Risum teneatis, amici?

EU Observer reports, apparently straight-faced, that the European Commission wants to create a new EU internal security body on the model of Catherine Ashton's European External Action Service (EEAS), which has been such a brilliant success at creating new jobs for eurocrats.

Speaking at a European Parliament hearing in Brussels on 30 March, Commission counter-terrorism director Olivier Luyckx [a distant relative of Asterix?] envisaged a new entity that would pull together existing security agencies Cepol, Cosi [fan tutti?], Eurojust, Europol and Frontex under EU counter-terrorism co-ordinator Gilles de Kerchove [it up your jumper].

"There is new room for action at EU level," said Kerchove. "This is how I see the change: to set up a system that would mirror the one that is being set up for monitoring external crises, a one-stop shop for information-sharing."

Friends, can you indeed hold back your laughter? It'll happen, of course. More parasites - it's what the EU is all about.

There's fat and then there's "public interest" fat cats

Nice one in Spiked about yet another pseudo-scientific bandwagon:

‘Obesity crusaders’ are what we call the individuals who manufactured the obesity-epidemic story in the first place and continue, through application of inherently flawed instruments, such as BMI and apple-body shapes, to misinform the public. They are a relatively small group of public-health officials in the US, the UK, the EU, and the World Health Organization, assorted academics (very many with close ties to the weight-loss and pharmaceutical industry), the International Obesity Task Force, and a collection of so-called public-interest science groups.

Laconic post from Biased BBC

David Preiser (USA) contributes a new Open Thread on B-BBC with this excellent montage (love the deliberate inversion [sic] in the middle) and comments:

Due to swingeing boodget coots, the local council has had to close a library, a swimming pool, and a community garden, as well as put several adorable puppies to sleep in order to afford to put up this new open thread.

Maybe that's the best we can do - just laugh at the pathetic bastards clinging to the increasingly withered tits of Crone Britannia.

US state - Leviathan?

This from NR Online:

When we add up the true size of the federal workforce - civil servants, postal workers, military personnel, contractors, grantees, and bailed-out businesses - and add in state and local government employees - civil servants, teachers, firefighters, and police officers - we reach the astonishing figure of nearly 40 million Americans employed in some way by government. That means that about 17 percent of the American labor pool - one in every six workers - owes its living to the taxpayer.

In Britain formal state employees alone account for 20-21 percent of the labour force, without counting those whose livelihoods depend on the state. Over 9,000 British state employees earn more than the Prime Minister. Check out (interactive map here) what very few parts of Britain have less than the overall level of US state employment.

Now that's astonishing. Parasites weaken and eventually kill the host - but the individual parasites are just doing what comes naturally. To expect the state sector to reform itself is akin to hoping that lice will suck a little less blood and thus restrain their procreation. Ain't gonna happen.

High unemployment forever?

Thought-provoking article in Foreign Policy about the possibly permanent unemployability of the ill-educated.

We have seen the rise of a large class of "zero marginal product workers," to coin a term. [1] Their productivity may not be literally zero, but it is lower than the cost of training, employing, and insuring them. That is why labor is hurting but capital is doing fine; dumping these employees is tough for the workers themselves -- and arguably bad for society at large -- but it simply doesn't damage profits much. It's a cold, hard reality, and one that we will have to deal with, one way or another.

In other words, the US economy is going through some major structural shifts. It's not a question of getting back to where we were, but that the economy must solve a new problem of re-employing a lot of people who were not, in reality, producing very much in the first place.[2] That's a steeper challenge than we realized early in the stages of this recession -- and so far policymakers have failed to meet it. Analysts still disagree on how rapidly the US economy will recover. But they're missing the point. The era of low unemployment may be in our rearview mirror for a long time to come.

1. In the UK, that would be the bloated state sector, whose already low productivity actually declined under the impact of the Blair-Brown borrow and spend binge. There was no employment increase in the productive sector under the Labour regime.

2. Just a thought, but maybe the cost of labour in the UK was already so high, and the labour force already so ill-educated, that this phenomenon had already manifested itself over a decade ago - hence the Blair-Brown "solution", which was to create a million new non-jobs in the bureaucracy.

