Clearly, we should all be buying Huawei and writing a thank you note

If other people make things cheaper for us then what is it we should do? The correct response being to then enjoy that greater wealth that those others have enabled us to have. It’s not actually necessary to write a note to Santa as well but perhaps politesse would indicate we should:

The Chinese telecoms company whose role in the construction of Britain’s 5G network has been questioned amid growing security fears has received as much as £57 billion of state aid from Beijing, helping it to expand and undercut its rivals, it is alleged.

A review by The Wall Street Journal of grants, credit facilities, tax breaks and other state assistance shows for the first time the extent to which Huawei has been helped — allegedly enabling it to offer generous financing terms and charge 30 per cent less for network equipment than competitors.

Assume that all of this is true and isn’t just competitors trying to justify their own higher prices - what should our reaction be?

Well, as a result of the Chinese taxpayer being rooked by the Chinese government’s pandering to special interests we can have a 5G telephone network cheaper. Or, presumably, for the same price as we would pay elsewhere we can have more 5G telephone network. Either way we are richer as a result of those taxes paid in China.

The correct response then, to this claim of subsidy of Huawei is to buy Huawei for we’re made richer by doing so. This is true of any such foreign subsidy to a producer as well. The appropriate reaction to such unfair competition is to say thank you, please may I have some more?

That is, foreign subsidy is the same as an advance in production technology, or our useful reaction to trade itself. If, for whatever reason, other people are making us richer then we should enjoy that greater wealth. After all, that is the very thing we’re trying to do, get richer.

Certainly, the Chinese taxpayer has reason to complain but why wouldn’t we appreciate network equipment that is 30% cheaper, wherever the £57 billion to produce it has come from?

Some will complain that this all makes China richer somehow but that can’t be true. It’s a straight transfer of £57 billion from them to us, from China’s state revenues - thus the Chinese populace - to us consumers. Our only difficulty here is to work out where to send that thank you letter. D’ye think they’d let us post it up on the Tiananmen Gate?

The Gulag Archipelago

On December 28th, 1973, was first published one of the most powerful and influential books of the 20th Century. "The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was an account of life in the Soviet forced labour camps, in which Solzhenitsyn himself had been incarcerated. The term GULAG is an acronym for the Russian initials of the Main Directorate of Camps. The camps were like an archipelago of islands, scattered in the vast ocean of Soviet territory, many in the harsh climate of the Siberian wilderness.

Solzhenitsyn's book narrates the history of the forced labour camps from when they were first introduced by Lenin in 1918. He traces through the various purges and show trials that swelled the number of inmates into the millions. Some of it is from his own personal recollections and the interviews he had with other prisoners, many of whom come alive again as they tell their stories in Solzhenitsyn's words. It includes extracts from diaries, personal statements and legal documents, as the picture is built up through independent brush strokes like an Impressionist painting.

It is a devastating story of brutality suffering and injustice, painting a picture of Soviet Communism that taints its memory forever. In one of his anecdotes, Solzhenitsyn tells of the businessman imprisoned because he sat down too early after a 20-minute frenzied standing ovation at the name of Stalin. He tells of a talented young poet who died in a Gulag prison camp, and he writes from memory some of the lines that would never otherwise have seen the light of day.

The story is more moving because it is told simply and factually, an unembroidered account of the monstrous inhumanity the system embodied. Western leftists and Khrushchev himself regarded it as a deviation from communism, but Solzhenitsyn saw it for what it was, an inevitable and systemic outgrowth of the Soviet political programme and culture.

Solzhenitsyn had to write it in secret, hiding manuscripts and typescripts in secret places and with friends. The KGB forced one of his trusted typists to reveal under interrogation the whereabouts of one of the copies, and she hanged herself a few days after they released her. This persuaded him to have it published in the West, instead of in Russia as he had wanted. It was first published in France (in Russian) and circulated clandestinely in Russia.

