently fashionable and most pernicious idea is that if there should, righteously, be a role for government then that should be that government is the actual provider and manager of production. Something which we're sure is indeed true at times and mostly not given the areas to which people try to apply this argument.
Vox Populi is in the comments sections not the newspaper articles
We had a little go at the Fawcett Society over their gender pay gap calculation yesterday. What we think is rather fun about this issue is the extreme difference between what the two major left wing broadsheets (not that one of them appears on paper any more) say about the issue and what their readers insist upon telling them about it.
In The Guardian and The Independent there are pieces decrying how dreadfully the patriarchy oppresses women through the gender pay gap. In the comment sections below each there is near no one who is willing to accept even the basic diagnosis. Instead we've, from near all of those readers who could be bothered to give their view, repeated statements of the basic truths here.
There is no pay gap even if there is an earnings gap. To pay men and women unequally for the same job is illegal, the differences in earnings coming from different decisions about how to live life, what to do for an income and how much devotion to attend to that career. That is, the readers have got the point here, even if the newspapers themselves have not.
Yes, we will take some of the credit here for we have been banging on about this for a decade now. And Kate Andrews (who was with us) is indeed mentioned as being mentioned as a source to counter the misinformation.
That the people aren't being taken in by the agitprop we find cheering.
We might also extend this principle a little bit. Near none of the reporting The Guardian has done on the Paradise Papers even has a comments section for people to correct the articles themselves. We assume this is because even the editors know that such sections would just fill up with questions about why it's so appalling that others use offshore but just fine and dandy that the Guardian Media Group and Scott Trust Ltd do themselves.
The Fawcett Society really must start getting this right about the gender pay gap
Yet another report from the Fawcett Society on the iniquities of the gender pay gap. Yet another year in which they get the calculation wrong. This is now half a decade at least since they were told they're getting it wrong and yet still they continue to do so. The reason they do this is obvious, their method bigs up the problem they wish to complain about, doing it correctly does not. So, what is a campaigning group to do, eh?
Progress has stalled on closing the gender pay gap, which now stands at 14.1% according to the Office for National Statistics, with no movement on the figure in the last three years.
No, the ONS does not say that. The Fawcett mistake is explained here, in their press release.
To calculate the gender pay gap the Fawcett Society uses the ONS mean average full-time pay gap of 14.1%. Others often cite the median average which currently stands at 9.1% for full time workers, and has decreased by only 0.4 percentage points in the last five years.
As we've pointed out before the ONS, the Statistics Authority, both are insistent that we must use the median, not the mean. The reason being that our system of measurement is bounded at the bottom, we don't count negative incomes (which do exist, ask any bankrupt) but there is no upper bound to pay. Thus the median is a much better guide to the average experience.
Our then Kate Andrews made this point as well.
So far of course this is angels on pinheads stuff. Except, of course, that such public ineptitude should be pointed to. Then, after that, we do need to point to something much more important. Which is that, once we start with the right number, a gender pay gap of 9.6%, we find that it's not actually due to gender at all.
As we've explained elsewhere it's to do with primary childcare arrangements. Fathers earn more than non-fathers, mothers less than non-mothers. Mix and match the by how much of both of those with the relevant portions of the population and we have a complete and total explanation for that observed 9.6% gap. As other research has shown - familial roles are all we need to describe the observed reality.
We can, of course we can, still complain about this, campaign to change it. But if the cause is that mothers tend to be the primary childcarer then any action to change matters needs to change the manner in which parents parent, shouting about employers isn't going to make much difference, is it?
And so the protectionists gather
We've not been shy about our support for a system of unilateral free trade. Others want to insist upon protecting British jobs and all that. They're wrong, of course, the steel industry being a useful example:
British jobs would be put at risk by government plans not to match the EU’s tough stance on dumped imports after Brexit, the steel industry has warned.
If, even if, some foreign government subsidises the production of steel then that cheap steel is a gift to us. For, we get cheap steel, which is excellent. But even then the protectionists go further in their demands:
At the root of the concern is the so-called “lesser duty rule”, which limits punitive tariffs on dumped products to the duty needed to redress the injury to domestic producers — rather than the subsidy enjoyed by the manufacturers. This is to prevent the system from being abused by protectionist interests.
Even when the duty levels are set at the damage done they're still complaining. Thus their complaint cannot really be about the damage done to their own interests, can it? It must be that they can see a method of raising tariffs further, to produce a positive benefit, not just the absence of the negative one.
