Stumbling and Mumbling

Osborne: obnoxious prat

Does George Osborne realize what an obnoxious prat he's being here?:

We will be squeezing budgets like welfare which are a drag on the British economy...the thing to do for people who are not in work is give them the skills but also the incentives through the welfare programme, to get them into work.

Leave aside the assumption that welfare recipients are not part of the economy, but rather a "drag" upon it, as if the economy were merely the interests of the rich.
Leave aside also the fact that welfare isn't a handout but rather an insurance scheme, insuring people not only against the misfortune of losing their jobs but also of not having skills that are in demand.
Leave aside too the question of how people who haven't acquired skills in 11 years of schooling are to suddenly find such skills. How does a man with no knowledge of adult education or training propose to impart them?
Instead, my problem is: does Osborne not see how stupid and offensive it is for someone whose principal skill in life was to drop out of the right womb to call welfare recipients unskilled?
It may be true that the poor are poor because they lack skills - in the same way that people were in prison camps in the Soviet Union because they lacked escapology skills. But it's also true that they are poor because they are not the St Pauls (fees £22,872 pa)-educated sons of millionaire 17th Baronets who married into the peerage.
How would Osborne's life have turned out if instead he had been the son of a single-parent drug addict who went to a bog-standard comprehensive?
There are people who have a right to claim that welfare recipients are unskilled and a drag upon the economy. But Osborne ain't one of them.
He'll be laughing at lepers next.

Parris blurts out the truth

This comment from Matthew Parris is very revealing:

I was telling my colleague Danny Finkelstein about my new theory that the free market doesn't work properly when the real customers are those who commission a product rather than those who use it. It is, for example, businesses, not the householder, that choose the courier service that makes you stay in all day in case it calls...“Ah,” said Danny, “this conundrum is well known to economists. They call it the Principal-Agent Problem. There are whole chapters in textbooks about it.”
I felt as proud as Molière's Bourgeois Gentleman, enchanted to discover from an expert that quite spontaneously he had been speaking something called “prose” all his life.

Now, recall Matthew's career. From 1976 to 79 he working in the Conservative Research Department, and was then an MP for seven years. So he spent 10 years in a party that was supposedly espousing free market ideas, and yet he never had a conversation, or overheard one, about one of the basic issues in market economics.
How can this be? We can ignore the possibility that Matthew's stupid; his writings show him to be one of the smartest men in the dead tree industry. So, could it be instead that his Tory colleagues were just never really interested in market economics, and only talked about "free markets" as an ideological cover for what was really just class hatred and union bashing?

The competence non-question

Tim asks why the Left (with a few exceptions) has been so quiet about that HMRC fiasco. But we can turn the question around: should the Tories really be making so much of it?
I don't think so. This episode might show the failings of big or hierarchical government. But the Tories aren't promising to tackle these problems. And to make this merely a question of competence runs into (at least) three problems:
1. Cameron has no track record of competence. Quite the opposite. His only experience of working in business consisted of telling people that OnDigital wasn't going bust when it was - an experience which led Jeff Randall (no friend of Labour) to say he wouldn't trust Cameron with his daughter's pocket money. The more Cameron campaigns on competence, the more we'll hear of this, and - competence and character being linked - the Bullingdon Club.
2. If the next election is to be merely a question of who is least incompetent to run the country, turnout will slump. You might as well not bother with an electorate, and let Michael Page pick the government.
3. Any claim to managerial competence might be spurious anyway. Take Lord Browne. For years in the 90s and early 00s he was regarded as one of Britain's best bosses. Then BP's Texas City refinery blew up, drawing attention to the fact that much of the "shareholder value" had had created came from the simple tactic of cutting maintenance spending and praying.
Which raises the possibility that what look like managerial competence is in fact little more than having a plausible manner, taking hidden risks and getting lucky. I'm pretty sure this is true of Anthony Bolton, widely regarded as the UK's best fund manager of recent years. And it's also true of all those fund managers who have lost on CDOs and SIV-lites.
So, if the Tories have any sense, they'll not claim any superior powers of management, and recognise that, in government - as in any walk of life - incompetence is inevitable.