It was an immediate international sensation. Isaiah Berlin said that until that book, "the Communists and their allies had persuaded their followers that denunciations of the regime were largely bourgeois propaganda." Tom Butler-Bowdon described it as "Solzhenitsyn's monument to the millions tortured and murdered in Soviet Russia between the Bolshevik Revolution and the 1950s." It was the most powerful indictment of a regime ever made. People had known vaguely about Siberian prison camps, but never before had the general reading public been brought face to face with the horrors of the Gulag in such a way.

Early in 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported to West Germany. He went via a spell in Switzerland to the United States, where he stayed until the evil empire collapsed, and his citizenship was restored. He returned to Russia, where he died, knowing that he had written what some described as "the book that brought down a system." Those who suffered and who died under that inhuman system live on in the pages of Solzhenitsyn's great book, confronting those who profess communism today not with what it said, but with what it did.

Just what does anyone expect to happen?

The Guardian tells us of the perils of capitalist health care:

'How many more people have to die?': what a closed rural hospital tells us about US healthcare

With the vicious callousness of the capitalist counting his money the hospital was closed, necessitating travel to gain health care.

Dunklin county already has one of the highest post neonatal mortality rates in Missouri. Dr Andrew Beach, one of the few paediatricians left in Kennett, said the entire region of about 70,000 people is now without a full-time obstetrician.

Hmm, well, that “entire region” there is doing a lot of work. For what is actually being faced here is a basic problem of population density. Dunklin County’s population has been falling for near on a century now. It’s definitely smaller than it was in 1950 and the decline doesn’t show any signs of stopping. The county, as opposed to the region, population is now below 30,000.

So what does happen when a population shrinks? The infrastructure supporting it does too. Certain things operate at certain appropriate scales. Hospitals among them.

Take, for example, our own dear NHS, that most definitely not capitalist health care system. Efficient hospital size is taken to be some 200,000 to 300,000 people in the catchment area. Which is why all those small rural hospitals have been closing ever since 1948.

The actual lesson we get from a proper examination of the numbers being that the capitalist lust for profits retained that rural hospital rather longer than the rational planning of socialism would have done.

But then telling the true story wouldn’t have suited The Guardian, would it?

When Spain became a democracy post-Franco

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) was a cause célèbre for left-wingers in the West. Some, like Orwell, fought with the International Brigade for the Republican side, fighting against the Nationalist armies led by General Francisco Franco. After the Francoist victory in 1939, Franco ruled as a dictator until his death in 1975. He kept Spain neutral in World War II, despite expectations that he would join the fascist powers, Germany and Italy.

In 1969, Franco designated Prince Juan Carlos, the grandson of Spain's last king, as his chosen successor, skipping a generation. The plan was to restore Spain's status as a constitutional monarchy when Franco died. It was a delicate balancing act for six years as Juan Carlos prepared to succeed. The civil war was still fresh in many minds, with many on the Left thinking the King was too close to Franco, while Francoists had support within the army. A significant fact was that Spain's rising prosperity in the 1960s had seen the emergence of an educated urban class that was ready for change, but wanted it to be peaceful.

When Franco died in 1975, Juan Carlos set in motion procedures to restore democracy to Spain, and on December 27th, 1978, he signed the Act that brought the country's new constitution into effect, after it had been approved in a referendum, preparing the ground for elections. The transition was peaceful, with the Left holding back from the demands of its extremists, and the army keeping out of politics.

The King's popularity was enhanced when he was instrumental in foiling an attempted coup by dissident army officers in 1981. Spain had successfully made the transition from a dictatorship to a constitutional democracy, and had done so peaceably. A similar transition was achieved in Portugal and Greece, and later Chile. Three West European countries that were dictatorships in the 1970s became democratic members of the EU.

Spain has faced friction with its ethnic regions, first the Basque country, and then Catalonia, but the likelihood is that any solutions that resolve these frictions will probably be peaceable, settled by compromise and agreement, rather than by military force. Spain is almost evenly divided between left and right, with a series of elections seemingly unable to entrust either side with the authority to enact major changes, but still having them compete at the ballot box instead of on the battlefield as their predecessors did.

