BUT FIRST...
The government has introduced a new ’three tier’ anti-virus system. The tiers are: Don’t go out, Don’t enjoy stuff, and Don’t think. This will all end in tiers (that’s enough of that—Ed). At this rate we’re going to need Nightingale Hospitals not for the virus but for depression. And ‘extremely vulnerable people’ are being urged to shield. (I’m not sure what from, since most of the rest of us are being locked down anyway. Personally, I’m extremely vulnerable to socialism, but there is not much chance of escaping that infection in these times.) If only we had a two-week ‘circuit break’ from politicians.
Funny how Covid makes you act out of character (as the SNP’s Margaret Ferrier MP said when trying to excuse her own travels after testing positive). On 7 September, for instance, the usually dynamic transport secretary Grant Shapps told MPs he was ‘working night and day’ to bring in airport testing. On 7 October, he announced the results of his labours: a ‘Global Travel Taskforce’ that would report on 7 November! (Which no doubt will conclude it’s all too difficult to do before 7 April! Maybe he should get Michael Green onto the job instead—Ed.)
When I heard that farmers have been slimming down their turkeys so that they are the right size for a Christmas dinner of 6 people max, I had a strange vision of turkeys on treadmills. Still, they might be more efficient at generating electricity than Boris’s floating offshore wind farms. Meanwhile, the lockdown lack of useful things to do has led to an upsurge of giant vegetables at this year’s championships. I’m not sure what the point of a 22kg cabbage or an 8.5-metre-long beetroot is, but I suppose it keeps people out of the pubs.
Licensed premises in various places, including most of inhabited Scotland, have been forcibly closed, of course, on the basis of, er, no evidence whatsoever. Think about it: the biggest outbreak sources are (state-run) colleges, schools, hospitals, care homes etc., so we’re going to close the (private) hospitality sector. Yet infections are a third of what the boffins showed on the ‘Apocalypse’ slide that frightened everyone into this second lockdown. If you ask me, it’s not just Margaret Ferrier who’s gone mushy in the noodle.
But I digress, and if I reflect on these things any more I’ll be needing a Nightingale Depression Hospital myself...
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No lockdown for us, we have produced more research, reports, articles, blogs and suchlike than ever before. That’s because it’s needed more than ever. And because we are just so darn brilliant.
Streamlining the Quango State: Personally I’d strangle it, but let’s go with streamlining for now. Government is covered in quangos, like barnacles on a ship, says ASI Senior Fellow Tim Ambler. Some are part of the executive, but oddly ‘independent’ of it. They can’t have it both ways. Their performance should be measured against set targets (You mean they’re not? No surprise, I guess.—Ed.) And they need to be accountable. If regulators, for instance, are supposed to be independent of ministers, they should answer to Parliament; tribunals should be part of the judiciary. Proper controls, says Ambler, would not only improve our democracy but would slim the bureaucracy and save £3bn a year.
State of the Unions: The students are revolting in every possible definition. But the most rotten part of student life is the preening poncing political types that pretend to speak on behalf of all the others. Fortunately students Lucky Dube and Max Young have gone through the numbers (student unions cost taxpayers and students £165 million per annum) and highlighted just how much of a waste of time and money the student unions are, and just how few students actually engage with them. They set out a number of reforms to get the unions back to their core purpose of serving students’ needs.
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Our webinars feature real experts challenging orthodox thinking on key issues. They get thousands of viewers and win praise from politicians (and normal people) around the world. To see them in real time, just reply to this email and I’ll send you invites. You can also see the recent ones on YouTube.
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Stopping Britain’s Drug Deaths: Our vice expert Daniel Pryor (Wish I had that job—Ed.) hears why harm reduction should be at the centre of drugs policy—not harsher penalties or forlorn attempts to stifle drug dealing. Arda Ozcubukcu of Neurosight, Paul North of Volteface and Steve Rolles of Transform Drug Policy Foundation explain why people take illegal drugs and how we can reduce the harm that drugs do.
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Lands of the Free Trade: Professor Marc Busch of Georgetown University gives our Matt Kilcoyne some frank expert opinions on the realities of Biden, Brexit and British-American trade.
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The Future of Cities: Cities are the engine of modern economics. They are where we socialise, entertain ourselves, and find the most productive workers. At least they were… Have the changes we’ve made because of virus lockdowns become permanent? Are people going to move to other places? Or will things gradually revert to normal? Our experts Roy Sutherland of Ogilvy, Michael Hendrix of the Manhattan Institute, and Vera Kichanova of Zaha Hadid Architects review the issues with the ASI's Matthew Lesh.
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It’s the Supply, Stupid: How do we fix the housing crisis? Home ownership down, rents up, planning reforms that never get anywhere. The politicians’ answer? Subsidise buyers. Er, no, John Macdonald hears from Vera Kichanova of Zaha Hadid Architects, Sam Bowman of the International Center for Law and Economics and John Myers of London YIMBY. It’s the supply we have to liberate.
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In another ASI policy win, our decades-long call for freeports - dating back to my 1986 report, The Freeport Experiment - has been taken up by Chancellor Rishi Sunak, as reported in CityAM. I am quoted in the write-up praising the proposals, but noting how important it is that the process to become a freeport is free, transparent, and as fair as possible.