But, of course, it gets worse. Steel is an intermediate good, an input into other processes. And we know what happens, from the American experience, when we try to raise that price:
200,000 Americans lost their jobs to higher steel prices during 2002.
These lost jobs represent approximately $4 billion in lost wages from
February to November 2002.3
• One out of four (50,000) of these job losses occurred in the metal
manufacturing, machinery and equipment and transportation equipment and
parts sectors.
• Job losses escalated steadily over 2002, peaking in November (at 202,000
jobs), and slightly declining to 197,000 jobs in December.4
• More American workers lost their jobs in 2002 to higher steel prices than
the total number employed by the U.S. steel industry itself (187,500
Americans were employed by U.S. steel producers in December 2002).
We really cannot see anything at all to recommend trade tariffs.
Full expensing: the best idea in politics you've never heard of
What’s the best idea in politics that nobody’s ever heard of? I think it’s what’s called “full expensing”, a tweak to the corporation tax rules that could eliminate a lot of the damage that tax does. It’s obscure in Britain, but new evidence is beginning to show that it might just be the single best tax reform the government could do to raise productivity and growth.
Basically, “full expensing” means letting businesses deduct the cost of any investment they do from their corporation tax bills straight away. At the moment, for ongoing expenses like pens and paper, you can do that already. But for longer-term expenses, like investments in a new building or in new machinery, you can only deduct a small fraction of the cost of investment each year over the accounting lifespan of that investment.
The problem is that this means that, in fact, businesses don’t actually get back the full cost of the investment. £100 today is worth more than £100 in ten years because of inflation and the things (like other investment) you could have done with the money in the mean time. The longer the write-off time, the less of the cost of the investment you can write off.
As the Tax Foundation’s excellent Kyle Pomerleau explains here, between 2008 and 2013 the UK reduced the value of deductions for machinery and property – from 87.5 percent to 84 percent for machinery, and from 59.2 percent to zero for industrial buildings. As Kyle says, “This means that corporations cannot write off the cost of investing in buildings over time at all!” (Kyle points out that this blunted the economic effects of the reductions in the headline corporation tax rate under the coalition.)
You may be able to see why this matters quite a lot. If we allowed businesses to deduct their investments from their tax bills immediately, we’d effectively be allowing them to deduct the full cost of those investments.
Now for the evidence. If our theory tells us what might happen, what does our evidence tell us what actually did happen? Two new papers, one from the US and one from the UK, suggest that full expensing could have very big positive economic effects.
The first, from Eric Ohrn, looks at states that adopted an full expensing policy temporarily in 2002 and 2008. It uses what’s called a ‘difference-in-differences’ technique which controls for the fact that states did not adopt these policies randomly – states starting from a lower level may have been more likely to adopt this sort of policy, for example.
Ohrn’s results are staggeringly large. Full expensing increased investment by 17.5% and grew wages by 2.5%. Five years after the full expensing window had been available, states that adopted it had 7.7% higher employment levels than comparable states that did not adopt it, and 10.5% higher production output (which means lower prices too, though not necessarily concentrated in that state).
This is such a large result that it sounds unbelievable. But it’s consistent with a paper from last year that looked at UK evidence too, from the introduction of a policy that allowed small- and medium-sized firms to write off more of their investments in plant and machinery early on – not full expensing, but closer than before (40% in the first year instead of 25%). A change in what allowed a firm to count as an SME gives the paper a quasi-experimental event, where they can look at firms that did not qualify one year and did the next, and compare them to firms whose status did not change.
Access to more generous capital allowances increased investment by 11% (2.1%–2.6% percentage points). That’s roughly consistent with the other paper (where the policy was more generous), and still shows a large effect. Both seem to suggest a high elasticity of investment, where every extra pound raised causes much less investment to take place.
Finally, Estonia's system of full expensing has helped to give it the most competitive tax system in the developed world, even though its headline rate of 20% is higher than many other's, including the UK's. In the four years after introducing full expensing in 2000, along with other reforms to its corporation tax, investment growth was 39 percentage points higher there than in its Baltic neighbours.
Full expensing sounds technical and obscure, and is unlikely to win votes on the doorstep. It is not the sort of policy to win headlines. But its effects seem like they could be very large, and could deliver the sort of jobs and wages boost that would be popular. For a government that seems desperate to boost investment, especially investment in machinery-intensive sectors like manufacturing, it could be one of the few policy silver bullets it has left.