It is one of the virtues of constitutional monarchy that it is flexible, able to adapt to changing circumstances and values. Unlike most dictatorships, it incorporates a procedure for peaceful succession. The UK's Queen Elizabeth has overseen a succession of prime ministers, and the transition of her country from head of a post-imperial commonwealth, to membership of the European Union, and now to its coming status as an independent power playing on a global stage, and trading internationally on such terms as it chooses to negotiate.

Queen Victoria is said to have remarked of Spain and Portugal, "I do think constitutions are so unsuitable for these Southern countries." Whether or not this was true then, it is not true now. Constitutions enable disputes to be settled peacefully, and this lay the groundwork for progress.

The horrendous risks of gambling

We are told that gambling poses some massive risk to the health of the nation:

Gambling-related admissions to hospital have reached more than one a day, as the health service grapples with betting addiction across Britain.

There were 379 such admissions to hospital in 2018/19, up 28% on 2015/16, according to NHS Digital figures that include those diagnosed as having a “pathological” gambling addiction.

Heavens to Betsy that’s appalling, Quick, ban it. Regulate! Something at least.

The something being take a deep breath and think.

The Gambling Commission tells us that some 50% or so - we’re using rough numbers here - of the population gamble in any one month. One admission a day means a one in a million chance of problems leading to NHS admission from gambling.

This is not the same as a micromort because we’re talking about NHS admission here, not actual death - and whatever the more lurid tales of the NHS, no, admission does not equate to death.

How much of a risk is a micromort? Walking 17 miles or cycling 10 - both risks by accident. Government also tells us that we all really must, just must, walk and cycle more.

That is, one micromort is not some killer argument that an activity must be banned, controlled or otherwise regulated out of existence. It can’t be if it is positively insisted that we must go out and take such risks.

So our action to prevent that one hospital admission per day from the effects of gambling is - nothing. Despite the manner in which this is being breathlessly flagged up as some horrendous risk to the life and soul of the nation.

Actually, there’s a greater than one in a million chance that someone will die after getting out of bed this morning - we all do live fewer than one million days after all. We do not thereby regulate getting out of bed, nor ban it.

The end of the Soviet Union

December 26th, 1991, was a bright day for mankind. It was on that day, 28 years ago, that the Supreme Soviet officially dissolved the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War. The Soviets had always taken the view that Communism would succeed across the world because of historically inevitability, as outlined by Karl Marx. However, they were quite ready to help history along with as much armed force and brutality as it might take.

It reached the ultimate in armed force with the Brezhnev Doctrine, which declared that any country attempting to move away from Marxism-Leninism would be invaded by Soviet forces to override the will of its peoples. The Soviets did indeed suppress popular uprisings in Poland, East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The problem for the Soviet Union was that Socialism doesn't work, and the peoples of the Soviet satellite states resented their lack of freedom and prosperity compared with the countries of the capitalist West.

The Cold War never resulted in direct armed conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, though there were several 'proxy' wars in the world in which the two sides backed different sides in various conflicts. There were moments of drama in which tanks faced each other yards away at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, or in the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Khrushchev tried to station nuclear missiles in Cuba, minutes away from US soil.

Many commentators seemed to think the Cold War might continue indefinitely. Left-wing academics looked for the ultimate victory of communism, as Khrushchev declared, "History is on our side. We will bury you." Many academics assumed that the outcome would be some kind of draw, with a system emerging that would combine elements of both capitalism and communism. Almost none supposed a total defeat of communism, but it happened.

President Reagan racked up the pressure on the Soviets by a major push to modernize military technology. This came at a time when the Soviet economy was falling further behind, and they found themselves unable to compete. Gorbachev declined to use Soviet troops to bolster up unpopular communist allies in Central and Eastern Europe, and the result was a 1989 wave of popular and usually bloodless revolutions that overthrew the communist regimes.

