My true love sent to me: six geese a-laying. In the song, this seems to refer to the six days of creation.

But talk of geese or turkeys makes me think rather of destruction - the destruction of birds due to bird flu, and indeed cattle due to BSE and foot & mouth. I don’t know how much of these disasters should be put down to the diseases themselves and how much should be put down to government incompetence. When you have officialdom closing down agriculture for months on end and slaughtering tens of thousands of animals; viruses escaping from government research centres; Edwina Currie putting the nation off its eggs; Sir Liam Donaldson scaring us with the prospect of 50,000 human deaths from bird flu, then maybe government is the bigger threat.

That, of course, and the interest groups. These scarces are all very useful material for those who want us to give up eating meat entirely, those who want to protect UK agriculture from foreign imports, and those who are just against the modern international economy and want us to stop flying, stay at home, and live quietly in cabins on our smallholdings. In the scheme of things, AIDS, malaria, filthy water and road accidents are all bigger killers. Why don’t we focus a bit more attention on them?

From Adam Smith Institute

Tags: Libertarian, Politics, Liberty, Freedom

From Power and Plenty:

Another important economic link between Venice and the Ottoman Empire was the sale of high-quality Venetian woolen cloth to the latter. In the course of the 17th c., however, the Dutch and English, yet again, displaced Venice and the other Italian producers in the Levantine markets for these key manufactured goods. Charles Wilson pithily accounts for this by observing that "the Turks wanted cheap, light cloths. The Venetians offered dear, heavy ones." Constricted by guild regulations, Venice insisted on maintaining high quality and high prices. Meanwhile, northerners lowered quality and price… 

That old saw about those who ignore history being condemned to repeat it comes to mind really. Most obviously in the current success of clothing chains like Matalan and Primark: it appears that what the Brits want is cheap and light and so if you lower quality and lower price…

And so many  business disasters can be explained by that "constricted by guild regulation" line. No, it doesn’t mean just unions, management has been just as purblind at times: the Austin Allegro was proof that there are things too light, too cheap and too low quality even for the British.

The basic lesson though is obvious, isn’t it? The producers who actually provide what the consumers want prosper, those who attempt to supply what suits themselves do not. The next question I suppose is which side of that line Microsoft Vista belongs?

From Adam Smith Institute

Tags: Libertarian, Politics, Liberty, Freedom

There may be trouble brewing for some microbreweries! A worldwide shortage of hops is starting to make its mark on the price of beer. The cost of some hops, the ingredient that gives beer its distinctive flavour, has quadrupled in price over recent years.

A whole host of factors are behind the current price rise: poor crops, bad weather, and most of all lower prices. All of which has led to a decrease in supply. This is a perfect example of supply and demand economics in action. The price fluctuations that the consumer sees are a reflection of a market that is free.

The price of hops had fallen in recent years due to over production and low demand from breweries. This meant that many producers left the market to grow other more profitable crops, such as cherries and apples. But then as hop production fell, beer had a resurgence in popularity. While the big companies have insulated themselves from this through futures contracts the microbreweries have been left to fight it out over the remainder. It’s all very apparent from the global hop acreage figures, which have fallen from 236,000 acres in 1992 to 123,000 in 2006.

Hops then wouldn’t be a bad investment for the farmers of South East England. Unfortunately it takes three years for a hop field to produce, so in the meantime beer drinkers are going to face slightly different tasting and higher priced beers. And unfortunately for some microbreweries, they may go out of business, especially if the taste of their beers is not able to match up to the price.