Is VAT to blame for the productivity puzzle?
Yesterday the Office for Tax Simplification’s released its long-awaited review of Value Added Taxation. VAT raises about £120bn each year and in general is one of the least economically harmful taxes because it taxes consumption not investment. But the UK’s VAT is one of the world’s least efficient. In fact, in the OECD only Turkey and Greece (!) have less efficient VATs.
Source: OECD, Consumption Tax Trends 2016
I’ve commented before on the stupidity of the lower/zero rating of food and children’s clothes on this blog. Readers are probably aware of the famous Jaffa Cake case, but did you know that while potato crisps are taxed at the full rate, tortilla chips and prawn crackers are zero-rated? Alas, any brave politician determined to fix this distortion, would be mocked for proposing a ‘Doritos Tax’.
But it’s not just zero-rating where Britain falls behind. In an attempt to spare small-business owners the administrative burden of claiming and paying back VAT, we set the threshold for VAT registration rather high. In fact, we set it much higher than our European counterparts. If you report a turnover of £85,000 a year then you must register for VAT, incurring a tax bill of £17,000 minus any VAT reclaimed on inputs. As most businesses near the threshold are sole-proprietorships, where their inputs are low and most value-added comes from their own work, they are unlikely to be able to claim back much.
The result is a situation not too dissimilar to the problems caused under the slab system for Stamp Duty. Earning one extra pound can lead to a massive tax bill. As a result there is an overwhelming incentive for firms approaching the threshold to refuse work, under-report turnover or even take extra long holidays . This is seen in the data with firms massively bunching around the threshold.
Source: OTS, Review of Value Added Taxation
Paul Morton, tax director of the Office for Tax Simplification jokes “We hear that cruise ships are full of people staying below the VAT threshold.” We often worry about the effects of marginal tax rates approaching 50% sapping an entrepreneur's incentive to produce, imagine what a marginal tax rate of 1,700,000% on the next pound you earn does!
This is a serious problem. When we worry about a complex tax system, we are not worrying about the need for HMRC and KPMG having to hire extra accountants, rather we are concerned that it is leading people to behave in ways that will destroy productive economic activity.
This bunching effect is significant enough that it may help explain why Britain’s productivity levels are so stubbornly low. It probably isn’t the main factor, but it’s increasingly becoming clear that low productivity levels are not down to simply one thing. It’s not just people in the North being unable to move to productive work in the South because of eye-watering rents or underinvestment in productive machinery because of inadequate capital allowances. It’s all of those things combined.
There’s a further problem. Companies below the threshold often compete with firms registered for VAT. For instance, most Uber drivers turnover under £85,000 which means your average Uber ride is almost VAT-free (you pay VAT on Uber’s cut). If a competitor that employed its drivers directly entered the market, it would be forced to pay VAT in full on each journey. So, the VAT registration threshold might not simply discourage productive activity, it may also lead to inefficient corporate structures.
So what to do? I think the case for reducing the VAT registration threshold is overwhelming. If we brought level closer to the EU minimum threshold of €10,000, it would solve the bunching problem and raise around £2bn for the Treasury in the process. It would mean that more small businesses will have to bear the admin of registering for and paying VAT, but the harms can be mitigated. First, most will use the VAT Flat Rate Scheme which eliminates the need to claim and register every purchase and instead estimates a flat rate on your total turnover based on the industry you are in. So for instance a corner shop owner with lots of input costs will pay a flat 4% rate, while an IT consultant with few input costs will pay 14.5%. Second, we could use the additional £2bn in revenue to cushion the effect of the tax rise by raising the national insurance thresholds.
VAT is one of the least-bad ways to raise revenue. In theory. In practice the UK's VAT falls far short of the ideal. Fixing VAT would boost productivity, efficiency and give us the revenue to cut other more harmful taxes.
We agree the Charter of the Forest is important, but why it is matters
The Charter of the Forest was an accompaniment to Magna Carta and we entirely agree that it was an important document, the signing of it an important moment. The thing is, it's important in a manner rather different from the way in which some are celebrating it today. It really was the start of the English exceptionalism in law, economy and property. But, crucially, it wasn't the creation of commons that mattered, it was the delineation of what belonged to the state and what to individuals that did.
