Tag: politics

Are governments really that stupid ?

~ Adrian Perry ~ Leave a comment

I recently found myself – much against my better judgement – engaged on Twitter/X with a climate change denier.  The difficulty facing the deniers is that 99% of scientists in this field believe that human engendered climate change is happening, and constitutes a danger to life on the planet. Their rebuttal of this is that all these scientists (and NASA, and the Royal Society, etc etc) have been bribed by government because government wants to boost its spending, and climate change provides an excuse to increase taxation.

This is, of course, ludicrous.  If there is slush money to change what scientists say, it is more likely to come from oil companies than university research grants. Anyone who knows about higher education knows that reputations are made, not by going with the flow but by disproving current wisdom and commonly held beliefs. In any case, climate change action doesn’t increase government revenues – there is no climate tax that passes to the hands of megalomaniac politicians and civil servants.  But there’s a more forceful reason to know it’s nonsense. Anyone observing the politics of Europe in the last ten years or more – since COVID, since the 2008 financial crash – will know that governments are desperate to reduce public deficits, and to avoid increasing taxation.  There is concern inside and outside government about the cost of borrowing or the size of the National Debt.  Nothing would delight governments more than the discovery that climate isn’t changing, and that fossil fuels are not involved. 

Which comes to my point.  The climate denial mob are not alone. 

  • Those who believe in the Laffer curve tell the government that, if they cut taxation, there would be a rise in government tax receipts as incentives lead people to work harder, increase their incomes and thus boost the economy.  We’ve even heard it recently from Richard Tice of the Reform Party, with the usual nodding interviewer alongside. “The Times” even published budget advice by Laffer himself, the man who is to fiscal prudence what Uri Geller is to metallurgy. But it’s just not true – as I (and many others) have demonstrated elsewhere. Where it’s been tried, it’s been a disaster. But, for a moment, let us suppose that it is true.  What they are saying is that governments are keeping taxes and budget deficits higher than they need to be, which leads to the question – why on earth would any government do that ?
  • On the left, there are enthusiasts of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) which maintain “that the level of taxation relative to government spending (the government’s deficit spending or budget surplus) is in reality a policy tool that regulates inflation and unemployment, and not a means of funding the government’s activities by itself. MMT states that the government is the monopoly issuer of the currency and therefore must spend currency into existence before any tax revenue could be collected.[1] The government spends currency into existence and taxpayers use that currency to pay their obligations to the state.[2] This means that taxes cannot fund public spending,[3] as the government cannot collect money back in taxes until after it is already in circulation. In this currency system, the government is never constrained in its ability to pay,[3] rather the limits are the real resources available for purchase in the currency.[3] “ (Wikipedia). So the government doesn’t need to raise taxes to support desirable programmes (unless we are at full employment)*.  Again, why wouldn’t the government adopt this policy if it were true ?
  • Further left, we are told that government will not need to raise taxes if the unpaid debts of tax dodgers and the corporate sector can be hunted down. Of course there are dodgers, and the rich get away with too much in financial jiggery-pokery, and this needs to be chased with vigour. However, the sum involved are unlikely to be sufficient to be transformative.  For example, unbiassed estimates suggest changing rules for multinationals will increase UK receipts by less than 1%.  And again, let’s ask – if this were true, why wouldn’t governments do it ?
  • My climate change denier also claims that governments wish to bring in “millions of migrants to live on benefits”. It’s a policy would increase public spending and taxes and lose votes by the bucketful. So, again, why would any government want to do this ? (Yes, I have heard of the Great Replacement Theory, but that’s a whole new swivel-eyed anti-Semitic level of “why would governments ever want to do that”)

It’s OK to say governments are adopting the wrong policies, I think (even if Trump doesn’t).  But the idea that governments throughout the advanced world are consciously adopting policies that make themselves look bad, and lose them elections when cheaper and more popular policies are available seems, well, as I said in my Twitter spat, silly. 

  • In passing, those advocating this have been quieter since Liz Truss’s budgetary experiments.

Bullet points

~ Adrian Perry ~ Leave a comment

Anyone who is a regular user of X/Twitter will know the rules, one of which is – never respond to an American gun nut.  If you are unwise enough to ignore this rule – perhaps after the latest school shooting, perhaps by suggesting that it is unwise to allow mentally unstable people to have access to military hardware,- you will be deluged with responses.

There are two main responses.  One involves saying that gun ownership is a constitutional right.  This actually rather dodgy.  The constitution speaks of not infringing the right of a citizen to own guns as part of a well-regulated militia. To most people, this would involve a coherent organisation with memorandum of association, a membership system (in which you couldn’t own a gun if you didn’t fulfil the entry conditions), and a hierarchy of management (in which action could not be taken without authorisation by a supervisor selected according to the organisation’s rules).  None of this appears to be present in gun friendly states.  It may be worth adding, too, that even this right comes as part of an amendment to the constitution, which implies it could be repealed (as the ban on alcohol was, and denial of votes for women too).  You can surely change a constitution if it helps save lives.

The other main response is also curious.  It defends the ability to freely own arms as a way to maintain the freedoms of the population, enabling them to resist oppressive governments trying to take away citizen’s rights.  The (slightly paranoid) view is that governments are eager to remove freedom of speech and assembly and other rarely specified stuff. You sometimes have the circular argument that guns are needed to resist legislation to control guns.

My problem with this argument is that it is patent nonsense.  Someone equipped with a rifle they have bought from a gun shop could never resist a government, which has tanks, attack aircraft, warships to back up police, FBI and CIA agents.  Even nations with not just guns but (slightly fewer, or slightly inferior) tanks and aircraft have been unable to resist the awesome power of modern weaponry.  I’m sure the French and Polish peasantry of 1940 had plenty of shotguns, but it didn’t get them far preserving their civic rights against the Gestapo.

We can also see plenty of examples of US citizens losing, or failing to gain, their rights, without help from weapons.  Guns were useless in gaining votes for women, or securing civil rights for many black Americans.  Chinese migrants lost their rights to citizenship as part of the ‘Yellow Peril’ at the turn of the 19th/20th century. Innocent and patriotic American citizens of Japanese origin were moved to detention camps in 1942. Neither group were helped by gun laws. One suspects that the argument made here is “well, not those sort of rights”, or perhaps even “well, not that sort of citizen”.  Abortion rights, or even the right to access all and any book in a public library or school, also seem to be outside the protective magic of the bullet.

There are other arguments. “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people” is common enough, and could be used to justify selling cyanide, attack helicopters and tactical nuclear weapons.  The idea that a substantial force of guards could be set outside every school to await the next gun toting oddball would be more convincing if there wasn’t evidence of this, er, not working. 

Finding apparently noble reasons for doing what you want has a long history.  Aristocrats tell us they should stay in the UK Parliament because their families have served the nations well.  We are told we don’t need to cut hydrocarbons because, well, it damages the economy and anyway this climate change stuff is untrue.  Millionaires, it seems, don’t avoid taxes because they’re selfish, but to create jobs and boost the economy.  Social entitlements should be cut, not as a miserable attack on the less fortunate, but because they encourage laziness.  Action to reduce speeds and cut road deaths, we are told, is part of a war against the motorist.  Reducing ill health and obesity by controlling fast food is similarly just the nanny state in action. 

A confession: I’ve been out shooting with American relatives, and it’s fun.  I guess the gun lobby actually thinks “I like having my guns”, and will dredge up any apparently worthy argument to keep them.  Even if it results in hundreds of deaths a year, many of them children.