This week’s Economist reports an interesting study into the taxation of mobile phones. Not surprisingly, developing countries with high mobile taxes generally have far fewer mobile phones per person than those with low taxes.
This is important because there is good evidence that access to mobile phones is good for development.
Easy! we all cry out in unison. Developing countries should stop being so short sighted and abolish the tax on mobile phones. Doh!
Indeed they should. But if you are the Finance Minister in a very poor country, this is easier said than done. In Bangladesh, health expenditure per person per year is just $11, and primary education just $34 per person per year. You need the money to expand those services. People with mobile phones clearly have more money than most.
Finance Ministers know that if they abolish the tax on mobile phones, there will be more usage, more business, and more taxes coming in. Well perhaps: but when will that revenue arrive? How are you going to manage in the meantime? Many developing countries cannot afford to borrow to see them through until the revenues pick up.
Mobile phones are just one example. The economies of many developing countries would benefit hugely if they could abolish import tariffs, for example on computers and cars; liberalise state telephone companies and other state companies; remove user fees on key government services; and so on. But in poor countries with only a small formal economy, these taxes and charges are major sources of revenue for the government which pay for essential public services.
This seems to me a good example of how aid donors might help developing countries to carry out reforms. The rich countries could provide fixed term funding to finance the fiscal costs to developing country governments of sensible tax and policy reforms that will boost the supply side of the economy, to see the government through during the dip in revenues that they will inevitably experience and can ill afford. The aid could be calibrated to replace the revenues forgone as a result of the reform, and taper off over time as the revenue benefits of the supply side reforms begin to materialize. Donors would thereby provide bridging finance for reform, and share some of the risk that the revenues do not materialize. For this to work, the bridging funds would have to be predictable, guaranteed for as long as the reforms are sustained, and unhypothecated and untied.
On August 18th, I argued here that Sir Ian Blair should not be forced to resign because of the comments he made at a press conference which turned out to be incorrect. I noted, however,
that Sir Ian Blair may have sought to prevent an enquiry into the circumstances of the shooting of Mr Menezes. If this turns out to be true, then this would indeed be a resigning matter, consistent with my dictum that it is always the cover-up that does you.
Now the Curious Hamster has looked carefully at the letter that Sir Ian Blair wrote that day to Sir John Gieve, the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office. Curious Hamster notes that the letter reveals that Sir Ian Blair gave an order that the Independent Police Complaints Commission should be barred the scene of the killing, despite knowing that, by law, he was required to supply all information that the IPCC might require. This seems to me rather an important fact.
Remember, it is always the cover up that does you.
An amazing webcam set up by National Geographic, showing a watering hole in the Mashatu Game Reserve in Botswana. Mashatu is named after trees indigenous to the region, and is in the dry, eastern corner of Botswana.
The picture to the right is a screenshot I took of a jackal (I think) drinking at dawn this morning (it is not a publicity shot).
I find just having the sound in the background – the cicadas at night, the dawn chorus in the morning – very theraputic.
I am beginning to understand what people see in Big Brother …
Peak viewing time is 7am to noon in Botswana (which is 2 hours ahead of GMT and does not have daylight savings time).
H/T: Boing Boing.
Two quotations from the last two days, worth reading together.
Jack Straw’s Labour Party Conference Speech, 28 September 2005
At the Millennium Summit two weeks ago, with the UK in the vanguard, major reforms were agreed. New development aid targets; a peace-building commission; a new and more effective human rights council; and, most important of all, a new recognition that sovereign states themselves and the nations of the world as a whole, have a clear “responsibility to protect” all citizens from genocide, from ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.
And if this new responsibility had been in place a decade ago, thousands in Srebrenica and Rwanda would have been saved. We would not have had to take action in Kosovo without an explicit UN mandate; and the later divisions over Iraq might (just) have been avoided.
And my pledge to you is to ensure that the fine words on responsibility to protect are translated into collective action.
Sleepless in Sudan - An aid worker diary from Darfur, 29 September 2005
The UN’s aid chief, Jan Egeland, has been making some noise this week about insecurity in Darfur and how unacceptable the situation is getting – close on the heels of similar remarks by the UN’s genocide envoy, Juan Mendez, who visited Darfur recently. …
Any man, woman or child in a typical Darfur town, be it Geneina or Kebkabaya, will tell you that the Janjaweed are still walking through the market with their guns – or jogging through the streets with the military as new recruits, as the case may be. And that the SLA are again rumoured to be on the cusp of launching an attack against one of the major towns soon. And that no, that road is NOT safe to use – you WILL be robbed, possibly beaten and maybe shot if you keep going that way.
What would really be news is if someone actually prosecuted the people behind the violence for their crimes – or, perhaps more importantly, their bosses. Unfortunately, there’s little hope that this will happen in the Sudanese tribunals that have been set up to deal with Darfur. And as the International Criminal Court, the one body who might have an impact on ending impunity in Darfur, sits around and mulls over its options I suppose the United Nations officials will be content with continuing to state the obvious.
