Randomly Selected Article or Link

Interesting thing over at Tim Worstall's place on the statistical evidence for the smoking ban.

i wonder if it is also statistically significant that Sir Richard Peto, probably the foremost epidemiological statistician and long time collaborator with the late Sir Richard Doll on the tobacco issue, says rather non-commitally that "if this ban helps people who want to stop to manage to do so then it could save a lot of lives and prevent a lot of premature deaths."

If, of course, they survive the pneumonia.

Let's face it, this is a grubby piece of nanny-state legislation used to demonise what is a grubby habit - and I write as a smoker who is at the same time not proud of my addiction but not in the "right place" to have the willpower to give up at the moment. And at the same time presents an interesting precedent about property rights and the state.

All sorts of figures were trotted out before the debate on the ban, such as that 80% of people would prefer going out or start going out to pubs and restaurants if they were smoke free. Why then, could the leisure industry not react to this fantastic market potential without legislation forcing them to do so? Well, any pub or especially pub chain would be taking a risk with their existing customers by unilaterally banning smoking. So, in a classic piece of rent-seeking and market manipulation they wanted government to tell them they had to so they would all be "disadvantaged" at the same time.

Yes, smokers had become too bolshy over the past couple of decades, exercising a "right" to smoke anywhere that they hadn't enjoyed previously - old fashioned pubs had "smoke rooms" long before any desire of the middle class to segregate smokers; I remember in upmarket restaurants and hotels and at formal dinners nobody would dare smoke at the table - that one smoked in the lounge with one's coffee and digestifs in a similar fashion to ladies being dismissed to the drawing room so the gentlemen could smoke after genteel dinner parties.

Of course, the sort of places the hoi-polloi want to go these days are too focussed on money making to have redundant spaces like lounges for after dinner mints and cigars or rooms specifically established for the working man to stop for a pint and a fag on the way home. Many a pub has had its internal walls ripped out to make more space for crammed in binge drinkers.

I daresay that the most effective way of making smokers face up to the grubbiness of their addiction would have been to allow a two tier system to develop in response to market demands, and have some pubs full of pristine, crystal clear air and others where you couldn't see the bar as you entered the establishment for the clouds of smoke. Eventually, even smokers, and especially their non-smoking friends, going out for the evening would abandon the filthier establishments and persuade their addicted friends that a better night would be had without the smell and choking fumes.

Technorati Tags: liberty, smoking ban

There's been lots off discussion about poverty this week with the little tiff between the Cameroonies and the rest of the conservatives about embracing and addressing relative poverty and so on and so forth...

Anyway, I want to proffer a different definition of poverty. One which leads to different solutions. A liberal definition as I see it.

If the end of liberalism is personal freedom, then in the economic sphere perhaps the definition of poverty ought to be someone who has not yet attained "financial freedom". Financial freedom is usually thought of as the point at which you can meet your basic needs without being compelled to sell your labour. How does one achieve financial freedom? By having sufficient capital assets to provide an income that covers one's basic expenses, or allows you to liquidate enough to live on long term.

Now, I'm not poor in the conventional sense - I have enough to eat (far too much!) and although I don't have a home that I own, which is a significant step in achieving financial freedom, I do have enough income to want to give much of it away in good causes every month. But if I were to lose my job I would be flung on the good auspices of the state pretty quickly.

The point about financial freedom is that you can then pick and choose what you want to do - do you want to go improve yourself through education in order to accumulate lots more wealth? Do you just want to make a bit more pin money to buy a nice Christmas present?

Despite the attempts of the Tories in the eighties to create a nation of shareholders, financial wealth in this country is even less well distributed than incomes.

We are entering the post-industrial age. A few weeks ago it was noted that there were fewer people engaged in manufacturing than at any time since the mid-nineteenth century. Some of the prophesies of the C H Douglases of the early-mid twentieth century have indeed come about - that we would have most menial, manual tasks done for us in the future, through the benefits of automation. But that has meant that all the benefits of that have accumulated to the owners of the capital, rather than the providers of the labour that made that capital productive.

How do we change this? There have been lots of theories - Louis Kelso suggested creating more widespread Employee Share Ownership Schemes, that there was spare capacity in all that capital going to waste, that if employees were to be allowed to make use of they should accumulate a share in that capital. Douglas suggested social credit.

But to my mind the real solution is to recognize that we have a cornucopia of natural wealth that belongs to all of us by birthright as human beings. We only have one planet, we cannot choose where we are born. That planet is for all of us. Yet the best bits of it are owned and traded for the profit of the few. If we recoup the value of those natural resources, land, and so on, that are used by people and production processes, the "community collection of rent" suggested as long ago as by John Locke, we would have a source of income producing assets that would keep all of us in the basics and free us up to pursue our talents and interests, rather than our mere survival.

