Liberalise High Street planning, yes - but why not actually liberalise it?

A plan here to liberalise High Street planning:

The government is working on a shake-up of planning laws to help to revive struggling high streets.

James Brokenshire, the communities secretary, is working on draft legislation, seen by The Times, that will scrap the need for landlords and retailers to seek consent to change the use of empty or poorly performing shops, bank branches or estate agents to other services, such as cafés and hairdressers.

We don’t need as much retail space as we did, the internet is taking care of that. To the tune of near 20% of consumer spending, explaining why near 20% of retail space is empty. So, yes, good idea:

In town centres, planning rules mean that properties designated “A1” can be used for shops and retail outlets; “A2” properties are for financial and professional services, such as bank branches and estate agents; and “A3” properties can be used as restaurants and cafés.

Changing the use requires planning permission, which can take months, so Mr Brokenshire is planning to introduce a “high street use class” that would incorporate those under A1, A2 and the café element of A3, so that no planning permission would be needed for any changes.

OK. But we are reminded of what happened with the abortion law change. This isn’t a point about abortion, rather about how law changes. The time limit was 28 weeks, this was lowered to 24 weeks. A tightening of the abortion law? Not so fast - at the same time abortion for deformity was no longer limited by the 24 week restriction, nor even the old 28 week one. Is that a tightening of the law or a loosening?

Which brings us to this:

A list of “unacceptable” uses would be drawn up, including betting and pay-day loan shops, amusement arcades, shisha bars, tattoo parlours and casinos. Planning permission would still be needed to change use to and from restaurants, bars and hot food takeaways.

They’re not loosening the law, are they? They’re tightening it. Before, space could be filled by what gained an audience at the cost of some paperwork. Now space can only be filled by those approved of - with less paperwork.

At which point, why not actually loosen the planning laws which rule our High Streets? Simply state that if a business is legal in itself then it may operate out of any building? Yes, obviously, necessary to insist that a restaurant have taps and water supply, everyone has a fire exit and so on. But this insistence that the rulers know which sort of shop should go where is just the planning delusion. Of the same type even if at a lower level of idiocy as that which made the Soviet Union such a consumer paradise.

The people who know what sort of shop they want are consumers, they show this by their patronage. Those who chase that, the shop providers, the retailers. We’ve a method we can use to try and match that desire with supply, a sorting mechanism to search for the optimal solution - the market. Why not just get out of the way and allow the most efficient method yet devised, that market, to get on with it?

General Motors’ bankruptcy heralded change

On June 1st, 2009, America’s largest vehicle-manufacturer, General Motors, filed for bankruptcy. The US Treasury then invested $49.5bn in the company through its Troubled Assets Relief Program, and recovered $39bn of that when it sold its shares in 2013 - a loss of $10.3bn.

The bankruptcy of such a major player in the US and, indeed, the world economy was a portent of changing times. The heyday of General Motors was the era of the big gas-guzzlers, but the oil shock of the early 1970s led to a drive for fuel efficiency, only achieved then through small cars. The Japanese seemed to make better ones, and theirs were reliable, unlike the GM ones.

Most major manufacturers have suffered quality problems and recalls, and GM has been no exception. In 2014 it was fined the maximum $35m for knowingly continuing with faulty ignition switches linked to 124 deaths. The recall cost it $1.5bn, and it now faces lawsuits over the issue that could cost it $10bn.

Concerns over the pollution emitted by petrol and diesel cars is speeding a trend to electric vehicles that GM has followed somewhat half-heartedly. The EV1 it launched in 1996 was available only for lease, not purchase, and three years later it stopped renewing the leases and destroyed the returned vehicles. Both its Volt plug-in hybrid, and its Spark EV were only released in selected areas, and were criticized for their poor range.

I joined the trend to electric vehicles four-and-a-half years ago by acquiring a Tesla. I have found it reliable, fast, clean and quiet, and it is the safest car ever tested. The other trend in America is that young people are driving less. Only a quarter of 16-year-olds are qualified drivers, compared with nearly half just a generation ago. More young people are choosing to live in city centres rather than suburbs; this makes car ownership more awkward and less necessary.