Even in Russia the Communist Party lost control, and when hardline communists attempted a coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, and saw it thwarted by Boris Yeltsin, the game was up. The 'Commonwealth of Independent States' was created on December 21st, 1991, and the Soviet Union dissolved itself on December 26th.

U.S. President George H. Bush expressed his feelings: "The biggest thing that has happened in the world in my life, in our lives, is this: By the grace of God, America won the Cold War." Indeed it did, and the shadow of nuclear Armageddon receded, as did the threat of a worldwide communist tyranny. Those who affect to support socialism in modern times should look long and hard at what it did, and what it would have done had not free men and women stood their ground against it.

Incentives matter

The first and most basic lesson of economics is that incentives matter. As shown here:

Across race, teen childbearing leads to negative consequences for white teens but no significant negative effects for black or Hispanic and Latino teens.

That this does matter is shown here:

In 2017, the birth rate for Hispanic teens (29 per 1,000) was slightly higher than the rate for non-Hispanic black teens (28 per 1,000), and more than twice the rate for non-Hispanic white teens (13 per 1,000). Rates for other races are reported in the text.

People do more of less costly things, less of more costly. Incentives matter.

This is about something as basic as giving birth - in a world of contraception both pre- and post- actual conception. Leading to the idea that perhaps we should not try to have socioeconomic systems where there are no incentives, or they are ignored.

For prices are indeed prices, people really do react to them.

Understanding Newton's universe

Galileo died in Italy on January, 1642, and on December 25th of that same year, Isaac Newton was born in Lincolnshire, England. He became one of the most influential and distinguished scientists of all time. Remembered for physics, mathematics and astronomy, he also worked on alchemy and theology. He was a bridge between the mediaeval and modern worlds.

Newton's main contribution was to show that the workings of the world could be understood in terms of rational laws, and the same laws that explained the behaviour of objects on Earth also regulated the most distant part of the heavens. Where people had separated existence into two domains, the Earth and the Heavens, Newton showed that they were one.

He wondered why apples separated from trees always moved in the same direction, towards the ground, and postulated that a force might be acting on them. He wondered if that force might apply to all bodies, not only those we see on Earth, but also including the distant ones we see in the heavens. Encouraged by the Astronomer Royal, Sir Edmund Halley, he published his famous "Principia," laying the groundwork of classical mechanics.

Having devised the theory of gravity, he used it to prove mathematically Kepler's empirical laws of planetary motion. He also explained tidal motions, the trajectories of comets and the precession of the equinoxes. The idea that humankind could gain knowledge of a rational and ordered universe laid the basis for the intellectual Enlightenment which followed.

Newton showed that natural laws governed the behaviour of light, using a prism to split white light into it coloured components.  Realizing that telescope lenses would always have colour distortion, Newton invented the reflecting telescope that bears his name, grinding the mirror and the eyepieces himself.

He used his mathematical 'fluxions' - differential and integral calculus (invented independently by Leibniz) to mathematicize other physical sciences, and he set out the systematic basis for a scientific method based on observation and experiment.

He was a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, then a professor there, requiring Royal dispensation to do so without taking Holy Orders. He served two terms as MP for the University, and was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705. He was Master of the Royal Mint, and President of the Royal Society.

Although Einstein's relativity has made Newtonian mechanics into a special case, his laws still dominate the explanations of most of what we observe. Newton encouraged us and enabled us to be bold. Today when we seek explanations of observed phenomena, it is because Newton taught us that we could do so, and also taught us how to do so. The test is not theory, something dreamed up in the mind. The test is observation, and if the observation does not bear out the theory, we change it or discard it. The universe is no longer a mystery to be gazed at in uncomprehending awe. It is something we can grasp and can understand, and something that we can predict. Newton's ideas still live.