Splendid contribution from Chris at Stumbling and Mumbling, who asks what a coherent set of left-wing economic policies would look like.
He offers:
- Macro markets to enable workers to insure against falling demand.
- A citizens basic income.
- Asset redistribution, including through inheritance taxes
- Dismantling the corporate welfare state – the DTI and CAP.
An excellent start. I would propose the following policies as part of a left wing economic policy agenda:
- Overhaul competition policy – strengthen the Office of Fair Trading by increasing its powers and resources, crack down on cartels, price fixing, monopoly and oligopolies; break up market dominant companies.
- Broaden the base of income tax to remove allowances and tax breaks, including equality of taxes for earned and un-earned income, no separate allowance for capital gains, taxation of capital gains on primary residence, taxation of trust incomes and non-domiciles; and lower income tax rates accordingly
- Abolish all tariffs, quotas and other trade barriers
- Introduce a carbon energy tax
- Relax immigration controls for both skilled and unskilled labour (I would favour completely open borders) – which would benefit both UK citizens and the poor internationally
2005 was to be the year of development. There have been some significant advances – particularly on debt relief and funding for vaccines.
But as I explain in this longer assessment, overall, 2005 has not lived up to the ambitions that campaigners and some politicians had for it as a year of development.
As things stand, 2005 will be remembered as the year that the world recognised that the Millennium Development Goals would not be met, and decided to pass by on the other side.
Jim at Our Word is Our Weapon splendidly refutes the graph published by Fredrik Erixon that purports to show a negative relationship between aid and growth. (See also Jeff Sachs’s response to Erixon).
As Jim points out, these very simple purported relationships tell us almost nothing. Proper statistical analysis of the relationship between aid and growth finds a robust positive relationship.
Over at Samizdata, there has been an ignorant and racist discussion of South Africa’s land reform policies. Now I don’t throw the term ‘racist’ around lightly – I’ll explain below why I consider the comments there to be racist. But first let’s deal with the substantive issue.
South African Land Reform
South Africa has a land reform policy in three distinct parts:
- Restitution
A person or community dispossessed of property after 19 June 1913 as a result of past racially discriminatory laws or practices is entitled either to restitution of that property, or to equitable redress. 68,000 claims were lodged before the deadline (end of 1998), to be arbitrated by a Land Claims Court, overseen by a Commission on the Restitution of Land Rights. After a slow start, more than 62,000 of the claims have now been settled. - Redistribution
The redistribution program, which is separate from restitution, is a policy to increase land ownership by black people by transferring 30% of arable agricultural land. The government provides help to communities and individuals to enable them to buy land from existing land holders on a willing-buyer-willing-seller basis, by providing grants to enable the purchase of land (requiring a matching contribution from the buyer). So far, 3% of land has been transferred. - Tenure reform
A person or community whose tenure of land is legally insecure as a result of past racially discriminatory laws or practices is entitled, to the extent provided by an Act of Parliament, either to tenure which is legally secure, or to comparable redress.
Last Thursday, the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights announced that it would serve an expropriation notice on Hannes Visser, the owner of a cattle and arable farm in North West province. This will be the first time that compulsory purchase, rather than a willing-seller sale, has been used to conclude a restitution claim. The farm was once part of four parcels owned by the Molamu family, which was forced to sell under the apartheid government’s policy of stripping blacks of land and moving them into townships and "homelands." Descendants of the Molamus filed a claim seeking restitution.
Assessment
There is an important distinction between the restitution policy, which is a time-limited, quasi-judicial process to restore land to people who had it removed from them under apartheid’s racist land laws, and the program of redistribution, which is an entirely willing-seller process to buy up land to rebalance land ownership in South Africa.
It is a testament to the skill and patience of the South African government that the vast majority of land restitution claims have, until now, been settled without any recourse to compulsory purchase, either by buying out the current owners of the land, or by compensating the claimant in other ways. It is a pity that, in this case, it has not been possible to reach settlement on this basis. In these circumstances, compulsory purchase is apparently the only option remaining to restore to the Molamu family the land that was stolen from them under apartheid. But the decision to use the legal powers force a sale of the land, to return it to its original owners, has nothing to do with the more general policy of land redistribution (for which there are no such powers).
And yet the reports on the BBC, CNN,and Voice of America, as well in blogs such as Samizdata, (and blogs here, here, here, here, here and here ) have wilfully ignored this distinction. They have all written about the proposed compulsory purchase of Mr Visser’s farm as if it were part of the land redistribution program. (An honourable mention for Aural Fixations who makes the distinction).
Many of us – including, you might think, some of the bloggers linked above, believe that property rights are an essential component of a functioning economy and a fundamental right in a free society. And yet when a democratically-elected Government in South Africa attempts to enforce and protect property rights by restoring to people the land that they owned and had taken away from them by racist land laws, in a time-limited program overseen by the courts, and as they are required to do by the Constitution of South Africa, we hear complaints from the conservatives and right wing free marketeers. It seems that they believe that property rights are only for white folks.
