Tree-stump shaped demand

Some points from the argument between Tim Worstall and Jesse Taylor over “price-gouging”.
To recap: John Stossel made an argument, with a hypothetical example, to the effect that if you pay a high price for some essential, you should be glad that the price was set high, because had it been set low the vendor would have already sold out and you wouldn’t have it at all.

Jesse Taylor attacked this argument as “odious”.

Tim Worstall then nominated Jesse Taylor as an “Economic Idiot”

After that, things started to get unfriendly.

The sides are so far apart in their unstated assumptions that they appear quite unable to comprehend each other. After much pondering, however, I think I understand Taylor’s claim that the seller is “artificially encouraging scarcity”.

Read on…

No Electronic Voting

Proposed trials of voting via internet or text message in next year’s local council elections have been scrapped by the government. (Via Risks Digest)

Just occasionally the government trips over reality and notices. It’s also encouraging that Opposition spokesman Oliver Heald was, firstly, able to dig this out, and secondly, correctly said that “Remote electronic voting is even more vulnerable than all-postal voting.” The reference to the vulnerability of large-scale postal voting strongly suggests that he understands the issues.

We’re not completely out of the woods – a Department of Constitional Affairs spokesman has said “We are not ruling out piloting e-voting in the future and any future plans will be taken forward at the appropriate time.” I hope that’s “at the appropriate time” in the Humphrey Appleby sense.

Previous: Voting fraud

Emergency Preparedness

Just as it’s too early to say with confidence what caused the death of de Menezes – though I sure as hell want to know – it’s too early to say what, if anything, really went wrong in New Orleans.

I don’t think it’s too soon to draw some general lessons, however.

This article in the NRO alleges the following (my emphasis):

… a working group decided that the workable solution to the problem of thousands of stranded citizens was to ask churches to set up a giant car-pool system. The plan further called for a DVD to get the word out, which was still in production when Katrina struck. A cynic might say that such a plan was drafted so city officials could say they had a real evacuation plan, written down on official letterhead and signed and announced and all of the other things that make bureaucrats swoon, but was in point of fact yet another exercise in passing the buck to the next schmuck to occupy the conference-table chair.

Again, at this point I would treat this as an unconfirmed allegation, but anyone who has had the “disaster recovery” duty dumped on them in a business is likely to see it as at least plausible. The general lesson is that, if you might someday be dependent on an organisation’s disaster plan, it would be a good idea to find out in advance what it is, and whether it makes any sense. That’s the only way to be sure it isn’t an exercise in pointless box-ticking.

Everyone should do this, everywhere. Make a list of, say, the three most likely disasters to hit your area. Find out what the contingency plans are. If they’re stupid, make a fuss. In any case, make your own plans.

And, of course, get risks in perspective. It’s silly to be planning for the likes of a nuclear strike, if you haven’t planned for a house fire. House fires kill 700 people a year in the UK. That’s a 7th of July death-toll every month.

Why QMV?

Anyone reading the previous piece on the EU textile quotas might by surprised by the bizarreness of the U’s “Qualified Majority Voting” rules.
To recap:

Under QMV, a decision needs 232 out of 321 votes, AND a majority of countries, AND countries constituting 62% of EU population.

Where did those numbers come from?

The problem of the EU is that it is not a country, and no-one needs it.

If, say, a bunch of the biggest and richest US states felt like they were being outvoted in the federal government by people who were practically foreigners, it would be enormously difficult for them to just leave – they have 200+ years of history, essential government functions, and the precedent of a failed war of seccession to hold them in.

In the EU, any country could just decide to leave, much more easily. The institutional arrangements have to guarantee the most important members a reasonable say, because the EU can’t afford to lose them. At the same time, the EU has to pretend that it is really one country, and that a Slovakian or a Lithuanian is equal in status to a Frenchman or a Dutchman. The method of squaring this circle has been the weighting rules that ensure, on matters of significance, that the important countries can’t be overruled by unimportant countries. That was just about possible with 15 members, but now with 25, including the large population of Poland, it’s proving near impossible.