The spread of gig economy transport by firms such as Uber and Lyft contributes to making personal ownership less necessary, as does the prevalence of urban electric scooters. And two developments coming along are likely to accelerate it further. One is the advent of driverless taxis, and the other is the emergence of pilotless people-carrying drones. All of this contributes to a changing world of personal transport, one in which big, slow corporations will find it more difficult to adapt to than smaller, fast-moving upstarts which enter the field. This is Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” in action. It is how neoliberal capitalism renews itself by allowing the new to edge aside the old.

Instead of trying to protect the established industries with regulations designed to thwart and deter newcomers, and to hold on to the status quo, the strategy should be the reverse: to make it easier for the innovators to enter existing markets or to generate new ones. This can converge on offering more consumer satisfaction and on offering more consumer choices. And it can do so more rapidly.

Now they're designing a tax system to cure a problem that doesn't exist

One of the criticisms of the banking system post-crash was that it was too homogenous. So many people - males mostly - all from the same sorts of backgrounds, believing the same sorts of things led to significant groupthink and thus an inability to recognise reality outside the window.

Harriet Harman’s famous statement that if it had been Lehman Sisters then all would have been different. She’s got a point too even if not the one she thinks. All female organisations are, as with women generally, less risk loving than male and men. But mixed gender organisations and groupings are more risk loving than either single sex one.

But Robert Shiller’s share of the Nobel, the story of Galton’s Ox, that Wisdom of the Crowds - all underlying the same point, that everyone’s views must be taken into account, not just the ingroup. For such ingroups are all too prone to that groupthink and thus error, that not looking out the window at reality.

At which point we get the Chief Medical Officer trying to design a tax system to reduce childhood obesity:

The Chief medical officer is considering a tax on all unhealthy foods in a bid to reduce the levels of childhood obesity and persuade parents to buy fresh fruit and vegetables.

A review by Prof Dame Sally Davies will examine these ideas as well as further measures in order to halve the levels of childhood obesity by 2030 after more than 20,000 of primary school children were classed as obsese when they left primary school last year.

One problem with this being that there simply isn’t an epidemic of childhood obesity that needs to be reduced.

And yet, one in ten kids are classified as obese when they start primary school and one in five are 'obese' by the time they start secondary school. According to the latest figures, 23 per cent of 11-15 year olds are obese. And that’s before we add those who are merely overweight.

These are shocking statistics and we are reminded about them at every opportunity. Organisations like Public Health England repeat the claim that ‘more than a third of children [are] leaving primary school overweight or obese’ like a mantra whenever they have a new anti-obesity wheeze to push. So where are they all?

You can’t see them because most of them do not exist. They are a statistical invention. The childhood obesity figures in Britain are simply not worth the paper they are printed on. The childhood obesity rate is much lower than 23 per cent.

The public health authorities are in the grip of that groupthink. They’re simply not looking out the window at reality. Which is why the’re trying to cook up a taxation system to solve a problem that simply doesn’t exist.

Francis Bacon imprisoned

On May 31st, 1621, Sir Francis Bacon was imprisoned in the Tower of London, some say for one night, some for a few. His enemy, Sir Edward Coke, had instigated proceedings for taking bribes. It was common practice in those days, and was not regarded as corrupt if it didn’t influence judgement. Sir Francis had even given verdicts against some who paid him, but Sir Edward was determined to punish one of King James’ favourites. His fine was £40,000, which was remitted by the king, and he was released.

None of this has diminished his reputation as a strikingly original thinker. He was a philosopher and statesman, who managed to combine his scholarly publications with a political career that included his becoming the first Queen's Counsel designate when Queen Elizabeth appointed him her legal counsel. He went on to become Solicitor General, Attorney General, and Lord Chancellor of England. He was elevated to the peerage as Viscount St Alban.

The skeptical methodology developed through his writings makes Bacon “the father of the scientific method,” and his works remained influential through the ongoing scientific revolution. His book, Novum Organum, set out the basis of scientific method as a process of observation and induction. Long after his death in 1626, Bacon was commonly invoked during the Restoration as a guiding spirit of the Royal Society, founded under Charles II in 1660.

Bacon pioneered the Renaissance trend of turning away from the reasoning of the Scholastics and the writings of Aristotle, and into open-minded observation, and speculation based upon it, about the nature of the universe and observed reality. He said, “If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.”