"I’m not a racist but …"
Which brings me to my accusation that the bloggers and some of the commenters at Samizdata are racist. Wherever you find right wing libertarians, racists are not far behind. When I was a student, the Federation of Conservative Students, hard-line libertarians who supported legalization of hard drugs, distributed badges that said "Hang Mandela". Now they and their type peddle their racism at Samizdata.
Here are some comments on the blog post that I consider to be racist:
"I have no problem talking about the idiocy, as I see it, of some black attitudes"
"Let them take over the land, run it into the ground (run land into the ground?), and starve themselves right out of the gene pool."
"Prior to the arrival of the eeeevil colonialists in Africa, property belonged to the warlord with the best warriors."
"Farming done in the African manner (eg. Tanzania, Kenya, Mozambique) does not have a sterling track record, "
"African cultures haven’t adopted the idea of national identity."
"given the near-total lack of respect for property rights and the rule of law in Africa"
"They’ll barbecue the dairy cows, and then come to the West holding out the begging bowl. This is either a racist statement, or else a pretty conservative prediction"
If anyone posted that sort of bile on comments here, I’d delete it. We should have zero tolerance of racism, period. Whoever operates the Samizdata site should be ashamed of themselves for allowing this sort of stuff.
It will make no difference to anything but for what it is worth I’ve removed the link to Samizdata from my blogroll. There are some serious people who blog at Samizdata (such as Alex Singleton from the Globalization Institute): I hope that they will insist that this sort of racism is not tolerated there, or dissociate themselves from the site.
Up
date 25th September: I’ve amended this post to give some of the background to South African land reform.
In the meantime, Tim reckons – see the comments – that "property belonged to the warlord with the best warriors." and "Farming done in the African manner does not have a sterling track record," are both statements of fact. Both are complete rubbish – they are the fantasies of white colonialists who know nothing about the countries they occupied. And I don’t care who said them: they are clearly racist, as are the other comments which Tim doesn’t even try to defend.
Being in favour of subsidiarity is like being against sin: easy to agree with the general principle, but harder to agree on the details.
Subsidiarity, for anybody still blissfully unaware of this grotesque piece of jargon, is the idea that decisions should be taken at the lowest level of government at which they can be efficiently taken and implemented. Subsidiarity in relations between nation states and the EU was enshrined in EU law by the 1992 Maastricht Treaty:
In areas which do not fall within its exclusive competence, the Community shall take action, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, only if and in so far as the objectives of the proposed action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States and can therefore, by reason of the scale or effects of the proposed action, be better achieved by the Community.
So what should be done where?
The principle of subidiarity is often invoked to assert the rights of the governments of nation states. But the more I think about this, the less I can see a role for a Westminster Government if the principle of subsidiarity is strictly applied.
I think of myself as a Londoner, and as a European. This may be unusual, but I do not feel that I have more in common with the people of Barrow or Bath than the people of Barcelona. Most public services should be delivered by government at a lower level than Westminster – services such as education, transport and health are much too centralized. But for external relations, such as defence and security and international economics, Europe would be stronger and more effective in the world community if we took those decisions collectively as Europeans.
Here is my initial suggestion for a division of labour. Comments welcome, as ever.
Best done by local or regional government
- education policy and management of schools
- delivery of health services
- delivery of social services (care for the elderly etc)
- oversight and funding of police, fire services, ambulance
- local transport
- local environment issues (eg protection of areas of natural beauty)
- sport, culture etc
- court and prison administration
- tax collection
- welfare payments
Best done by the Westminster Government
- ?
Best done at the European level
- defence policy
- foreign policy
- trade policy
- competition policy
- monetary policy
- fiscal redistribution
- border security, immigration and customs
- regulation of financial services, food safety, drugs etc
- cross border environment issues (eg climate change)
- criminal justice, human rights
- international development policy
One issue I find difficult to place is the decision on the overall level and the total amount of spending that a community wants to impose on itself. My instinct is that this should primarily be a local decision, with a European-wide "solidarity levy" to enable redistribution from rich regions to poor regions.
Come to think of it, this system would not be very far from the federal system in place in the United States.
A fascinating new paper from the National Bureau for Economic research finds that adult mortality alone can account for all of Africa’s growth shortfall over the 1960-2000 period.
This comprehensive analytical and statistical study finds that high adult mortality induces people to invest less, accumulate less human capital, have a large number of children rather than fewer, children who are likely to survive and have be economically productive. This, in turns, lowers economic growth. The effect is economically very substantial. The linkage with fertility is particularly strong: as countries develop, the reduction in mortality precedes, and appears to cause, the fall in fertility (and not the other way round).