Redwood's hypocrisy

Is John Redwood making just a fatuous debating point here, is he stupid, or is he a hypocrite? In lamenting Ruth Kelly's proposals for road pricing, he says:

I look forward to seeing her contribution to the next Labour manifesto. Coming from the Marie Antoinette school of politics, it will presumably say “The poor should take the bus or stay at home”. It will make its bid to get the votes of the better off by recommending ” You know you can afford it - try one of our motorways now we persuaded those on low incomes to stay off the road. You know you’re worth it.”

This is just drivel. There is in principle, an overwhelming case for road pricing. Roads are a scarce resource, and prices are the best mechanism we've discovered for allocating scarce resources. And using roads imposes costs - pollution, congestion - onto others. Efficiency requires that these be internalized.
If these prices are regressive, the solution is more (and more efficient) redistribution to the poor, not to forego efficiency-enhancing policies.
So, why is Redwood moaning? He's supposed to be in favour of free markets - he's Honorary President of the Selsdon Group which "exists to promote the case for free market policies". So why does he not want a (near) market in road use? Or do I know the answer to that?

Tory bansturbation

Those Tories who (rightly) complain about New Labour's banstubation seem to have gone quiet about  proposals by Zac Goldsmith - who inherited a fortune based upon green activities such as tyre manufacture and tin mining - to ban plasma TVs.
But they should complain. As I and Bluematter have said, a ban is inferior to a tax.
So, why does the Quality of Life Group prefer the ban? Could it be that a ban is a stronger signal that it cares? Has the bipartisanship begun by Gordon Brown led the Stupid Party to embrace the worst aspect of New Labour, a preference for gesture politics over liberty and efficiency?

"You know you're a Conservative when..."

Iain Dale is inviting people to complete the sentence, "you know you're a Conservative when..."
OK. Here goes:
1....you think people should get on their bike and look for work, unless they cross a border in doing so.
2...you think people should stand on their own two feet, unless they have a rich daddy.
3...you think people should stand on their own two feet, unless they do so by joining trade unions.
4...you believe in equality under the law, even though it's mostly your opponents who have achieved this.
5...you think state authorities shouldn't intervene in markets, unless doing so would benefit your business or support share prices or house prices.
6...you deplore youngsters' ignorance of history, but forget about primitive accumulation.
7...you think a centrally planned economy is a bad idea but centrally planned companies are great.

Against tax breaks

I've got an idea to solve the so-called obesity epidemic. It works like this. Professional footballers are mostly slim and healthy. So, let's give a tax break to footballers. This'll give people an incentive to get healthy.
Now, you might spot some flaws in this reasoning. Footballers are selected precisely because they are fitter than the rest of the population; tax breaks won't turn a lardarse into Cesc Fabregas. And there are already huge incentives for people to become footballers. Giving them tax breaks will, at best, encourage a few part-time players to become bad second division players. Generally, though, the tax break will just be a giveaway to people who are already happier and richer than the rest of us. And it'll be paid for by poorer folk.
So, it's a cretinous idea.
But this is exactly what Iain Duncan Smith is proposing,  in calling for tax breaks to married couples.
Even if we grant that married people provide a better upbringing for kids than others, it doesn't follow that encouraging others to get married will make them better parents. This is because married couples differ from unmarried ones because of selection effects; people select into marriage if they think their relationship will be strong.
Few extra people are likely to get married becuase of financial incentives. And those that do are likely to be the petty-minded money-grubbing sort whose relationships won't last.
What's more, people already have big incentives to get married; married people are richer, happier and healthier (pdf) than singletons. Giving tax breaks to married couples is, therefore, inegalitarian in that it gives to those who hath.
So, let's see this idea for what it is - an attempt to bribe median voters. No more, no less.

The true face of Toryism

Patrick Mercer has revealed the true face of Toryism - not perhaps its racism, but its stupidity.  He did more than just blurt out the truth. For me, the stand-out claim is this:

I came across a lot of ethnic minority soldiers who were idle and useless.