Land Value Tax funding a Citizens' Income. No income taxes, no national insurances; firms would be able to pay employees that big chunk more that could go into capital assets instead of tax. There'd be no marginal tax problem with taking employment and losing benefits. It seems a no brainer to me.

I think it's about time I started blogging more again. I recently found a quote from Lord Acton that was very apposite - "Learn more by writing than by reading". So since he was a bit of a hero of mine I think I should put his exhortation to the test.

Later this week we will be treated to the denouement of the worst kept secret in Oxford politics, likely to break this coming Thursday we are told. Two of last year's defectors from the Lib Dem group on the City Council are apparently about to take another step away from their constituents' wishes and sign up to become the first Conservative Group on Oxford City Council since 1996. The story goes that they are to be joined by a third, possibly a Green councillor, though that remains to be seen. It would make life difficult for the ex-Lib Dems, for from what I can see the only way Cllrs Sargent and MacGregor are ever going to have fancy titles like "Group Leader" and "Deputy Group Leader" is if they are part of a group of precisely two.

Obviously the political headlines at the moment are dominated by the "battle" (though one suspects it might be a "rout" when the votes are counted) for who succeeds Blair as caretaker-manager of Air Strip One. Apparently Sargent and MacGregor may have delayed their announcement by a week to avoid clashing with Tony Blair's announcement last week - though I hardly think their little local defection was ever going to compete for column inches - though that is probably how self-important they are! No doubt they will spin it that "a former chair of the Lib Dems in Oxford" and "the wife of the former constituency vice-chair" have seen the light and joined the Cameroonies. No doubt if it was the other way round, we would do the same. Defectors are always, and without exception in my experience, self-seeking, smug, narcissistic types and will do anything to give themselves a heightened sense of their own importance and the significance of their political disloyalty, usually to cover for the real reasons they defected (such as, in this case, lack of sufficient ability to get onto the Lib Dem led executive of the City Council).

But let's not forget, present occupiers of these positions obviously excepted, that chair of the city group and vice-chair of the constituency, are, in Lib Dem circles, not too dissimilar to David Horton and Frank Pickles in the "Vicar of Dibley." Cllr Sargent's own nick-name when chair of the group - "Fluffy" - kind of demonstrates the seriousness with which the post is viewed. Most recently, and including Sargent's own period of office, is has been occupied by relatively junior members of the group willing to do the thankless task of herding cats and keeping order in meetings because they generally don't have other onerous council tasks to do.

Elsewhere there are stories floating around that Cameron's Tories might join the Lib Dems in calling for Gordon Brown to hold a snap General Election to secure a mandate for his rule. Now, don't get me wrong, I do agree with these calls, as, it would seem, do 72% of people who expressed a preference so far on the Oxford Mail's current online poll (and, according to the BBC, so does most of the country). Cameron should give pause to such urges, populist though it may appear to be. In his own back yard, Oxford, it would be unfortunate for him to be crying over what was a majority at that last election, just two summers ago now, for a Labour Government and Labour Prime Minister (whoever they decide to put in that position, such is our broken and unaccountable democracy) when his only local councillors arrived by breaking their contract with their constituents and voters.

I called, in vain as usual, for them to submit themselves to their electorates in a bye-election when they first left the Lib Dems under whose banner they were elected. But at least they maintained for a while the pretense of political neutrality (some of us call it indecision). But, should they now join a party that stood candidates against them when they were elected and whom they defeated, overwhelmingly in both cases, I do hope Mr Cameron will this time join my call for them to submit now to a bye-election to prove the city wants "back door Tories". For if I were a Tory in Oxford, I hope I would be appalled now to be represented by those two in any case, and I hope I would have the conviction to stand against them in a selection contest in any such bye-election.

Hat tip to US Georgist tax researcher "Taxpayer" who highlights that Fred Harrison has made a seven or so minute introduction/video advert for his book "Ricardo's Law: House Prices and the Great Tax Clawback Scam"

If you want to understand a bit about just how unfair a tax system based on incomes is, have a watch, and hopefully buy the book - it goes into a lot more detail and will leave you I am sure convinced of the place of LVT.

...or why we would still need Land Value Tax even if everyone had a home.

One of the most common responses to the suggestion that Land Value Tax would be an equitable way of solving housing shortages is that "we don't need more tax, just looser planning regulations" enabling landowners to release more (and predominantly rural) land for additional housing. You can see these arguments out in force in the comments to a recent posting on LVT by PragueTory.

It is also the core logic of Kate Barker's report on the housing market which the government has decided will pretty well be the bible for housing policy - that housing problems are due mainly to a shortage of supply of building land. And this has fed through to well-meaning but misguided local policies such as that building thousands of homes at Grenoble Road in Oxford will somehow solve Oxford's housing affordability problem (which even prominent members of the Lib Dem administration are now supporting despite what I thought was a manifesto commitment to look seriously at other options first).