In my view, this has important policy implications. We should be careful about blaming Africa’s poor performance on its governments and institutions: this paper finds that the whole of Africa’s poor economic performance can be explained statistically by higher levels of mortality. Some of this may be an indirect result of poor governance; but the burden of tropical disease is also substantially higher in Africa; and the paper points out that poverty can be self-perpetuating, because countries are too poor to be able to devote resources to fighting diseases and reducing mortality. This suggests that we should focus on fighting disease as a significant investment in reducing poverty and helping to break out of this vicious circle. The proposal to create market incentives for the development of new vaccines for malaria, AIDS and TB, by promising to buy them if they are developed, would be an excellent start (full disclosure: this is what I work on).
It is also worth noting that this analysis tends to back Jeff Sachs’s claim that there is a poverty trap, as opposed to Bill Easterly’s scepticism which I reported last month.
Source: Death and Development, Peter Lorentzen, John McMillan & Romain Wacziarg NBER Working Paper 11620 (registration required; send me an email if you want me to send you a copy)
Hat tip: Stationery Bandit
Go read Whiskey Bar’s spoof White House Press Briefing. Here’s a sample.
We want everyone to understand that we’re taking this hurricane very, very seriously, and the federal government has already set the machinery in motion to delivery vital disaster recovery services – including press conferences, focus groups, overnight polls and photo opportunities with selected grateful survivors – to the President just as soon as the storm has passed.
Today’s Financial Times reports that the US has rejected a plan to replace food aid with cash.
Under questioning from senators, Rob Portman, the US trade representative, said: "We are not going down that road.
"The kinds of radical changes the EU and others are talking about would not be just harmful to our farmers and ranchers, but also terribly damaging to the developing world," he told the Senate agriculture committee. …
The EU, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Australia and Thailand are all urging the US to stop providing direct shipments of food to developing countries except in genuine emergencies. They argue that food aid displaces commercial sales, distorts agricultural markets in developing countries and is used primarily to dispose of surplus crops encouraged by high domestic subsidies.
The same day, the New York Times reports that food aid threatens the livelihood of farmers in Niger:
after a season of good rains, Niger’s farmers are producing a bumper crop of millet, the national staple. This should be a cause for rejoicing, yet in one of the twists that mark life in the world’s poorest countries, the aid that was intended to save lives could ruin the harvest for many of Niger’s farmers by driving down prices.
The newly harvested millet and the donated food will reach market stalls at the same time, and with prices depressed, poor farming families may be forced to sell crops normally set aside for their own use and use the money to pay off debts. The effect would be a new cycle of hunger and poverty.
This is not rocket science, and many of us predicted exactly this would happen. On August 2nd, I said:
What is striking about these cases is that food aid – that is, buying surplus production from rich countries and shipping it to the places where people are hungry – may do more harm than good. What the poor people need in these circumstances is buying power, to enable them to buy the food that is already being produced but is not available to them. Food aid may depress local food prices, and thereby cause some harm to food producers and perhaps reduce future production. In these circumstances, it would be better to drop dollar bills out of helicopters than sacks of food.
See also Head Heeb
George Bernard Shaw, so they say, remarked that the British and Americans are two nations divided by a common language. Now this is normally the time for a lot of tired jokes about "fanny", "fag" and "pants". (We English think it is very funny when Americans talk about their pants). But I shall rise above that. One thing I’ve noticed living in the United States is that there are some words, and some ideas, which mean subtly different things on each side of the Atlantic – nuances you might not notice at first.
- Holiday
There doesn’t seem to be a word for this in the US. In Europe people take maybe 6 weeks a year of holiday. Americans have two weeks of something called "vacation" which means they do their email with a blackberry instead of their PC. - Liberal
An insult to many Americans but never in Europe. In the US, liberal means left wing and is associated with large-government. To Europeans, liberal means someone primarily concerned with freedom and choice, and is often associated with small government (q.v.) - Middle class
When Americans talk about the middle class, they mean the middle class and below. Europeans mean middle class and above. Europeans aspire to join the middle class; Americans aspire to leave it. - Privacy
When Americans talk about whether the Constitution includes a right to privacy, they mean what Europeans would call freedom. For an American, privacy is whether you can do certain things (eg to have oral sex, anal sex, same-sex relationships, abortion, polygamy) without finding yourself in prison. For Europeans, it is whether you can do these things without finding yourself in the newspapers. - Quite
To Americans, this means "very". To the English, it means "not very". Which is quite an important distinction. When Clinton said that Kerry would make "quite a good President", this was a compliment. It sounded to Europeans like an insult. - Small Government
In America, this apparently means a Government small enough to fit in your bedroom.
Other contributions welcome in the comments section.
The Bush Administration plans to introduce tradeable quotas for fishermen. According to the Washington Post:
The administration’s bill would be the biggest change in fisheries management in a decade. It aims to double by 2010 the number of "dedicated access privileges" programs, which allocate shares of each fishery to individual fishermen, who can then can buy and sell their shares. In Alaska, for example, fishermen are granted a portion of the allowed halibut catch and can trade these quotas among themselves; in most U.S. fisheries, regulators govern the annual catch by limiting how many days fishermen operate and how much they collect each trip.
