Forget it Jacob

Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr

Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa has yet again announced that Gadaffi is willing to accept a truce.

This is a repeat performance of Zuma’s visit to Tripoli a few weeks ago when he could not even be bothered to go on to Benghazi and meet the Transitional Council.

The Anti-Gadaffi forces have consolidated their positions and Gadaffi has not moved an inch from his original position of staying in the power that he seized 42 years ago. He has sustained his leadership by murder, torture, bribery and repression. Why would anybody take seriously a ceasefire proposal proferred by the thug dictator and a buffoon president backed up by the entirely useless African Union.

Go home Jacob and try to do something useful for the country whose economy you have wrecked and whose young democracy you have insulted.

Devon Cream Teas – The Inadequate in Pursuit of the Inexcusable

Devon cream teas are the latest food product to try to claim EU protected status. We now have an epidemic of this nonsense in which some consumable that has a geographic location in its name tries to tell the world, or as much of it as they pretend to control, that they have an exclusive right to use the name.

 

This farce began with things like champagne so that overpriced fizz could carry on extracting a snob premium and similar sparkling wines failed to command a strong market position because they were denied the magic word.

 

This has nothing to do with people fraudulently trying to pass off a product as something that it isn’t. It is all about market manipulation. Nobody should pretend that Cava is made in the champagne district of France, but there is nothing miraculous in that bit of ground. Champagne was in early and got itself a reputation as the tipple of the rich so they try to put up barriers to entry in which as good, or even better, product cannot break in.

 

Now that we have got to Devon cream teas we are scraping the bottom of the jam jar. This alleged regionally exclusive product is Indian or Chines tea drunk with a scone whose origins are lost in time and some clotted and whipped cream produced from cows like Jerseys or Ayrshire. Which bit of it is exclusive to Devon? None of it.

 

Amid all of the money wasting EU bureaucracy this is not the biggest deal, but all of these attempts to rig markets have only one consequence. The consumer and taxpayer gets milked.

 

I’m off for a Cornish cream tea.

Related articles

• The cream tea wars (bbc.co.uk)

Being Quango’ed into a Soviet State

 

The reason why western democracies have the highest standards of living in the world and why the Soviet Union and its satellites collapsed in economic ruin is that wealth creation is driven by private enterprise.

 

When the state owns and controls most of the economy the generation of new ideas and products withers. This causes public discontent because they are deprived of the things they need and which they can see being enjoyed in freer societies. The government which cannot face letting go of the control that it has grabbed from its own citizens can only respond by ever more interference in personal choice.

 

When the Labour Government came to power in 1997 about 33% to 35% of the British economy was owned and controlled by the government. That was an unacceptably high proportion and very damaging to the efficient development of wealth creating companies. The laws we have to control monopolies and to try to stop large corporations from completely dominating a market define an unacceptable monopoly as control of one third or more of a market. On this basis the British Government had a monopoly grip on our economy even in 1997. Since then the government stake in gross domestic product (GDP) has risen to nearly 45% and it is growing at an increasing rate.

 

According to Dominic Lawson in the Sunday Times there were almost 1,200 quango’s in 2001 costing £20 billion a year to run. By last year the cost of quango’s had risen to £34.5 billion a year. In just seven years the quango bill has risen by 75% at a time when inflation has only been around 2.5% and at the moment it is close to zero.

 

This government has taken the country into near bankruptcy. We have a national debt so huge that our grandchildren we be left with trying to pay it off and it is still increasing at a rate of £200 billion a year.

 

Desperate all the time to find more money to finance their lust for control, the government continually increases taxes. The recent increase in top rate income tax from 40% to 50% will actually produce almost nothing if not even reduce the tax take because high earners will move away, but an even more damaging consequence is that the decline of the wealth producing sector will accelerate. This is the road to collapse that killed off European communism twenty years ago.

 

We need to call a halt before we are all ground into destitution and subservience. A good start is to kill off the quangos.

Poverty, Welfare & Big Government

 

The Labour Government set an impossible target to reduce child poverty and then it damaged the economy so badly by its excessive spending, enormous debt creation and crippling burden of bureaucracy on business that it made every one of us poorer than we should be.

 

David Cameron is quite right in saying that there needs to be smaller government and that individuals and voluntary organisations should be encouraged to take more responsibility improving their own life opportunities and assisting people close to them when they face difficult times. Our interfering state has made it increasingly difficult for people to help out with child care, volunteer in a youth group or do any kind of constructive community activity. The bureaucratic systems set up by local government and some of the huge charities have no ability to build genuine relationships with the people they are supposed to serve. Although usually well intentioned to begin with, they become self serving empires for their managers and the staff get reduced to box ticking target hunters rather than genuine carers.

 

The problem with the Tories is that they have not put forward any concrete proposals to show how they would cut the interfering state and we know that in government they will be hard to distinguish from the appalling Labour government they hope to replace.

 

The welfare dependency that has been built up over decades, including such deceptions as the incapacity system introduced by Thatcher to try to hide unemployment, cannot be wiped out overnight, but real progress must be made immediately.

 

Cameron says that people should not be worse off when they go off benefit into work. Of course not. He will not achieve that by fiddling with tax credits. The tax credit system is a costly, over complex, bureaucratic monster that needs to be scrapped. Incapacity benefit must be ended and the benefits for all people without work frozen at their current level.

 

As wages increase and benefits stay fixed the incentive to find work and not be penalised for taking it increases.

Abolish Minimum Wage

 

Wages are the price of labour. All attempts to control prices against market forces create distortions that damage wealth. The minimum wage destroys jobs and adds to the black economy.

Public Sector Pay Settlements

With the exception of the military, public sector workers are to get an increase in pay this year which is lower than the increase in the cost of living. No doubt there will be a lot of squealing, but this is long over due and does not go far enough.

For nearly ten years we have had an orgy of overspending by the government on the public sector. They have trebled spending on the NHS and made enormous increases in education spending. What has happened? Health provision and education are no better and they could even be worse. The reason is that publicly owned bureaucracies are always self serving bottomless pits in which money is consumed in the empires eternally built by managers and the waste which unmotivated workers are too lazy to avoid.

The inexorable rise in the proportion of the economy controlled by the government must be stopped. This country has been undergoing a creeping sovietisation for decades. Now that more than 43% of the economy is state controlled and stealth taxes have resulted in the government grabbing more of your money than ever before, our society is in danger of being strangled. Enterprise is over regulated, we are all over taxed and the only people who are secure are the public sector workers who have jobs for life, generous pensions and nothing to ensure that they do a good job and provide excellent service. The public sector is riddled with absenteeism and paper shuffling non-jobs rather than the nursing angels and firefighting heroes of popular imagination.

It is time to call a halt to the gravy train and return to an expectation that people will work for their living in enterprises that survive by being what people want and that we will all provide for our own lives and the well being of our families.

Those public sector workers who think that they should be paid more should leave and find employment in the private sector.