The Charter of the Forest, the lesser-known but equally significant twin of Magna Carta, asserted the rights of ordinary people to access from “the commons” the means for a livelihood and shelter, whether it was grazing their livestock, cutting wood for housing and fuel, fishing and hunting, creating water mills, or sharing the other resources of the forest. It restricted the rights of the king and nobles to privatise and exploit the forest while guaranteeing the rights of the commoners. It represented an early constitutional victory for ordinary people over a wealthy elite, and as such was hugely influential in the writing of other constitutions around the world. The battles in England continued of course, and waves of enclosures across Britain through subsequent centuries stripped away many of the rights.
But now a movement to restore them is growing. Guy Standing, a professor of development economics, is one of those calling for a new charter of the commons, re-establishing the right of the property-less to a basic income, affordable housing, energy and water, and common ownership or control of the means of providing it.
The important part of the Charter to grasp is that the King, and those aristocrats, weren't "the rich" they were, in that time and place, "the State." William the Bastard didn't just say that the throne belonged to him, he insisted that every inch of land and all upon it did. And went out and killed all who demurred. He was really very "Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato" indeed in a rather different and more proprietorial manner than the later "L'Etat, c'est moi." "L'état est à moi" perhaps.
This idea, that the "forest" and all in it continued to belong to the State, the King, is what the Charter overthrew in the time of his descendant, Henry III. Instead there were some things that did, others that were the inalienable rights of individuals. Sure, we might not think that pannage or scutage are all that important today but they are indeed the basis of property rights.
Property rights being the very things which make market economies possible of course. To use, as is being done, this example as justification for the commons is thus wrong, it's a justification for the assignment of property rights to people, not the State, with which the individual can then do as they wish within the law. That was all rather the point of it all.
This does indeed have modern implications:
Natural mineral resources are also part of the commons – and where extracting has a detrimental impact on the wider population, it is their interest that should prevail – whether it be leaving them in the ground to mitigate climate change or sharing the profits when appropriate. The Community Chartering Network has already scored a victory here, when its Falkirk group came together to draw up a charter of the communities’ commons assets and successfully opposed fracking for gas.
Oil gas and coal are all, in those mineral deposits, the property of the State today. The lesson of the Charter is that instead of these being vested in the Crown, as they are, they should be the property of those who own the land above and those who have rights to that land through tenancy etc. You know, as has actually been suggested might happen with fracking royalties distributed to those locals. As does actually happen under US law, as does happen with other minerals which are not Crown property.
The Charter of the Forest distributed property rights away from the State and towards individuals. We agree that's important, we think we should be doing more of it but that isn't the lesson people are taking, is it?
Protectionism is killing the British Grand Prix
Elsewhere on our blog today, Richard Teather has written a defence of Lewis Hamilton’s tax avoidance scheme, pointing out that the EU’s poorly-designed VAT system is primarily responsible for creating the situation in the first place. As a huge F1 fan (with a soft spot for Hamilton), I’m naturally more likely to come to his defence. But there’s another controversy in the world of British Formula 1, which came to prominence earlier this year, that I feel I can comment on with a more neutral perspective: the potential demise of the British Grand Prix.
In July, the owners of Silverstone circuit (which hosts the British GP) activated a break clause in their contract with the Formula One Group:
“It is not financially viable for us to deliver the British Grand Prix under the terms of our current contract,” said John Grant, chairman of the BRDC [Silverstone’s owners]. “We sustained losses of £2.8m in 2015 and £4.8m in 2016, and we expect to lose a similar amount this year. We have reached the tipping point where we can no longer let our passion for the sport rule our heads.”
The BRDC blame exorbitantly high fees charged by the Formula One Group, whose negotiating position with Silverstone is made more favourable due to the widespread use of government subsidies for tracks in other host countries. The 2017 season opener in Melbourne received around A$60,000,000 from Aussie taxpayers, with Singapore and Bahrain being two other high-profile examples of heavily state-subsidized Grands Prix. In many cases, newer races on the calendar function largely as vanity projects for governments who prioritize the prestige and glamour of an F1 race weekend above overall economic wellbeing.
Team principals like Red Bull’s Christian Horner have argued that Silverstone’s dire situation is largely the result of poor management decisions. It’s true that Silverstone does get comparatively favourable terms compared to many other venues (the 5% yearly fee escalator in their contract is comparatively low by F1 standards), but this is outweighed by the sheer size of subsidies given to other circuits by their respective governments. Silverstone’s ticket fees are some of the highest on the calendar, but despite consistently topping race attendance figures over recent years this has not been enough to make up for the absence of subsidies. Sadly, Formula One Group have little incentive to offer economically viable terms to circuits like Silverstone when they have an easy source of revenue from governments that don’t depend upon the signals of profit and loss.