Good. Almost every expert in fishing agrees that a property-rights based approach to reducing overfishing is exactly what is needed. Furthermore, it is good economics. Nor are there any environmental arguments against using tradable quotas as a way to deliver reductions in overfishing in the most efficient way possible. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
Steve Murawski, chief science adviser to the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service, said … the administration recognizes that good fishery management is based on peer-reviewed science, and that the government should help fishermen make better business decisions through the use of fishing quotas. "In many cases they do not make market decisions that are in their own best interests and the long-term interests of the country because of this race to compete with each other," he said. "This ‘survival of the fittest’ — it generates a lot of conservation issues."
It is good to see the administration turn to peer-reviewed science for support. Now why can’t the Bush Administration apply exactly the same logic to limiting greenhouse gas emissions, by limiting carbon-dioxide emissions using tradable quotas? They could start by supporting the Clear Skies bill which desperately needs Administration support if it is to get through Congress.
<dream> One of the greatest assets that developing countries have today is that they are low emissions economies. Wouldn’t it be great if we divided the world’s limit for greenhouse gas emissions equally, by head of population, and then let the world’s poor, who are clean, rent to the world’s rich, who are dirty, the right to use their pollution limits? </dream>
Update 22 September: See the post on this by Jane Shaw at the Commons Blog
Regular readers will recall that I occasionally take Tim Worstall to task for some of his opinions about development, especially his articles at TechCentralStation. For example, I disagreed with him on the role of the supply side in development). I don’t mean it personally: Tim is the man for whom the term "irrepressible" was invented.
It is with a mixture of pleasure and surprise that I can report that his article today on trade is, in my humble opinion, not bad at all. Tim rightly draws attention to the connection between the consumption of physical and natural capital and the level of poverty (ie poor countries tend to have to run down their natural endowments more rapidly than do the rich). However, the relationship between poverty and trade is more complex than he suggests: free trade is certainly an important component in development, but it is not the only determinant of how quickly countries will lift themselves from poverty. Nonetheless, I share his hope that rich countries will accelerate progress to free trade at the WTO Ministerial Meeting in December, in the interests both of rich and poor countries.
As an aside, I cannot resist drawing attention to his choice of TechCentralStation as a platform for his writings. TechCentralStation is a right-wing, corporate lobbying front. I personally wouldn’t want my articles sandwiched between articles advocating Intelligent Design. I know Tim has got to earn a living somehow, but this isn’t an organization whose money I would be happy to take.
Tim has edited an anthology of the best of British bloggers in 2005, 2005 Blogged, which will be coming out later this year. You can order it here from Amazon (buying it after clicking that link will give me a small commission).
As a public service, I have transcribed verbatim the interview with Tony Blair on the Today Programme on 16 September. You can read the full text here.
The interview touches on the Government’s draft anti-terrorism legislation, the UN summit, development, Iraq, and Tony Blair’s legacy of reform of public services.
If I have time, I will post soon about the Government’s proposed anti-terrorism laws. In the meantime, I will let the Prime Minister’s words speak for themselves:
let’s be absolutely clear: there will be all sorts of people who say for all sorts of reasons: "look, I understand why the terrorists do it, and you know, you can sympathise with their motivation." Now I happen profoundly to disagree with that, but I am not suggesting that you make that a criminal offence. Er, what I am suggesting should be an offence is somebody who in effect by glorifying is inciting and is saying to people – particularly impressionable people – and we know, look, that this is a modern phenomenon that we have, this extremism based on a perversion of Islam – is in effect saying to impressionable young people: this is something you should do.
I remain unclear what statements the Government wishes to make illegal. Are there statements which are not incitement, which is already illegal, and which are not merely expressing sympathy with a terrorist’s motivation, which Mr Blair does not think should be illegal. Can anyone think of an example of such a statement?
Americans call public spending that they don’t approve of "pork". Apparently the term comes from the idea of the government giving every voter a barrel of pork (smoked pork products were, at one time, shipped in barrels).
And by golly there is a lot of it here in the United States. This is partly because Congress has much more power over the budget than does the British House of Commons. The British system has a rule that only a Minister can propose increases in expenditure or taxation; it is for the House of Commons then to decide whether to grant the money needed. In the US, by contrast, Congress can insert additonal spending in almost any bill.
President Clinton was briefly given the power to veto particular items (the "line item veto"), and he used it 82 times in 1997 to delete unnecessary expenditures in 11 spending bills. The savings to taxpayers total nearly $2 billion over five years. But the Supreme Court struck down the line item veto in 1998, and now the President has to accept the pork inserted in the Budget by Congress, or send the whole thing back.
