online casino slots http. treasure island casino http. best online casino http. golden casino review http. …

casino search engine http. casino chips http. internet casino http. tropicana casino http. …

ClimatePolicy ” Blog Archive ” Climate Management 101 — 2 … is an excellent post on solve Reverse Mortgage Problems….

About a year ago his tone seemed to me to change to a more strident one, more soundbites, snappier.

I think he has seen Cameron, Osborne and Johnson and thought that he, for all that he is bald, could do that, and better . . .

Those who write the manifesto often go on to bigger things, and Hannan can claim to have a fair amount of influence: http://www.gofourth.co.uk/dans-the-man-with-the-plan

But Cameron is running an old etonian ship, from which he removed most of the old etonians to avoid his snobbishness being pilloried. It is NOT ideologically driven, it is driven by getting elected.

Hannan and Carswell may have the discipline to hold their criticism schtum until Cameron wins or loses, we shall see.

Pragmatism and Hannan do not suit.

Funny thing, saving. It doesn’t actually help anyone other than the saver and the banks, and so isn’t really a government concern. Especially as those banks will likely invest overseas and stimulate their economies and pay for their jobs.

Now, with money in your pocket, you’re more likely to use petrol, British shops, local services, and every time it whizzes on that merry-go-round a hefty 17.5% gets knocked off. Compare that to the tax you get on your interest, and you can see why you get salmon from fast-running streams, and nothing more than a forlorn trolley in stagnant ponds.

Provided that you’ve got enough to stop you claiming insane levels of benefit and social care, I don’t think the government really cares how much you have in the bank.

He wrote last month of his policy influence …

“What’s better than leading a political party? Getting to determine its manifesto without any of the hassle of actually, you know, leading it. I’ve observed before that, line by line, chapter by chapter, The Plan: Twelve months to renew Britain is becoming official Tory policy. My friend and co-author Douglas Carswell is miffed at the lack of acknowledgement, and you can see his point: David Cameron’s policy wallah, Steve Hilton, has cut and pasted bits of our text with neither alteration nor attribution”.
http://www.nextleft.org/2009/08/hannan-i-determine-tory-manifesto.html

John Prescott very excited about this
http://twitter.com/JohnPrescott

- well not this one.

DHP – you are not quite getting my point. All those things are perfectly rational given the institutions we have. An ex of mine worked as a market analyst, and she lived off a huge mortgage and endless credit cards. Why? Because she knew the whole system was so crooked that she might as well. She wasn’t that bothered about what happened. If she miscalculated she could always declare bankruptcy, and in the event she got it right. The government is spasming to bring house prices back up to their vastly inflated level as quickly as possible, punishing anyone who was scrimping and saving, and rescuing anyone who overstretched. With this in mind, the rational thing to do is to overstretch. And don’t save, your savings will only diminish in value.

Remortgaging to pay for holidays is rational?

Getting an Interest only mortgage with no provisions to add value to your loan to ever pay it off and be subject to the arcane whims of the Bank of England’s Interest rate committee is rational?

Skipping from 0% rate on credit cards rather than actually paying off a penny is rational?

You, sir, need to have a word with Mr Kant.

And I wish people would make up your mind – are we living in a broken society full of sink estates and feral children or a world of honest hard working businessmen trying to scrape together a crust in the face of punitive stealth taxation?

Besides, it’s my wife who’s the social worker, and thinks everyone deserves an even break. Me, I think “You’re screwed, and I don’t think it’s worth throwing good money after bad, but maybe we can stop your kids going the same way.”

Not really, what people did was rational for a number of reasons. When borrowing money is the norm, you know it is safe to do so. Either things will work out fine and you’ll pay off your debts, or the economy will tank and the government will be forced to bail everyone out (which they have done or are trying to do!). Now the economy has tanked, you would be even stupider to save when you know that government action will ensure that our currency is debased.

And actually being a leftist who thinks the general population are stupid and cretinous isn’t really “funny”; it is a pretty common. Certainly as common as the paternalist conservative.

Well, it wasn’t rational, was it? It was short-termist infantile lust; responding to temptation.