Many of his other sayings still remain pertinent. He recognized the power of questioning, saying that “A prudent question is one half of wisdom.” More famously, he remarked that “Knowledge is power.”

His enquiring mind proved to be his undoing, for while investigating if snow could keep a chicken fresh by freezing it, he contracted pneumonia, and died of it a few days later at the age of 65. Amongst innumerable other honours, he was featured on a 1910 Newfoundland postage stamp in recognition of the major role he played in the establishment of the first colony there.

It is important to remember Bacon when people come forward with glib theories about how society should be organized and how people should live. His skeptical approach and insistence on actual observation could have saved the world from many follies had people heeded it, and could save us from many more in future.

Encryption ghosting - the spies suggest breaching civil liberties for a solution that doesn't work anyway

That there are times when civil liberties take a back seat to other issues more pressing is obviously true. Sad, but true. In time of war, however distressing this might be, we don’t have a jury trial before shooting at the enemy soldier. Nor do we do so in some time of civil mayhem, the Riot Act exists for a reason and so on.

However, before we permit the erosion of those rights we do want to know that the solution is both necessary and also works. It’s that second that GCHQ’s latest idea fails. The thought is that we can all still use end to end encryption. But that such a system must create a “ghost” message. GCHQ must be cc’d with a copy of what we’re saying to each other. So that they can, if they wish, then try to break that encryption.

Obviously, of course, they’d only do so when pursuing really bad guys. Oh yes. As to why this rather than a back door which simply allowed them to decrypt such a backdoor is exploitable by every bad guy out there so that’s not a good solution.

And yet, quite clearly, this won’t work. The code - source code - for end to end encryption is easily available, undoubtedly there are versions on GitHub and the like. Therefore, what will happen? The commercial forms of such messaging systems would - if such a law were passed - contain such ghosting. Our civil liberties would have been reduced. But to no good end. For what are the bad guys we’re trying to catch going to do? Go get the source code and create their own end to end encryption networks which don’t contain the ghosting.

There’s really no point to such a diminution of our freedoms if it simply won’t solve the problem to hand, is there?

Voltaire, champion of freedom

François-Marie Arouet, known to history as Voltaire, died on May 30th, 1778. He was a major figure in the Enlightenment, a writer, historian and philosopher, renowned for his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the separation of church and state.

He authored more than 2,000 books, essays and pamphlets, in addition to over 20,000 letters. He was versatile, writing novels, plays and poems, in addition to scientific papers and historical studies. He bravely advocated civil liberties in an age of aristocratic dominance and arbitrary control of the law. He fought against the censorship laws of France by publishing satires attacking the intolerance of Church dogma, and the repression of French institutions.

When a young French nobleman belittled his lack of breeding, Voltaire insulted him back, and was arrested and imprisoned in the Bastille without any due process. His suggested alternative punishment of exile to England was accepted, and proved to be the making of him. He admired Britain’s constitutional monarchy and its greater respect for liberty and free speech.

Most of all Voltaire is famous for his relentless attacks on aristocratic and Church power in France, who oppressed the bourgeoisie and commoners on whom the bulk of the tax burden fell. His most famous satirical work, Candide, has its eponymous hero ploughing through every conceivable disaster, only to have Prof. Pangloss (Leibniz) reassuring us that everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. The novel ridicules religion, theologians, governments, armies, philosophies, and philosophers.

Like many famous figures from Sherlock Holmes to Rick of Casablanca, Voltaire never actually said the line he is famous for: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." This was written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall to sum up Voltaire’s attitude, which it does succinctly.

Between 1727 and 1728 he lodged at Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, where a plaque now commemorates his residence there. He was a great fan of coffee, reportedly drinking 50-72 cups a day, which might explain his prolific creative output.

His advocacy of freedom of thought and speech eventually won through, and these principles are widely recognized in Britain and America, except in their universities. Developed and civilized countries acknowledge freedom of religion and religious expression, but significant parts of the world still imprison and execute people for heresy. In modern times the head of Iran called for a Western writer to be murdered, and in France the writers of a satirical magazine were murdered by religious zealots who took exception to what they had published.

Voltaire reminds us that there are states and religions that still oppress and seek to bind into conformity any attempt at free and independent thinking. His spirit lives on, reminding us to oppose such barbarism and not to surrender to its use of violence to silence us.