In August 2005, Congress passed, and President Bush approved, a transportation bill stuffed with pork. The bi-partisan pressure group Taxpayers for Common Sense identified 6,371 pieces of pork – at a cost of $24bn. These included $450m for two bridges in sparsely populated Alaska and $2.3m for landscaping along the Ronald Reagan highway in California. There was also funding for a snowmobile trail, a deer-avoidance system and something described as "dust control mitigation" on rural roads in Arkansas.
And that is why this porkbusters campaign is such a good idea: use the blogosphere to identify a comprehensive list of pork. Instapundit explains:
Identify some wasteful spending in your state or (even better) Congressional District. Put up a blog post on it. Go to N.Z. Bear’s new PorkBusters page and list the pork, and add a link to your post. Then call your Senators and Representative and ask them if they’re willing to support having that program cut or — failing that — what else they’re willing to cut in order to fund Katrina relief. (Be polite, identify yourself as a local blogger and let them know you’re going to post the response on your blog). Post the results. Then go back to NZ Bear’s page and post a link to your followup blog post. The result should be a pretty good resource of dubious spending, and Congressional comments thereon, for review by blogs, members of the media, etc. And maybe even members of Congress looking for wasteful spending.
Of course, one person’s pork is another person’s essential infrastructure project or welfare payment, and I’m not sure who will decide if each entry truly qualifies. We’ll have to see whether the quality of catalogue can be maintained. I’d be inclined to have a community voting system to determine which spending is the most egregiously porky.
In general, I’m an admirer of much of the United States’s system of government. But their inability to exert any sort of fiscal discipline is not an advertisement for their budget process. Perhaps the blogosphere can help to shed some light on the worst excesses and put pressure on Congress to do better?
The excellent Suzanne Nossel at Democracy Arsenal proposes ten next steps for the United Nations.
It is a mixture of
- eminently sensible and practical ideas including making Bill Clinton the next General Secretary, funding the proposed staff buy-out, forming an America’s Regional Group, and putting UN TV on air,
- completely sensible but non-negotiable ideas, such as creating standing peacekeeping capacity, a US-supported peacekeeping training centre, and putting the UN at the heart of US efforts on terrorism and WMD.
- not very sensible ideas, such as doing away with the months of prior negotiations on the draft communique, and boycotting the Human Rights Council.
Most intriguing is tucked away in tenth place: invoking the new responsibility to protect in Darfur. As you would expect, I think this is not only sensible but essential. I can’t decide if it is practical. But getting on with this would really show that this new agreement means something important.
Meanwhile at TPM Cafe, Ivo Daalder proposes that instead of trying to reform the UN, we should
create a global organization that would unite the world’s democracies — an alliance of democracies. … now that the UN has proven itself to be an emperor with no clothes, it’s time to take a serious look at this idea.
Daalder proposes that this new alliance should have its own military capabilities.
<rant>This seems to me to be wrong-headed at almost every level. It simply isn’t true that the UN is irrelevant. It is true that the views of the Security Council were not taken into account on the invasion of Iraq – but that was the result of the unusual (and possibly illegal) behaviour of a small number of member states (who would be leading members of the proposed alliance of democracies). Day to day, the UN plays an essential role across a huge range of fields, from agreeing international telecommunications standards to monitoring global health epidemics, and it does it pretty well. (See here for a list of ten things the UN does well.) It is true that there is a problem with the institution’s difficulties in creating a multilateral framework for security – but that is primarily the fault of the country that Daalder would have at the heart of his new institution.</rant>
One of the more widespread pieces of rampant stupidity is the language of trade "negotiations" in which countries make "concessions" if there is a "deal" and other countries do the same.
Let’s get this straight. Trade barriers make a country poorer and should be abolished irrespective of whether other countries have the wisdom to do the same thing. "We’ll only stop throwing rocks in our harbour when you stop throwing rocks in yours" is not the policy of a rational person.
But it is more than daft, it is cynical. George Bush said in his UN speech:
Today I broaden the challenge by making this pledge: The United States is ready to eliminate all tariffs, subsidies and other barriers to free flow of goods and services as other nations do the same. This is key to overcoming poverty in the world’s poorest nations.
And Tony Blair speaking today said:
going to have the World Trade Organisation in Hong Kong, that has got to be done properly, we have got to get a good strong deal out of that … it is the test of whether international cooperation is prepared to live up to the demands of the inter-dependent international community we live in today.
Neither the EU nor US has the slightest intention of making a significant reduction in trade barriers. These carefully phrased bluffs are designed never to be called. We will go on shovelling taxpayers’ money into the trough for agricultural and economic interests, with catastrophic consequences for the word’s poor, while blaming other countries for the lack of progress. Here’s the White House’s press spokesman speaking in April last year:
And we will be defending U.S. agricultural interests in every forum we need to, and have no intention of unilaterally taking steps to disarm when it comes to this.
We won’t get anywhere if we go on thinking of this as a negotiation. There is no analogy with disarmament: trade barriers are not something we might reluctantly give up as a price we have to pay to obtain the benefits of actions of others. They are a form of self-harm which we should cease immediately, while earnestly hoping that others do the same.