Unfortunately, these people make up a large proportion of society. I’m a funny sort of leftist; I freely accept that there is a large proportion of people who have been denied access to education and life choices, which is a tragedy, and obviously we have a moral imperative to level that to deliver equality of opportunity.

That said, until that happens, we will always have a large proportion of society which is at least two of the following three: stupid, selfish, short-termist, short-sighted, deceptive, poor and of poor health, and it is a mistake to conflate what we as (semi)-informed individuals believe is best for ourselves with what is best for them.

And, unfortunately, the basis of government and law is not to assess based on intelligence and capacity for rational thought, but to provide rules largely applicable for the entire population.

“Vimes had once discussed the Ephebian idea of ‘democracy’ with Carrot, and had been rather interested in the idea that everyone had a vote until he found out that while he, Vimes, would have a vote, there was no way in the rules that anyone could prevent Nobby Nobbs from having one as well. Vimes could see the flaw there straight away. “

Policy Exchange’s slogan: “Using centre-right means to progressive ends”. Policy Exchange is the biggest centre-right think-tank in Europe and second only to IPPR in the UK in terms of overall size.

Next!

Well not really. Who would hold money (unless they were particularly good investors) in an economy like this? By the time the recession is completely over, we may have gigantic amounts of inflation that will rapidly diminish the debts people have. Who would rationally be a creditor under these circumstances? It is not the public that cannot be trusted to live within their means (they just responded rationally to low interest rates), it is governments!

Individuals are disincentivised by the tax system from buying their own health insurance and instead it is usually attached to employment benefits, with the employer deciding what sort of coverage their employees will have. Doctors and pharmaceutical companies lobby the federal government to have their particular services made mandatory parts of employer coverage. This is why classical liberal reforms tend to emphasise giving individuals greater control over their own healthcare spending, so as to cut out these very expensive middle men:

http://www.cato.org/subtopic_display_new.php?topic_id=32&ra_id=6

In essence, the US government took a number of very wrong policy turns over the course of the 20th century which has allowed for some fairly terrible outcomes to develop. But what they have done has very little to do with market theory or practice. Which is not to say that there aren’t a number of potential problems with having a total free market provision in healthcare, only that regulation of the US kind seems to have piled on problems rather than solving them.

Ah, but your children are your property, so it’s perfectly right to choose for them. [note to pompous libertarians: Insert Smiley Here]

I like your points, but I think the crucial failure for libertarian thought is in the rational choice, individual volition argument when it comes to healthcare, and education.

Healthcare is not a rational market, and can never be, since you do not choose to become ill, or pre-select the particular disease or condition you suffer from. The rational choice/freedom model is particularly inapplicable to mental health conditions, or indeed the burgeoning numbers suffering from age related dementia.

Education fails, but on a slightly different score. For the vast majority of their education, students are not adults, and therefore cannot exercise full informed choice. They are the real consumers, but their parents (in defiance of properly libertarian free will) make their choices for them.

1. The idea that individuals must be able to save money and pay as they go medically. This is tantamount to saying that we shouldn’t have to pay car insurance and just pay out if we have a car crash.
a) What do we do with those who waste their money or become bankrupt – let them starve in the street? The last ten years or so of 3bn of private debt has shown us that the public can’t be trusted to live within their means.
b) What about children and the disabled; is it their fault for not having wealthy parents and guardians?
c) With so much money returned to the individual purse, the cost of living will simply rise as businesses can charge more. The rule of the free market says that the market charges what the public will pay.

2. Society as a whole benefits from a workforce which is largely healthy and non-crippled. Every pound earned in this country has arisen because of someone on minimum wage, someone who cannot or will not pay for their health insurance. If a company wishes to make sure that their workforce will still be there, they will have to pay an element of insurance.

3. The logical corollary is closing local schools, refunding that tax and letting adults educate their children at their own expense, but I doubt even Hannan would agree with this, as again children would be punished for their parents’ sins, and if the only people who could survive were the children of wealthy and intelligent people, who would clean our toilets and fight our wars?