Some earlier arguments on the issue here

Irreversibility

An interesting point in The Telegraph (a week or so old, but I just came across it at EU Referendum.)

The EU textile quotas that are causing all this trouble lately were introduced in haste back in June. Viewed in the cold light of day, they were particularly badly implemented (leaving aside the fact that they were a stupid idea in the first place), and it might seem reasonable to try to reverse them.

The interesting issue, however, is Qualified Majority Voting. The regulation was passed under QMV, which requires 232 out of 321 votes, AND a majority of countries, AND countries constituting 62% of EU population. link

To have prevented the measure would, therefore, have required 89 out of 321 votes, or countries constituting 39% of EU population. To reverse the measure now, however needs 232 votes and 62% of population – vastly more than would have served to block it in the first place. The unwise decision, therefore, is practically set in stone.

While I’ve looked at organisational features before, this implication of “supermajority” type voting hadn’t occured to me. In general, since I see legislative productivity as a bad thing, making it more difficult to pass legislation (via things like QMV) would strike me as beneficial. But this “trap” effect of supermajority votes could have nasty side-effects. If it is very much harder to reverse a measure than prevent it, there is greater incentive to use deceit or panic to achieve political aims. In an ordinary-majority system, it is still easier to prevent measures than reverse them, but a body “insulted” by being bamboozled by a minority into passing what it later regards as a bad law is likely to take revenge by reversing it.

But with supermajority voting, even a majority will be unable to do so. When combined with the lack of popular oversight and accountability of the EU institutions, that produces a huge incentive for dishonesty, artificial hysteria and generally bad politics.

Questioning Copyright

Good piece at the Social Affairs Unit questioning the value and validity of intellectual property. It is very good to see that, as the reclassification of copyright infringement from something like trespass to something like theft goes on, the Right is taking the lead in dealing with the issue intellectually.

The author (Austrailan economist William Coleman) lists four justifications for property, and shows that one of them (allocational efficiency) applies to IP er, see below, and two others (justice and incentives) partly. Unfortunately, he does not examine the extent to which his other justification, far from applying to IP, actually tells strongly against it:

3. The economisation of violence: In the absence of a code of property, resources are wasted in force and violence to take possession, and defend possession.

In the modern world, enormously more force, violence and wasted resources (in the form of the policing powers under such legal frameworks as the US DMCA) are needed to maintain copyright than would be used if there were no copyright. This is what has made IP the hot issue that it now is.

To clarify: with physical property, if there is no clear legal ownership, rivals are very likely to fight over it. With legal property ownership, the violence and waste(in the form of crime and policing) is much reduced. With, say, recorded music or computer software, in the absence of legal protection, they will be freely copied; but the attempt to provide legal protection produces a huge wasteful activity of hidden, criminal copying and intrusive, destructive policing in an attempt to prevent it. Thus the “economisation of violence” argument is not merely nullified but entirely reversed.

Correction: in fact, Coleman doesn’t say that the allocational efficiency argument supports IP – he starts talking about it and wanders off the point. In fact, like the economisation of violence argument, allocational efficiency tells strongly against intellectual property: the most efficient allocation is for anyone who wants a copy of something to be allowed to make one. Only the justice and (most significantly) incentive arguments have any force in favour of IP.

Katrina

The media here in Britain seem to be a bit geographically challenged when it comes to assessing the relief efforts on the Gulf of Mexico. They seem to have, consciously or not, transposed the damage from a map of the USA to a map of Britain without taking note of those funny “scale” markings in the corner, and they imagine that what has happened is something like Bristol being destroyed by bad weather, and Britain having to respond, when the actual destruction is more like Scotland or Denmark being taken out by bad weather, in terms of area and population. The nearest big cities to New Orleans are Dallas and Atlanta, each about 500 miles away – that’s further than London to Glasgow. How would you go about evacuating Scotland with 12 or 24 hours notice? How whould you supply it, with sea and air links taken out first of all, and roads impaired for the last hundred miles or so?