Some say that tariffs and subsidies give us "leverage" that we can use to accelerate reduction by other countries. In which parallel universe is that true? Meanwhile, back in reality, our tariffs and subsidies give other countries all the excuse they need to go on doing the same. If you really want to put pressure on other countries, do yourself a favour and get rid of of trade barriers.
Interviewed by Jim Naughtie 16 September 2005
Unofficial Transcript by Owen Barder (www.owen.org)
Ed Stourton: He [Jim Naughtie] started by asking him about terrorism. Wasn’t it striking that the UN couldn’t even agree on a definition of what terrorism was?
Prime Minister: I think this is one of these times when … the definitional issue is less important than it really seems. I mean, in fact the vast bulk of people can agree on exactly what it means: it means killing of innocent civilians deliberately and even some of those countries because of their particular issue for example Pakistan over Kashmir, the problems of definition were fully in agreement with that personally I wouldn’t make too much of that I think that … there is a coming together in the international community around the need to fight terrorism and fight it not just at the level of security but at the level of taking on and defeating the ideas of these people and the idea that in any shape or form they have a grievance that can possibly justify what they do.
James Naughtie: But the problem with the definition is that you are being technical when you legislate to say that people should not glorify it, because the courts are going to have to decide what it is. So it isn’t an irrelevant question. It is one thing to say well people know it when they see it, but you are going to legislate to potentially send people to prison for talking about it. And if we don’t know precisely what we mean, that it means different things to different people, there’s a real problem. Doesn’t it illustrate the difficulty you’ve got with how you legislate at home on these important matters?
PM: Do you really think people have a difficulty with defining terrorism? I mean, it is the, it’s the, killing of innocent people, um, deliberately, innocent civilians. And when people go on a bus or on the underground or in a café or a bar or a restaurant and kill as many innocent people as they possibly can quite deliberately that is something I don’t think it is just that people sort of recognise it when they see it. I think in practical terms most reasonable people have no difficulty with this definition.
JN: Do you think it would be easy for the courts to decide when someone was glorifying it or not?
PM: Before there is a prosecution the Attorney General gives … his consent so … you know, there is that stage and then yes the courts are going to have to take a view about that. But again I think that in situations where people for example are going out and saying look, if you go and kill people and killers and people and terrorist acts you are doing something that is a great thing, you are doing something that will secure your place in paradise and so on, I think again most people have not much difficulty deciding that.
JN: Twenty years ago, when Ken Livingstone led standing ovations for Gerry Adams at Labour Party fringe meetings, when there were IRA bombing campaigns in London, presumably with legislation like this he could have been arrested and thrown into jail for glorifying a terrorist?
PM: I don’t think that is true in fact because – oh look, I can’t … to be absolutely frank you may have a better recollection of exactly what Ken was saying in that particular time than me – erm, but, let’s be absolutely clear: there will be all sorts of people who say for all sorts of reasons: “look, I understand why the terrorists do it, and you know, you can sympathise with their motivation.” Now I happen profoundly to disagree with that, but I am not suggesting that you make that a criminal offence. Er, what I am suggesting should be an offence is somebody who in effect by glorifying is inciting and is saying to people – particularly impressionable people – and we know, look, that this is a modern phenomenon that we have, this extremism based on a perversion of Islam – is in effect saying to impressionable young people: this is something you should do.
JN: And in pursuit of that, are you happy that you are moving in the direction that Dame Eliza Manningham Buller of MI5 laid out the other day that we are moving towards a kind of stage in which we have to accept, probably in perpetuity, that liberties that we have traditionally enjoyed are going to be suspended?
PM: Again, I think it is important that we don’t exaggerate this. Virtually every country in Europe following terrorist acts has been toughening up their legislation. And I think that, for example, the fact that someone who comes into our country and maybe seeks refuge here, the fact that we say look, if when you are here you want to stay here: play by the rules, play fair, don’t start inciting people to go and kill other innocent people in Britain. I think that, you know, when people say this is a abrogation of our traditional civil liberties I think it is possible to exaggerate that. I mean, as far as I know people have always accepted that with rights come responsibilities. And if people want the right, whether it is the right to stay here or the right of freedom of speech, there are always limits on that. There are limits to inciting racial hatred, there are limits er, to, er, inciting people to commit offences against other people. You know, there has never been an untrammelled right erm, to what people accept as as as human liberties it has always been qualified by some sense of duty or responsibility.
JN: Do you think on that level these discussions this week have got us anywhere? There has been a great discussion about whether the proportion of hot air to real change here is greater. Do you think we have moved on that issue?
PM: I think the summit has marked the culmination of a process in which the international community, yes, on the issue of terrorism, there is no doubt the attitude is different today. It is quite different. I mean, I know people say …
JN: What examples would you give?