From Adam Smith Institute

Tags: Libertarian, Politics, Liberty, Freedom

I was channel surfing the other day when I came across a strange caption at the top of my television that caught my eye, causing a definite double take…            WH O RE 1 Anyone care to guess what I was watching?…

From Samizdata.net

Tags: Libertarian, Politics, Liberty, Freedom

Christian Michel holds talk-and-discussion evenings at his London home on the sixth and twentieth of each month. If you want know more about these events email him at cmichel@ cmichel.com. I am doing the talk at the next one, the first of 2008, on January 6th. My chosen subject will be: the history of music making in the twentieth century. I have just sent an email to Christian about my talk, from which he will…

From Samizdata.net

Tags: Libertarian, Politics, Liberty, Freedom

Is it better to read a dead tree magazine? Or the online version? Chris Anderson thinks it’s the paper version. Martin Stabe begs to disagree (sometimes).

More on the Danes and their tax rates and emigration. It’s the English language that is doing some of the damage.

Even more: there’s only one country that has tax laws which make such escapes impossible

A tawdry tale of what happens to the money extorted from us. 

As is increasingly happening, the arguments of Paul Krugman the columnist are refuted by those of Paul Krugman the economist. 

For those still unsure exactly what a CDO is (or why they’ve become a problem) here’s the explanation. In short, too much of a good thing. 

And finally , a new political lexicon (the less polite description is the explanation of how politicians are lying to us: whether they are or not is of course not at issue). 

From Adam Smith Institute

Tags: Libertarian, Politics, Liberty, Freedom

My true love sent to me: five gold rings. It probably means the first five books of the Old Testament, but to me five rings means the Olympics, which are coming to London in 2012.

Well, they say that. But it’s a typical government-led project, so who knows? The London bid for the games put the cost at £3,375m, but in March this year Tessa Jowell revealed that the cost had risen to £9,300m - a tripling of the costs in just a few months. Something of a black hole, which the hole-vaulting Culture Secretary explained as due to VAT, inflation, and a whopping £2,700m ‘just in case things go wrong’ fund (a figure larger than that the original estimate for building the entire Olympic Park. As the bulldozers move in, it cannot give much confidence to their operators that the costs of all this, including their wages, are still being calculated.

The Scottish Parliament building started with an estimate of £40m and ended up costing £400m. Still, we taxpayers can afford it, can’t we?

From Adam Smith Institute

Tags: Libertarian, Politics, Liberty, Freedom

One of the perks of this wonk land stuff is being sent books before their publication date so that we terribly important people can tell you what to think about them before you read them. As with the upcoming "Power and Plenty" which bills itself as an economic history of the past thousand years. I found it fascinating and it’ll provide me with all sorts of wondrous arguments to deploy in times to come, some of which I’ll sketch out in the next few days here (no, don’t worry, I’m not going to try a comprehensive review of such a complex book in a blog post).

One of the things I like about it is the way that little factoids pop up which explain, make clear in a simple manner, quite complex situations. At one point we’re told that the Mongols commanded the services of 50% of the world’s horses. At a time when the animal was both the transport to the battlefield and the tank equivalent once there this rather explains some of their success, doesn’t it? Another is

…the number of operative hours to process 100 lb of cotton was over 50,000 for spinning by hand in India. In England it was cut to only 2,000 by the 1779 invention of Crompton’s mule, and fell to 300 by 1795 and 135 by 1825, compared with 40 in 1972…. 

That after two centuries only 0.1% or less of the man hours are required to do the same thing as before rather explains why our cupboards are filled with a multiplicity of clothes while our forefathers had, if they were lucky, two outfits, daily and Sunday best.

The excellent point is also made that such technological advance really rather required international trade: without it, the domestic market would quickly have become flooded and the economies of scale would never have appeared. 

From Adam Smith Institute

Tags: Libertarian, Politics, Liberty, Freedom

Bebe is now three, and has taken to the proper feline adult life of sitting in chairs, demanding to be fed at four in the morning, catching lizards, and occasionally waving her claws at people….

From Samizdata.net

Tags: Libertarian, Politics, Liberty, Freedom

Wired has a list of what it regards as the top scientific breakthroughs of 2007. Some of the technologists and scientifically literate folk who read our blog might disagree, so comment away with your own suggestions….

From Samizdata.net

Tags: Libertarian, Politics, Liberty, Freedom