Empire tax avoidance - if true, how wonderful

The Tax Justice Network is shouting about how those remnants of empire, the territories and dependencies, drive corporate tax avoidance. Let us assume that TJN are correct in this claim - isn’t that a lovely and wondrous thing?

The UK and its “corporate tax haven network” is by far the world’s greatest enabler of corporate tax avoidance, research has claimed.

British territories and dependencies made up four of the 10 places that have done the most to “proliferate corporate tax avoidance” on the corporate tax haven index.

Corporate tax avoidance being a good thing, therefore this is a good thing, enabling it.

Alex Cobham, the Tax Justice Network chief executive, said a handful of the richest countries had waged a world tax war “so corrosive it had broken the global corporate tax system beyond repair”.

Truly excellent then.

This is not because we believe the plutocrats should never be taxed - we’re right with Adam Smith himself in more than in proportion of the tax burden. Rather, it’s just that we’ve read a little further in the economic textbooks and know that corporate taxation is a bad system of taxation. We shouldn’t be trying to tax economic activity at the level of the firm at all.

Given that the entire economy is indeed incomes to someone we can and should tax that economic activity when it turns up as an income to someone. Simples - and yes, the standard research does indeed tell us that this is economically efficient in a manner that corporate taxation is not. That we’ve a legal and regulatory system in which competition leads to this desirable outcome, the collapse of the inefficient current system? Well, that’s good, isn’t it.

Einstein, and the importance of testing

On May 29th, 1919, exactly 100 years ago, an historic experiment took place. Einstein had published his General Theory of Relativity in 1915, and an opportunity arose during the solar eclipse of May 29th in 1919 to test his hypothesis. If light were indeed bent by gravity, then a couple of stars in the constellation of Taurus would be visible during the eclipse, not in the position that Newtonian physics suggested, but displaced by gravity. Two expeditions set out to test this, one by Dyson and Eddington to Principe island, the other by Crommelin and Davidson to Brazil. Both found the stars were indeed observed where Einstein’s theory predicted.

The young Karl Popper, aged 17 at the time, was powerfully influenced by this. His Vienna was abuzz with the radical ideas of Marx, Adler and Einstein. Adler had introduced the notion of inferiority complexes in childhood. Popper came across a case that didn’t seem to fit, and took it to Adler. He reported that Adler had no difficulty in explaining it in terms of his theory, even though he knew nothing about the person in question.

“How can you be so sure?” he asked Adler. The great man replied, “I know it from my thousand-fold experience.” To which young Popper replied, “And now I suppose it’s a thousand and one,” suddenly realizing that if all cases could be fitted into the theory, none could ever test it. It was the same with Marx’s theories - they could explain everything that happened, no matter what outcome prevailed. Einstein was different. His theory lived dangerously. If the two stars had not appeared in their predicted positions, his theory would have had to be discarded. Popper realized then that theories had to be capable of being tested, and rejected if observations went against them.

It was an insight that led to his “Logic of Scientific Discovery,” rejecting induction in favour of what he called “conjecture and refutation,” meaning that creative proposals had to be tested against the world of our observation. It lies at the core of neoliberalism. Marxism and socialism interpret the world, but neoliberalism seeks to change it by applying techniques that work in practice. Its record has far surpassed that of its rivals. It has created the wealth that has lifted men and women out of degrading subsistence toil and given them opportunities for advancement undreamed of by previous generations. It has lowered death rates, increased lifespan, conquered diseases, and generally improved the condition of humankind.

The importance is testing. If observed reality goes against a practice, it has to be modified or rejected. Socialism, by contrast, rejects the evidence if observation shows that it fails to achieve its objectives. If it does not bring the promised equality and prosperity, its advocates claim that “it wasn’t really socialism.” Thus socialism can never be disproved, and cannot, therefore, contain any insights of value about the real world, the one that we live in.

On that day 100 years ago, we learned something important, that theories have to be tested against the observed world. Depending on how they perform, they have to be modified or rejected, and only the useful ones are retained. This is why neoliberalism has improved the world, and why socialism has not.

The problem with communal ownership - community flowers in Brixton

That private property is theft is a mantra well known to us all. That there has to be a management system for property is even more obvious. That private property, even if we accept the first contention, is the best solution to the requirement is something all too many don’t wish to acknowledge. Yet it is true, as this about community flowers in Brixton tells us:

A flower row has erupted on the streets of Brixton after a community grower accused their neighbours of stealing blooms planted by a community group.