What is the point of saying this? At one level, it might be just fatuous. Maybe he came across a lot of soldiers of all colours who were useless.
Or is it a complaint about the "race relations industry", as hinted at in the following line "...but who used racism as cover for their misdemeanours"? But if so, why preface this by talking of "a lot" of useless black soliders rather than "a few"?
Or is it "dog-whistle" politics - an appeal to racially prejudiced voters  whilst hiding behind his own non-racist background?
Or is he saying that blacks were disproportionately useless? To stand this argument up,  we need lots more evidence; we need to fill in all four boxes in the black-white/useless-not useless table. And even having done that, there are other questions.   Is Mercer's experience representative? Or is he committing the availability heuristic, of over-inferring from a handful of memorable vivid cases - a possibility raised by his line, "I remember one guy from St Anne’s..."?
And even if blacks do seem disproportionately useless, is this because they are genuinely worse, or because they are subtly judged by higher standards - as (perhaps) when Afro-Caribbean boys are more likely to be excluded from school?
For me, what Mercer is guilty of is stupidity.  Not just the stupidity of making golf-club bore remarks in public. But a deeper stupidity - of failing to see that remarks that hint at racial differences between people must at least  follow basic rules of statistical thinking, and not be casual off-the-cuff impressions.

Cameron, Bullingdon and character

How much do people change between the ages of 20 and 40? This question is the key to whether David Cameron is fit to hold any political office, and indeed whether he can get any significant public support at all.
At Oxford, he was a member of the Bullingdon Club, which is pretty much the embodiment of the very worst of the public school character: an arrogant contempt towards the "lower orders" (porters, waiters, scouts); a yobbish criminality; and a wallowing in utterly undeserved and unmerited privilege. It's viciousness tempered by cretinism, and the strongest argument for class war I've ever seen - and I've seen a few.
It is only if Cameron is a very different person now than he was then that he could be remotely worthy of any public support at all.
So, do people change that much?
Obviously, Cameron's own words on this question are worthless.
Two things, however, lead me to doubt that he's changed much.
One is the opinion of good judges who've seen him at work outside politics. Sun business editor Ian King has described him as a  "poisonous, slippery individual". Jeff Randall's opinion is no higher. And I suspect that Tim Congdon's hostility is more than ideological. This matters, because these guys are good judges who don't share my prejudices.
Secondly, there's introspection. I don't think I've changed that much since I was at Oxford, as a near-contemporary of Cameron. Sure, I'm more liberal, less gregarious, wiser and better informed (if less intelligent). But I'm basically the same bloke.
In two respects, this should worry anyone attracted to Cameron. First, I spent years in an environment where my character was likely to change. If a working class midland Marxist can work for years in the City without much changing, how likely is it that Cameron's changed?
Secondly, one respect in which I've changed is that I'm more arrogant and less pleasant now than 20 years ago. If the same's true of any Bullingdon Club member, you should be scared - very scared.

The marriage deceit

The Stupid Party's learnt a new trick - to pretend that hand-outs to its supporters are a way of helping the worst off and benefiting society.
Cameron says:

The family is the most important institution in Britain and that if we are serious about tackling the causes of poverty and social breakdown then we must look at ways of supporting families.

Now, it's certainly true that people from broken homes are more likely to become criminals or poor in adulthood, and less likely to finish education, as this report describes.
But it doesn't follow that these problems will be diminished by financial incentives for families to stay married.
Incentives matter at the margin. They'll only encourage the marginally  dysfunctional family to stay together - the Ruth and David Archer type. But these generally aren't the families that produce kids who become poor or criminal adults. The families that do this tend to be deeply dysfunctional, who either won't respond to tax incentives to stay together, or won't benefit if they do stick together; my mum and I were delighted when my dad left home (when I was around seven), and I'm certain my life would have been worse had he stayed.
If we're being generous, we can say that Cameron is committing a version of the representativeness fallacy here. He thinks that the solution to a problem must resemble its causes - so that if poverty or anti-social behavour is caused by family breakdown, the solution is to stop families breaking up.
But it ain't necessarily so. If a man's been hit by a bus, you don't restore him to health merely by reversing the bus. More cost-effective ways of helping kids from bad homes becoming poor might involve higher welfare benefits, better schools or better adult education. Tax breaks to married couples, by contrast, carry huge deadweight costs; they 'll mostly go to couples who'll stay married anyway, and won't produe dysfunctional children.
If we're being ungenerous,  we could say that it's these deadweight costs that Cameron wants. He wants to pander to his supporters, whilst looking caring.