And the second implication of this scale, of course, is the perspective on the terrorism issue…

Read the rest of this piece

Government Criminality

I haven’t commented at all on the de Menezes affair. From the very beginning, I felt it wasn’t worth discussing it, because 50% of what we read about it would turn out not to be true. It now looks as if that was a massive underestimate, but that just makes it all the more sensible to wait until the whole thing hits the courts and we can start to separate the facts from rumour and misinformation.

I am raising it now, because of the philosophical link with my earlier post on the activities of Neil Herron. What is at issue in Sunderland is the attitude of government to the law. When I read on Neil’s blog today:

Sunderland Council had had a meeting with NCP regarding the fact that there were no traffic orders in place for the city’s taxi ranks. This meant that issued tickets were unlawful, but rather than admitting this, they covered it up. They knew in October 2003.

It just sounded so much like the Evening Standard’s account of the cover-up of the CCTV footage from Stockwell station:

The row over the death of Jean Charles de Menezes took a dramatic turn today.

Senior tube sources have challenged police claims that there was no video footage of his final moments on the platform at Stockwell station.

They told the Evening Standard that three CCTV cameras trained on the platform were in full working order. …

The Tube sources spoke out after it emerged that police had returned tapes taken from the cameras saying: “These are no good to us. They are blank.”

The attitude that tries to cover up illegal issuing of parking tickets is the same attitude that tries to cover up murder. That’s why the parking tickets matter.

Copyright, Property and Theft

“Property Rights – Property Rights – Property Rights!”, reads a slide in a presentation by the CEO of the RIAA to the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (via BoingBoing)

Intellectual Property is not actual property — legally there are differences, and practically there are huge differences. If someone uses my intellectual property, they do not interfere with my use of it.

But there is a closer analogy to IP in the realm of property law than the one the RIAA (and other copyright radicals*) use.

If I own the land, I have the right to exclude trespassers.

Trespass, like copyright infringement, is not (usually) a crime. It is a tort – I can proceed against trespassers in civil court.

The right to exclude trespassers is limited. Public rights of way can exist, or can come into being, across my land, and the public hs a right to make use of them. If I sell or rent part of my land, the necessary rights of access might be implied. (this can get legally very complex).

There is an obvious, though inexact, analogy between public rights of way across private land and “fair use” of copyrighted material.

So, the next time someone talks about “copyright theft”, interrupt them and say “I think you mean ‘copyright trespass'”.

* The actual practical political debate over IP is over whether copyright law should be extended in scope. In this debate, I am a conservative — indeed a reactionary, since I want recent extensions to be reversed — and the RIAA etc. are the radicals with a new vision of copyright.

Neil Herron

Neil Herron describes himself as “a new-born political anorak”. The issues he has involved himself with seem, at first glance, unbelievably petty: defending use of non-metric measures, and questioning the legality of parking fines in Sunderland.

There is more than meets the eye however. A feature of the “new politics” is the brushing aside of annoying legal details. The EU is the worst offender in this regard, with New Labour sprinting in its shadow. Mr Herron is saying “Wait a minute, do you actually have the legal authority to do what you are doing?” In a number of cases, they don’t.

Upholding the ban on non-metric measurements required the Law Lords to announce a startling new constitutional doctrine. A partial success has already been achieved in the parking dispute. And Herron’s third hobby horse, more obviously significant than the others, is the quiet setting up of unelected “regional assemblies” without any statutory basis.

I think the common attitude, that government has a totally free hand in the mechanisms it uses to govern, and that getting laws through parliament is a piddling technicality except in cases of great controversy, is hugely dangerous, in that it reduces the influence of voters, and increases the power of “undamped” variables such as activists and the media, which can produce huge overreactions to events. I think that however large or small the issues, in insisting on legal justification for government activity, Mr Herron is performing a valuable service. I don’t know if he’s right or wrong in any particular case, but the question has to be asked, and he’s asking it. I would say, conservatively, we need about twenty more people like him.