You won’t be surprised to hear that within the Adam Smith Inst (in conversation, not something “ex officio”) that we’re against the State planning everything to deal with this problem. Picking technological winners and all that. The Lucas/Monbiot thought of closing down industrial society etc.

However, there are two options that could and would work. Either cap and trade or carbon taxes. We would probably be expected to prefer cap and trade because it involves markets more than a tax does. However, we don’t, for cap and trade allows politicians (spit, spit) way too much power to intervene, play favourites. So we prefer a straight carbon tax directly from the welfare economics of Pigou.

Similarly we’re entirely happy with public goods arguments (although would insist that we talk about things which are indeed public goods. That’s things that are non-rivalrous and non-excludable, not simply goods consumed by the public). We defend copyrights and patents precisely because they are ways of dealing with the public goods problems of ideas and innovations.

That part of public health which is a public good, that part of education which is a public good…..hey, we’re right there.

Similarly we’ve understood Hardin’s Commons Tragedy arguments: sometimes regulation really is the solution, sometimes it’s allocation of property rights (as Hardin himself insisted). But whichever solution is best, it’s most definitely an intervention in markets, not pure “free marketism”, laissez faire.

Sure, our default position is that markets work but we do recognise that they sometimes don’t and we’re all ears when someone makes an argument that this or that one hasn’t, or that there’s an absence of one which should be created.

Finally, Sunder, on the US health care system.

Something I’ve been banging on about for a few days. Something that Americans don’t quite seem to realise, let alone us over here. The US health care system is, according to the WHO figures, number 1 in “responsiveness” (that is, amazingly, averaged across everyone, those with private, government and none insurance). That is, how long between deciding to see a doctor do you see one, get tested, diagnosed and treated. That very much is true of Medicare, the govt program for the over 65s.

I have a feeling that that is where all the expense is. Keeping enough slack in the system that your path from original finding of the lump to radiotherapy, via GP, consultant oncologist, theatre and chemo is a few days to a week or two.

It may be that this isn’t necessary, isn’t worth it, perhaps even shouldn’t be done. But I do think that’s where the expense is.

… one thought: the beneficial private provision argument is an empirical claim as well as a (stronger) gut belief

A lot of people this week have noted that the US spends 16% GDP on health c($7290 per head) compared to UK 8.4% ($2992 per head), yet gets poorer overall health outcomes, as well as patchy coverage … That suggests prima facie that the private efficiency argument in this case is unproven, to say the least.

Yet I have not myself seen anybody note the implication that as much of 45% of the US spend is already public spending, which is 7.2% of US GDP (and only 55% privately).By contrast, the UK is spending 82% of its spend publicly (which is 6.9% of GDP). So the US is already spending a higher proportion of public funds on healthcare than the British NHS, in addition to the further 9% of GDP spent privately in the US.

So it is also the case that the cost control, coverage and efficiency of the US public spend is a basket case compared to the UK public spend, though I am not sure whether that particular mitigation helps the pro-private provision all that much.

Nice point: but the Master/Slave relationship, albeit the basis many states known in history, is clearly of earlier origin.

But that wouldn’t happen unless the rich could all collude to exclude all alternative ways of raising funds from the poor, and for that you need a state.

So there is no principled reason why basic provision for other public goods, which may include health and education, could not be provided by government institutions. The sort of points that would be made though is that there is no reason why central government should provide these things, and that the US federal government is prohibited from providing those things.

There are other constraints even at this level: all government programmes must be alive to economic incentives, and be designed so as not to crowd out the beneficial private provision of these services (hence the use of education vouchers/tax credits so that private education is not damaged by providing a guaranteed level of public education). And the core Hayekian constraint: that the state must not violate the rule of law, which means no major decisions can be taken arbitrarily by officials but on the basis of published, predictable and properly specified rules that apply to all equally. This is what attracts a lot of classical liberals to things like a basic citizens income, or as Friedman called it, the negative income tax.