The problem? There’s no enforcement of property rights going on.

The original note poster responded, explaining that the lupins and geraniums were planted as part of a local scheme called Our Streets, in which members of the local community in south London "adopt" a tree to water and plant flowers under.

They added that the flowers have now been dug up and "moved elsewhere".

The neighbour who first replied seemed intent on having the last word, and penned: "Helpful to know that the flowers were part of a community project. However, if that was the case, it was very misleading to refer to them as 'my' flowers.

One amusement is that this is being done with Post-It notes rather than on Twitter. However, the underlying problem is a common one. For we’re in Tragedy of the Commons territory here.

There has to be some management system. Can be private ownership, a capitalist solution. Can be regulatory, a socialist one. As Hardin pointed out, which will work best depends upon the specifics of the item and situation. Elinor Ostrom took us further in our understanding, community self-regulation can indeed work. But the emphasis there is upon “can”.

Ostrom started from the sensible observation that there are commons which do survive without regulatory or private solutions. So, how do they work then? The obvious corollary to which is that those that don’t so work have already disappeared. Thus we cannot take Ostrom’s work as an insistence that community self-regulation will always work - only that sometimes it does.

As, sometimes it doesn’t. Ostrom’s own finding being that when we start to talk of groups bigger than a few thousand, perhaps 3,000 people at the top end, then the community bonds aren’t going to be strong enough for them to be binding on behaviour. The ability to free ride without significant cost from that community will be too great.

How many walk the garden streets of Brixton? There is our problem, isn’t it?

We’re entirely pragmatists around here. We’ve no great ideological attachment to specific forms of property management. We agree that at times the regulatory, governmental, solution is the one that’s going to work. So also that the vast majority of the time it’s going to be private ownership. Which is dependent upon the details. We even agree that this communal and undefined system will indeed work. But, from observation, only in a community small enough for it to do so. Which isn’t, sadly for the romantics about human nature, a useful description of most communities in the modern world.

Who was wearing the trousers

On May 28th, 1923, the US Attorney General declared that it was legal for women to wear trousers anywhere. This was by no means the end of the matter, though it was a significant landmark. The prohibition of trousers for women was enforced in most European countries and US states not only by social custom, but by laws that punished transgressors.

Several women defied this ban, not only for freedom of movement, but for disguise, especially for runaway slave women, and in some cases to earn much more than women could earn. Several prominent women activists were arrested and sentenced for wearing clothing that was deemed appropriate only for men. Amelia Bloomer popularized the loose-fitting garment that bears her name, and bloomers caught on as women took up cycling, tennis and horse-riding. Demure ladies might ride horseback side-saddle in skirts, but most found riding-breeches more practical.

Two world wars that saw women doing men’s jobs while men were away in combat helped speed along more relaxed attitudes to modes of dress, and female pilots often preferred trousers. Many states still passed and enforced laws against cross dressing in the 20th Century, however, despite the 1923 declaration by the Attorney General. Female senators were banned from wearing trousers on the senate floor until 1993, and it was only in 2013 that a Paris by-law that required women to seek city permission before wearing trousers was revoked - it had previously allowed them only for cycling or horse-riding.

Remaining restrictions in modern developed countries are now more or less confined to institutions imposing rules, rather than legal bans. Some schools insist on a “skirts only” code for girls, and some businesses such as airlines have required them for female flight attendants. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police dropped its opposition in 2012, British Airways did so in 2016, and Virgin Atlantic began permitting trousers for its female staff earlier this year.

Some religious orders ban women from wearing men’s clothing or otherwise dressing “immodestly.” It was long banned by Christian churches, which quoted Deuteronomy 22:5 saying, “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God.”  And by coincidence it was on May 28th, 1431, that Joan of Arc was charged with “relapsing into heresy” by donning male clothing (i.e. military attire) again. She was convicted and burned at the stake.

Trousers on women have been symbolic of the slow transition from ancient to modern, from patriarchy to a more gender-equal society. The march into liberty took longer for women than it did for men, but the changes in social attitudes that permitted greater choice about deportment and lifestyle have been a liberating influence for both.