Taking a leak

Ya gotta laff - Techdirt has published a confidential memo of 3 January 2011 memo from The Executive Office of the President, Office of Management and Budget (OMB), on . . . how to detect potential leakers. 

Not merely that, but the content of OMB memo is ludicrous. Shrinks to spot disgruntled employees? And what do you do then? You can't sack bureaucrats even if they fall well below the already pitifully low levels of motivation and competence that are the best government agencies can hope for.

Hat-tip Scott

Another one bites the dust

Oh dear. Have to take a pop at another often worthwhile blog, Chris Dillow's Stumbling and Mumbling.

He argues that inequality is increasing because of a "winner takes all superstar effects." This, he contends:

increases the force of Rawls’ [here] claim that the distribution of talents is “arbitrary from a moral perspective” because “no-one deserves his place in the distribution of native endowments.” The essence of winner-take-all economics is that small differences in skills can mean large differences in returns. Even if you think Rawls was wrong on this, and that there is a moral element in the distribution of skills - say, insofar as these arise from differences in effort - one must, surely, be inclined to think that small differences in skill are largely arbitary.

Whose moral perspective? What has "deserving" got to do with it? There is no moral basis for taking from one person to give to another. It can only be done by coercion, which by definition favours the strong over the weak. Therefore any attempt to redistribute the rewards of arbitrarily distributed talents (Dillow appears to be unaware that Rawls considers application - that is, hard work - is also an unfairly distributed attribute) constitutes an exercise of the even more arbitrary principle that might is right.

It reduces the relevance of the self-ownership thesis. Even if we concede the Nozickian [here] point, that people own their own talents, this does not suffice to justify leaving superstar salaries untaxed, because such salaries are a joint product. They arise from an interplay of talent (or luck) with socio-technical forces: globalization; a negligible marginal cost of production; copyright laws; and so on. No superstar can claim a right to these factors, which are an accident of history. And insofar as these are social factors, it might be reasonable for the incomes arising therefrom to be socialized.

Untaxed? Anyway, the point is not whether or not superstars should pay super tax, but whether they can be forced to do so, given that they can choose where they live and can employ armies of lawyers and accountants to minimize their tax exposure.

Sportspeople are rather more tied to a particular geographic area than artists or businesspeople, but they have to invest tens of thousands of hours of practice even to aspire to stardom, and most of those who attain it have relatively brief careers that can be cut short at any time by injury. What is "fair" about supertaxing their brief period of exceptional earnings, when after it is past most of them earn little from their skill? 

Plus - who does the "socializing"? Some austere Platonic elite that will perform the wonder of moral redistribution without any of it sticking to their fingers? Yeah, right. Lastly, the most significant "social factor" is that large numbers of people are willing to pay to enjoy the talents of these superstars, without coercion, as an exercise of free will.

Because only a tiny minority become superstars - and they do so at least in part through luck - hardly anyone with rational expectations would anticipate becoming a superstar. Superstar salaries, then, are not needed to induce people to become writers, musicians or sportsmen. Instead, they consist very heavily of rents. And rent is a reasonable subject for tax. 

Which then accrues to the state, whose officers reward themselves handsomely and in addition award contracts to rent-seeking private corporations in return for bribes, and spend some more of it on portions of the electorate selected according to the arbitrary criterion of whether their votes can swing a future election.

Can Scotland be far behind?

Following Fidel's remarkable slip of the tongue in admitting to a US reporter that "the Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore", the WSJ reports:

Cuba will lay off more than half a million state workers and try to create hundreds of thousands of private-sector jobs, a dramatic attempt by the hemisphere's only Communist country to shift its nearly bankrupt economy toward a more market-oriented system.

The mass layoffs will take place between now and the end of March, according to a statement issued Monday by the Cuban Workers Federation, the island nation's only official labor union. Workers will be encouraged to find jobs in Cuba's tiny private sector instead.

"Our state can't keep maintaining bloated payrolls," the union's statement said. More than 85 percent of Cuba's 5.5 million workers are employed by the state.

Cuba's effort to reorient its labor force represents the country's biggest step toward a freer economy since the early 1990s, when Havana embarked on a brief attempt to make changes in a bid to survive without subsidies after the collapse of the Soviet Union, its main benefactor.