I am also in fairly frequent correspondence with a brilliant guy called Kevin Cahill, who has done much research to produce tomes such as "Who Owns Britain" detailing the inequity of land distribution in the UK, and now in his latest, across the world as a whole in "Who Owns the World: The Hidden Facts Behind Landownership". He too does not seem to understand, given that there is approximately one acre available for every man woman and child in the UK, why Land Value Tax would still be necessary if you made more of the 93% currently non-urban land in the country available for housing.

The mathematics is simple, say all these people, we don't need to concrete over the countryside. Providing 0.1 acre for each unhoused household in the UK would only consume about 200,000 acres in total, or about a further 0.5% of the land surface (or a mere seven per cent increase in the seven per cent of land currently developed), to satisfy the total demand for the next ten years (2 million additional homes). And so we should not be scared of doing so on the trumped up pretext that we're threatening to destroy this green and pleasant land.

But this argument is why the planning system, and especially the predict and provide school of planning, cannot actually solve the problem just by throwing more land at it. You cannot predict where people will actually want to live. And land values are determined not merely by the supply and demand for absolute amounts of land, but much moreso by the supply and demand for particular locations.

To go back to the Oxford proposal again for a second, what they are suggesting is tacking four thousand or more homes onto the edge of what when it was built was the largest council estate in Europe apparently, and what now is the most deprived "super output area" in the county. And in fact the newer bits of that estate, developed in the last twenty years or so, have led in this "rush to the bottom" - and in that short time have become more deprived on all measures than even the more mature part of the estate adjacent to it.

Would I want to live in one of these new homes? Probably not, at least if I were working still at Brookes. It's almost the furthest point from Brookes one can get in East Oxford. Obviously the success of this new "community" (though how you actually create a "new community" out of thin air, or bare ground in this case, escapes me) would depend to a very great extent on how many of the facilities that make elsewhere in the city attractive - schools, shops, transport links, workplaces, entertainment places and so on - you choose to duplicate in that new area. And to do so properly will require vast expenditure that would, frankly, leave the current landowners (mostly Magdalen College and Thames Water) hoping to make a mint out of their holding, getting next to nothing for their land. Well, certainly nothing next to the prices prime residential land within the city attract at the moment - but in the volume they are talking, probably more than enough to keep the college cellars well stocked for the foreseeable future!

Now, a year or so ago there was a proposal from the Labour Land Campaign - the main advocates of Land Value Tax in the Labour movement in the UK - to "rebrand" Land Value Tax, and call it instead, in public campaigning at least, "Location Benefit Levy". Most of the rest of us in the wider "Georgist" movement poo-pooed the idea, thinking it would confuse people who had heard of LVT. But you know, on reflection, who has? Enough to be worried about confusing? Most people I know who have heard of LVT actually understand it is about locational value first and foremost anyway. But for those who haven't, it might remove one early hurdle to their gaining an understanding of it.

Anyway, why I mention that is that it is important to realise that while Land Value Tax is levied on the quantity of land and its value in the marketplace at its optimum permitted use, the thing that actually creates value, that makes one place less affordable than another, is its location. And 4,000 new homes in an unattractive location will but make little dent on affordability in Oxford as a whole. So we will have yet more of a "rush to the bottom" for those new homes and they will become what is known as the new "margin of production" in Oxford's land values. It would have to be something very special to attract long term-looking buyers - something perhaps such as they did at Vauban in Frieburg - though even that has the singular advantage, not repeated with Grenoble Road or other urban fringe proposals in the UK, of being much closer to the old town centre (and therefore suitable for a wider mix of residents, including halls of residence for their university and so on better reflecting the makeup of the whole town).

But I digress (as usual). That location value - the benefit, perhaps, of having bought your council house next door to what is now my place of work when the university was but a dream of John Henry Brookes and didn't really affect land values around it - is still something that the landowner, as a landowner, has done nothing to earn. And, being unearned, and furthermore being something that actively excludes those who now, arguably, justify living there more but can no longer afford to do so, it is, to paraphrase Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, still the best base to tax.

Until we invent a Star Trek style device to transport us instantaneously from A to B there will still be exceptional and unearned profit to be had from particular locations and whilst, by building more housing somewhere else one may make a small dent in that for a short time, the only way to even out the relative affordability of different locations is to have a "Location Benefit Levy". Building more homes on the outskirts will not reduce the pressures on more popular locations significantly on its own. Indeed, it could well simply increase the premium to be reaped for the better locations and bring more "gentrification".

Technorati Tags: Oxford Brookes University, headington, land value tax, oxford, affordable housing