Handbags and gladrags

Scientists appear to be able to explain that dancing around handbags and also Saturday Night Fever:

Cha-cha-chimp? Ape study suggests urge to dance is prehuman

Chimpanzees seen clapping, tapping and swaying along to piano rhythms in a music booth

There are certain predelictions among humans that predate there being any humans at all. Much of the modern world being explained by this part of the findings:

Males tended to dance and hoot a lot more than the females. One 39-year-old male, Akira, spent half his time dancing when the piano was playing. Another male, Ayumu, came second in the dance-off, spending about a third of his time jigging about in one way or another. Next was Gon who spent about 10% of his time moving to the sounds.

The females, meanwhile, seemed far less enthusiastic. All danced for less than 10% of the time the music was played. One female, Chloe, had only one move – the “hanging sway”, as the scientists called it – but she apparently preferred not to bother at all.

So, that’s both John Travolta and the collective amble around the pocketbooks observed on dance floors all over the country explained.

This is, however, more important than just an explanation for why we’ve vast barns all over the country in which people can go and indulge in this primordial behaviour. For it is indeed showing that such primordial behaviour does persist. It therefore probably being a good idea to order society in accordance with those base and basic urges, not try to build something for a species that isn’t going to turn up.

Which brings us, of course, to market exchange and that point of Smith’s about the innate urge to truck and barter - this being something that we have also seen in chimpanzees. A non-market society, one which tries to outlaw something so natural, isn’t going to work very well, is it?

At which point a Merry Christmas. For gift giving is voluntary exchange, isn’t it…..

Apollo 8 in lunar orbit

NASA made its bravest move in December 1968. On the very first manned flight of the Saturn V rocket, NASA sent it to the moon. Previous orbital flights had been in low Earth orbit, "like a fly walking on the surface of an apple." Now Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders became the first humans to leave Earth orbit and fly to the Moon. On December 24th, 1968, they entered lunar orbit and became the first humans to orbit another world.

They were also the first humans to see the whole Earth from space, like a blue and white marble, while viewers back on Earth thrilled to the spectacle of their home planet as a small globe in the blackness of space.

The mission was dangerous. They had no lunar module with them, and were totally dependent on the engine of the service module re-starting when required to. They had to burn that engine behind the moon, out of contact with Earth, and it had to burn for 4 minutes and 7 seconds. Too short a burn might have flung them out into space with no hope of return, and too short a burn might have sent them crashing into the moon. The crew said it was the longest four minutes of their lives.

They emerged at exactly the predicted moment, however, in an orbit between 193.3 and 69.5 miles from the lunar surface. Everything they had experienced thus far had been predicted, but something unexpected happened in lunar orbit. They saw the first "Earthrise" as the Earth rose above the lunar horizon, the only coloured object to be seen. This is not generally seen from the lunar surface because the Earth is always in view, but it can be witnessed from lunar orbit.

They made 10 orbits of the moon, and made the famous Christmas Eve live broadcast to Earth with a reading from the Book of Genesis. It was then the most watched TV broadcast ever, seen by an estimated quarter of the world's population either live or delayed. Borman signed off by saying, "And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth."

1968 had been a bad year. The Vietnam war was still raging and saw the Tet offensive. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were both assassinated. There were race riots in the US, student riots in Paris, and a riot that marred the Democrat Convention in Chicago. Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops and tanks invaded Czechoslovakia to crush its bid for freedom.

At the close of the year the flight of Apollo 8 lifted morale. On its return, Frank Borman received a telegram from a stranger that simply said, "Thank you Apollo 8. You saved 1968."

The most apt comment was perhaps the observation that the most interesting thing that humans saw when they ventured out into space was their own planet, the one they had left. They saw how fragile it looked, how beautiful, and how tiny it was, lost in the vastness of space. It gave humanity a sense of perspective that has stayed with many of us to this day. Everything that has happened since the first life-forms crawled out of the primaeval sea happened on that tiny blue and white marble spinning in the emptiness of the universe around it.