I know of at least one theorist who thinks at least basic provisions along these lines can be justified using even Nozick’s principles: http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/philn/philn015.pdf

If the next question is “well where does it end if public services are fine by classical liberals?”, the answer is something like Denmark (but hopefully without the ID cards): http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/02/22/the-laissez-faire-welfare-state/

This is an interesting new direction (christened “liberaltarianism” by Will Wilkinson), which essentially claims you can get away with surprisingly big government (high taxes) so long as it is also limited government (no intervention in the market, few arbitrary powers). Which is not to say this is a natural end state for classical liberals. It could just as easily be a relatively small government state like Hong Kong or Switzerland and perhaps be the better for it. The point is that classical liberal principles can be applied even to fairly robust welfare states. Indeed, if they aren’t applied to some extent, they won’t last long.

As Fukuyama sets out:

“If there was a single overarching theme to the domestic social policy critiques issued by those who wrote for the neoconservative journal The Public Interest, founded by Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell in 1965, it was the limits of social engineering. Writers like Glazer, Moynihan and, later, Glenn Loury argued that ambitious efforts to seek social justice often left societies worse off than before because they either required massive state intervention that disrupted pre-existing social relations (for example, forced busing) or else produced unanticipated consequences (like an increase in single-parent families as a result of welfare)”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/magazine/neo.html?pagewanted=all

Hayekians make a similar critique, though perhaps in some ways it is still more foundational. John Gray argues:

“For Hayek, indeed, the only appropriate area of social policy is that of
constitution-making, which is concerned to specify the permanent (but in
detail always revisable) legal framework of general and abstract rules which
facilitate the emergence of social order but which can never guarantee any
definite outcome for any specific group. In the Hayekian system, the crucial objection to interventionist programs, whether motivated by ideals of social justice or of public welfare, is not merely that the results of such programs are unpredictable (when they cannot reasonably be expected to be self-defeating): it is that interventionism presupposes a synoptic and concrete knowledge of society which no one man or group of men can in the nature of things possess”.
http://mises.org/journals/jls/4_2/4_2_1.pdf

However, libertarians and Hayekians often overstate this position and its social policy consequences, at least as Hayek saw them. Alternatively, some (as Gray once did) challenge Hayek for not supplying adequate safeguards for libertarianism or offering too many policy concessions to state provision.

Hayek wrote in The Constitution of Liberty (1960)

“All modern governments have made provision for the indigent, the unfortunate, and disabled and have concerned themselves with questions of health and the dissemination of knowledge. There is no reason why the volume of these pure service activities should not increase with the general growth of wealth. There are common needs that can be satisfied only by collective action and which can be thus provided for without restricting individual liberty”.

As Robert Skidelsky writes on Keynes’ and Hayek’s views of legitimate interventions into market processes and outcomes:

“Keynes clearly believed in the “inoculation” theory of social democracy – some of the outworks of liberal capitalism had to be surrendered in order to preserve the core. Hayek apparently rejected such concessions. Yet he gave the State the duty to provide a minimum subsistence income for all. The reason for this was clearly prudential – to make a free society “more attractive”, as de Jasay puts it. But this is indistinguishable from Keynes’s view; and once prudence becomes the ground for state intervention, there is no principled point at which to draw the line”
http://www.skidelskyr.com/site/article/book-review-after-serfdom/

So might it be argued that Hannanism in its “Icelandic utopian” form goes considerably beyond Hayekian liberalism?

Hannanism does, however, also acknowledge a social obligation to provide healthcare to those who can not afford it: “every developed country – pays for the healthcare of those citizens who can’t afford it. No one I know wants a system where the poor go untended”.

It would be interesting to know what founds this commitment. Is it a pragmatic adaptation to social and political conventiion of ‘civilisation’ (so acquiescing to a social democratic framing), for fear of delegitising the broader libertarian project? Is it an overhang of conservative paternalism in an otherwise libertarian argument?

Libertarians tend to take the political advantage of usually ducking this question, because they are interested in making a foundationally-driven argument about the *directionality* of public policy (less state). Where they accept the case for *some state* beyond the classical liberal minimum, it is important to know why and what legitimates that within the libertarian worldview.