A problem of communications

Hannah Richards, Christian Aid's communications officer for Latin America and the Caribbean, laments the incidence of malnutrition among the poor in Guatemala in the Guardian. I'm not going to blame her for the article header, as that will have been the work of some sub-editor. But I can blame her for the following:

This state of affairs is no accident. It is a direct result [1] of the extremely regressive tax regime in Guatemala and many other Latin American countries [2]. The poorest pay a far higher proportion of their income on the equivalent of VAT and other indirect taxes [3], whilst the business elite enjoy a very generous regime of tax incentives [4]. As a result [1], one in 20 Guatemalan children does not reach the age of five due to infectious and diarrheal diseases [5] that are easily preventable and treatable. Two-thirds of the country's children do not complete primary school on time and illiteracy levels are closer to the average for sub-Saharan Africa than to that for Latin America.

1. Inequality of wealth in Guatemala has almost nothing to do with taxation, which hardly impacts at all on the rural poor, who subsist largely outside the cash economy. The biggest problem is the corruption that diverts tax revenues and government-to-government aid to parasitic purposes.
2. How does the tax regime in other countries impact on the Guatemalan poor?
3. This is true for every country in the world - indirect taxes are much easier to collect than income tax, a major consideration in countries with poorly paid government bureaucracies. However, most of Guatemala's state revenues come from customs and excise charges.
4. With a very limited pool of skilled labour, poor infrastructure (no good ports) and no significant mineral wealth, how else is Guatemala supposed to attract investment?
5. Diarrhea is an infectious disease. Grimly, the evidence world-wide seems to indicate that the millions of infants saved by prompt oral rehydration have worsened the problem of malnutrition.

In sum, Hannah Richards either does not know what she is talking about, or else she has knowingly written something false in detail and in general. Whichever is the case, Christian Aid should consider replacing her with someone who can be bothered to do justice to her job description.

London Underground

I see the RMT shit-heads are at it again. Safety concerns, my arse.

What can I say to improve on the sentiments expressed in Amateur Transplants' dulcet ballad?

Why the "Big Society" will fail

Yes, I know this article is in the Mail, but it pays among the highest wages in the journopuke sector, has the highest circulation of any daily and even those who define themselves by loathing what it stands for very, very seldom dare to question the accuracy of its reporting.

The article - a long interview with an anonymous senior planning officer - is not really news at all. Most people know that local authorities - regardless of the dominant party - are over-manned, chronically unproductive, and corrupt. The trend to over-centralization that accelerated under Margaret Thatcher was driven by those facts, plus the fiscally irresponsible loopiness of councils that fell to arseholes posing as revolutionaries.

David Cameron's "Big Society" seeks to resolve the problem another way, by empowering citizens to create alternatives to statist "solutions" that never solve anything. It's a great idea, and it might work - if only we could import millions of ethnic Chinese and export a like number of made-in-Britain scrotes.

But who would have them? The most staggering fact of the last decade is that the Labour regime created jobs only in the feather-bedded state sector, and most of those jobs went to immigrants, because the British unemployed lack basic skills, motivation and self-discipline. Cool Britannia, innit?    

I'm in no doubt the article's conclusion is correct: Britain is a long way past the point of no return, and the drain of statist parasitism will continue until the society is reduced to a husk. I weep for my grandchildren.

Cuts and pay freezes are desperately needed, but the one thing Mr Osborne will never be able to control is the culture of inertia and inefficiency that is rife throughout the public sector.
 
Of course, when I tell my friends in the private sector about my working conditions, they can scarcely believe it. As the recession bites, they consider themselves lucky to be holding on to their jobs, and are willing to work extra hours or take a pay freeze to ensure their firm's survival.

In the public sector, though, there is no competitive edge; no incentive to cuts costs or improve efficiency. Few genuinely fear for their job security, protected as they are by threats of union action every time the axe looks likely to fall.

It's the same story across the world: when a nation's public sector is allowed to expand into a bloated behemoth, it is almost impossible to cut it down to size, still less to change the culture of waste and laziness that sets in.