So what’s the solution? It’s certainly not subsidizing the circuit. Subsidies might be good for TV viewers in other countries who aren't paying for them, but they certainly aren't good for taxpayers. I’ve been a devoted fan of Formula 1 since I was in primary school, but I’d rather see the British Grand Prix move to a different venue or exit the calendar entirely than force Brits who don’t share my love for the sport to pay for my enjoyment. If F1 wants to thrive in the long-run, British trade negotiators need to use Brexit as an opportunity need to make case for reducing Grand Prix subsidies in other countries as part of a wider strategy of supporting free trade. But even if this fails, maintaining a policy of unilateral free trade in motorsports is vital. Subsidizing the British Grand Prix would allow Formula One Group to reap the undeserved benefits of protectionism by charging higher fees to circuits, resulting in a ‘tit-for-tat’ ratcheting up of subsidies at the expense of taxpayers worldwide. I love my sport, but I love free markets more.
Racing around in circles on tax
Lewis Hamilton has been in the headlines for his tax planning rather than his driving, named in the BBC’s “Paradise Papers” reports as having imported his private jet through the Isle of Man to save £3 million in VAT.
If you want an unintentionally funny tax story, do read the BBC’s piece on this. “It was still dark when the private jet began its descent. Inside, its decor was sumptuous…the island that the plane was heading towards hadn't yet woken up.” Melodramatic prose, private jets, fast cars, exotic islands, shadowy international finance – I think the writer must be angling for a job on the next James Bond script.
But once you cut through the purple prose and outrage, what this shows is the stupidity of governments trying to fiddle with the tax system.
Hamilton bought his jet, according to the stolen files, mostly for business purposes (presumably flying between race courses and training grounds), plus a minority of personal non-business uses.
VAT was invented by a Frenchman, so not surprisingly it has, at its heart, an elegant logic. Also, not surprisingly, that fundamental simplicity is overlaid by a huge amount of bureaucratic complexity.
But fundamentally, the way VAT is supposed to work is that someone in business charges, and pays to the tax authority, VAT on all their sales, their income. They can then reclaim the VAT on all their business expenses and business-related purchases. That way the net VAT paid by the business is on its “value added”, the difference between its sales and its purchases. That’s why it’s called Value Added Tax.
If the EU’s VAT system stuck to this basic principle, Hamilton would have been allowed to reclaim part of the VAT on his jet, the proportion that related to his business rather than private use. If he used it two thirds of the time for business and one third for private flights, he could have reclaimed two thirds of the VAT. Yes, there would have been a bit of wrangling with the tax authorities over which flights were business-related, probably some cross-referencing of flight logs and race schedules, but basically the same business-use principle that all self-employed people are familiar with when HMRC check their expenses.
But at some point some bureaucrat or politician decided that the basic VAT principle of reclaiming VAT on business purchases should be abandoned when it comes to aeroplanes.
Without, it seems, any good reason other than political envy, the EU decided that VAT reclaims would be prohibited for private planes, even when they were legitimately used for business flights, unless they were used solely by an airline.
So that’s how the VAT scheme used by Hamilton and others worked. His advisers set up an airline for him (charter flights count as an airline business, even though the airline’s only customers were Hamilton and his businesses); the aeroplane was imported into the Isle of Man, Hamilton’s company paid the VAT due, and immediately reclaimed it again because the plane was to be used by his charter airline company. There was a bit more complication, but that’s the fundamentals.
Now, did Hamilton do anything wrong here?
There certainly wasn’t anything illegal; everyone agrees that the law was followed to the letter.
But it’s also difficult to say that he “should” have paid that VAT and “should” not have been able to reclaim it. The jet was being used primarily for legitimate business reasons, and the basis of VAT is that businesses “should” be able to reclaim VAT on their business purchases.
Yes, Hamilton does, according to the leaked documents, also use the plane partly for his own private non-business flights. But what the outraged BBC journalists don’t mention is that he will have to pay his charter company for those flights, at the proper price, and that will be taxable income of the charter company, subject to tax in the ordinary way.
So what is the problem? Why is there outrage, other than envy at the rich and successful and a desire for the government to grab ever more money? Yes, an artificial scheme has been entered into, but only because the EU first put an artificial restriction on the business VAT reclaim.