Daniel Pryor explains on CapX why drug deaths are the tragic result of a completely outdated approach to drug policy, and with a more holistic harm reduction-based approach, instead of a punitive approach, the UK could see a reduction in drug-use related deaths, as in Portugal.
Matthew Lesh hits back against calls for new regulation on American big tech firms like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple in The Telegraph. He points out how the proposals would be disastrous for consumers since there’s no identifiable consumer harm as there is.
Matt K’s letter to the editor appeared in The Times, reminding us all that the public sector will bear the brunt of the covid recession while the public sector workers benefit from wage increases and job security. But he gives a word to the wise - the public sector is only as strong as the private sector that funds it.
Madsen writes for CapX following Greta Thurnburg’s non-win of the Nobel Peace Prize. This is a good thing, he says, since all she’s really done has been to sow fear and discord, eschewing any real conversation around reasonable environmental solutions.
Our call for residency rights for Hong Kongers reappeared in the Scotsman this month, with renewed support for the idea from Roddy Gow, founder of the Asia Scotland Institute. In addition, our approach to building homes in underutilized London “green”belt land appeared in a Spiked article covering Boris’ ‘build build build’ strategy.
Matthew Lesh is back in The Telegraph lambasting Boris’s new approach to wind power claiming ‘old Boris was right: wind power is expensive, statist, and won’t deliver the reliable energy we need’. Unfortunately, it appears that Boris has been captured by well paid and well connected lobbyists (Government captured by lobbyists? What else is new?—Ed.)
Senior Fellow Tim Ambler appeared in ConservativeHome to tell us all how to replace the quangos which hold back and clog up the state. He appears off the back of his recent ASI report, Streamlining the Quango State.
Matt K appeared in CapX to respond to Pope Francis’ denunciation of the free market. Matt respectfully pointed out that it is the free market that has allowed us to fulfil the Catholic values of providing for the poor, sick and destitute.
ASI alum and current Spectator Economics Correspondent Kate Andrews calls for the Chancellor to Scrap the Factory Tax in her Spectator Life analysis of how Rishi can get the economy moving again. We estimate that allowing businesses to immediately write off capital expenditures would increase investment and free up resources needed for growth.
And finally, it’s that time of the year again. I’ve written for The Telegraph on my annual bug-bear: Daylight Savings Time. Surveys show that two-thirds of us support keeping summer time all year round, giving us more daylight in the evenings. When facing another lockdown, an extra hour of daylight in the evenings could make all the difference as we trudge through winter.
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On our mega-blog
Is Berlin going Soviet again? Dr Rainer Zitelmann thinks the party that ran old East Germany is flexing to end free assembly (including anti-government protests) in the capital. And free markets too, forcing property owners to cut rents (and we know where that leads—rents are cheap but there’s nowhere to rent). Even their party slogans have a chillingly totalitarian tone.
Auctions are awesome, says Matt Lesh, congratulating Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson on their Nobel Prize in Economics. Wilson developed a bidding model to maximise competition. He and Wilson created new kinds of multi-stage auctions that helped US and UK governments to maximise returns from selling radio spectrum. And their work has informed us as we call for work visas to be auctioned after Brexit—ensuring that the UK economy gets the highest value out of immigration.
Santa Claus is managing the NHS, says Tim Ambler, author of Streamlining the Quango State. The NHS should be either part of government or an independent corporation like the BBC—but it’s actually a quango that ministers interfere with but don’t actually control. Politicians won’t give it up because they like playing Santa Claus, so they can use it to promise a few hundred million here, a few hundred million there, more flu vaccines, more mental health provision, more maternity provision, you name it. But after months of state failures, perhaps it’s time to get real.
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Seen Elsewhere
The Museum of Communist Terror has identified ten watchable, commercial films that cast interesting lights on what really happened (happens) under communism.
Matt Ridley identifies what the pandemic has taught us about science. Specifically, that science is great, but scientists can be led astray by bias, overconfidence and politics. "Science is much better at telling you about the past and the present than the future,” he says. Scientists too often gather flawed data, or partial data, and data that supports their own view. And sometimes, we need to take heretics seriously—that is how most scientific advances have occurred.
Vermont is set to become the 11th U.S. state to legalise cannabis after Republican Governor Phil Scott allowed the associated bill to take effect. Meanwhile in the UK, our police are hard at work keeping the public safe and spending their limited time effectively. If Vermont legislators are looking for tips on how to manage their newly legal market, perhaps they should take a ‘leaf’ out of our book...
Australia has abolished their hated Factory Tax. Time for us to do the same!
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As I reflect on governments’ ‘emergency’ restrictions on our lives, I recall:
"‘Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded."
—F.A.Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 2.
And for my American friends:
"The Constitution was adopted in a period of grave emergency. Its grants of power to the federal government … were determined in the light of emergency, and they are not altered by emergency.”
--Charles Evans Hughes (1862-1948), Chief Justice, U.S. Supreme Court, Home Building & Loan Assn v. Blairsdell, 1934.
Bye,
e
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