One technicality has cancelled out another technicality, the law has been obeyed, and VAT has been paid and refunded as it was designed to.
This is essentially the same as the “flat tax” argument that I have been making in Adam Smith Institute reports for years. Rather than over-complicate the tax system, with hugely bureaucratic and interfering rules where some types of income get tax breaks and some don’t, and some types of expenditure get special tax allowances but others are penalised, let us just treat everything the same, have an easy system and keep the rates as low as possible.
It would have been far better to have a simple system where VAT just does what it is supposed to, without trying to use tax for social engineering. It would also show that the UK is open to business rather than merely trying to extract every last pound of tax.
A feast of classical liberal thought: Mont Pelerin Society in Stockholm
[This post was originally written by Edwin van de Haar on Notes on Liberty.]
Last week, Stockholm hosted a special meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) on the populist threats to the free society. MPS meetings are held under Chatham House rules, which means I cannot report in any detail about the proceedings. Yet a few impressions can be shared.
I have been a MPS member since 2010, when my nomination was accepted at the end of the general meeting in Sydney. In those days the old rules still applied, which meant you had to attend three meetings before you could be nominated for membership. However, this strict rule led to the erosion of the membership base (the MPS was literally starving out), so the rules to join as a member have been made easier.
My first MPS meeting was in Guatemala City, in 2006. I had participated in the essay contest for young scholars which is always organized in the run-up to the bi-annual General Meetings. As a runner-up I won free entry to the meeting. I happened to be in the south of the USA in the weeks before, doing PhD research at the Mises Institute in Alabama, so could easily make the trip to Central America. Because I lived in Manila during those years, I could also easily attend the 2008 meeting in Tokyo.
I had are number of reasons for wanting to join the MPS. First of all, the quality of the meetings offer a great chance to listen to and speak with the leading scholars within current classical liberalism. Increasingly multidisciplinary (back in the old days the economists dominated), the programme committees of the MPS Meetings always succeed in attracting an impressive crowd of high quality speakers and commentators from across the globe. I always find this a great intellectual treat. Second, the meetings are characterized by extremely pleasant and open atmospheres. Everybody mingles with everybody, you can talk with everybody, no matter your age, or academic background. Thirdly, the meetings take place across the globe, so they offer a great opportunity to travel and see places. Although it must be added that even when you do not stay at the conference hotel, the meetings are never very cheap, so it remains an investment. Fourth, for a Hayekian like myself, it feels very good to be a member of the society founded by the master himself, which had and has such an illustrious membership, ever since its beginnings 70 years ago.
Besides the big one week General Meetings held every two years, there are shorter regional or special meetings in the other years. Last week’s MPS meeting in Stockholm was a special meeting, very well-organized by the Ratio Institute. The theme was discussed from numerous angles, through sessions on Russia’s foreign policy, the economic issue of secular stagnation, or the danger of political Islamism. Two sessions were focused on new classical liberal ideas to counter the threats. At the opening day there was a session for young scholars to present papers. This was of course also a way to attract new talent and interest in the MPS. And at the end of the second day there was something different: beer tasting while listening to Johan Norberg. A rather splendid combination!
The speakers and commentators were high level, including MPS chair Peter Boettke (George Mason), David Schmidtz (Arizona), Deirdre McCloskey (Illinois), John Tomasi (Brown), Leszek Balcerowic (former president of Poland’s Central Bank), Russia specialist Anders Aslund, German thinker Karen Horn, Jacob Levy (McGill), Mark Pennington (Kings College London), Paul Cliteur (Leiden), Amigai Magen (Hoover Institution), and the energetic Ralf Bader (Oxford). A lineup like this guarantees a number of new insights, solid arguments, and general intellectual stimulus. Many answers were provided, yet in true academic fashion, many questions remain.
While well represented in this program, International Relations are normally a minor topic at MPS meetings, and there are not many IR scholars around (nor are sociologists or legal scholars, by the way). Personally I am convinced that the future appeal of classical liberal thought also relies on taking into account world affairs. So there is a need to keep on writing and publishing about it, to expand the basis for thought, also in the MPS. To hear about the concerns and insights of other classical liberals in other disciplines helps my thought process, besides remaining up to speed with current classical liberal issues in general.
So it was a great meeting again, And for all you young scholars out there: if you are interested make sure to regularly check the MPS website (www.montpelerin.org) to see if there are opportunities to participate in one of the upcoming meetings.