PM: Well, I don’t think you would have got the UN Security Council coming together in quite the same way on such a tough resolution that attacked not just terrorism itself but inciting it, erm, the, the, preaching of it, the educating of people in extremism, erm, a few years ago. I don’t think that you would have found quite the same consensus that terrorism cannot in any set of circumstances be justified. Now, you know, leaving aside for a moment the issues that you raise, quite rightly that one or two countries had with the definition of terrorism, basically that international consensus is there.
JN: On the broader questions raised at the UN Summit here, on development for example, it is true isn’t it that its really been a holding statement, a confirmation of what we already knew, not the drive forward which for example Kofi Annan himself said was really necessary to give the UN strength and legitimacy in this century.
PM: I think that is fair enough. Er, fortunately on the development goals we had the G8 summit at Gleneagles and that gave us a solid platform and we safeguarded that in its essentials. Again, it is difficult: you’ve got 191 countries they’ve all got to reach a consensus. On the other hand I think that the problem with this is that people always see it as black and white terms: it is either a triumph or it is a complete failure. Actually, if we do what we said we are going to do at this summit, if we carry it through, it will make a big difference. Because you will have the Gleneagles G8 summit commitments on development carried through, you will have a Human Rights Council that is an effective body not what we have had before…
JN: Well with respect, on the Human Rights Council, I mean the declaration says that it will be up to the General Assembly to decide how that’s put together which is a much much weaker prescription than the Secretary General wanted and I think than you wanted .. and that really could go into that you know traditional huge patch of long grass that surrounds the UN building.
PM: You know but in a sense that is what I am saying. I mean if we carry through what we are supposed to do then it will make a difference. The Peacebuilding Commission will make a difference. The first time that the UN has said that we have a responsibility to protect citizens – even if that means an interference with the sovereignty of countries, which is a breach of the traditional international understanding, and long overdue in my view, if we carry these things through then we will make a difference. But I agree, the issue is will we carry them through.
JN: Will we carry them through … you see the President of the United States made a speech yesterday saying that he would lift trade barriers and get rid of agricultural subsidies the more other countries erm did the same, Now Peter Mandelson, your old colleague, the European Trade Commissioner, was on the programme yesterday, being openly sceptical and saying well, we’ll believe it when we see it, because American farmers aren’t going to allow it to happen. So we’ve got rhetoric, but you know and I know that one is not going to change.
PM: Well we are going to see at the meeting in December. But on the other hand it is better that the commitment is given and we can then argue about how it is carried through than that the commitment is not given at all. I mean, look, with any of these things because you have got very delicate negotiations, and a lot of conflicting interests, as I say, there is a tendency for people to say because not everything has happened, nothing has happened. If the Americans follow through on what the President has said that will be big, the Europeans should do likewise. Other countries like Japan the same and we’ve got coming up over the next few months a lot of tests for the basic principles of the agreements, in particular the ones we entered into in Gleneagles, you’ve got the IMF/World Bank discussions on debt relief, you’ve got the African Peacekeeping Force and the question of whether we can develop that which is central to resolving the problems in Africa, erm that’s coming up again in the discussions in the next few months, and then of course you’ve got the World Trade Organization in December which will be definitive, frankly, of whether the world is prepared to opt for free trade or not.
JN: That’s a big statement, saying it is definitive on the move to free trade. I mean, are you yourself said these things tend not to be black and white. Do you really think that you can get a deal in December that marks a change in the pattern of the last hundred years?
PM: I think, I don’t know whether it will mark a change in the pattern of the last hundred years, because in a sense there has been movement, world trade has opened up significantly. But can we get a significant step forward in free trade, in December, yes we can but at the moment it is obviously very difficult and there is no doubt, you know, that the fact is that there are big disagreements still that have to be resolved, but our determination should be to try and resolve those. And my point again is that the thing about the G8 summit and again here at the UN summit is that at least the commitment is there, now the question is, is it done, is it carried through, and it should be because the benefits will be felt in some of the poorest countries in the world but also in the general increase in trade and commerce that is jobs and prosperity for everyone.
JN: Isn’t it inevitable at a gathering like this, where you are working quite often quite closely with President Bush and taking a similar line on most issues that you feel,you know, the heavy hand of Iraq on your shoulder … that it marks you out from so many other countries here, that you’ve take a line on this which they profoundly disagree with?
PM: I don’t think now in the international community that disagreement lingers on. I think that now people realise for the last two years there has been a UN-backed process in Iraq for Iraqi democracy and British and American troops and the other 30 countries that are there, are there with the full backing of the United Nations.
JN: I understand that but we’ve also got a huge number of deaths.. in the last 24 hours many more. You must constantly be aware that you have to prepare people for a much longer engagement than you had envisaged, and perhaps an engagement that is going to cost a lot more. This country has spent more than 300 billion dollars in Afghanistan and Iraq already – more to come. How much have we spent and how much would we spend if it was necessary, in your judgement?
PM: Well we have spent money; err, on Iraq and Afghanistan and we are engaged in a major strategic battle in both countries, because this international terrorism has decided to make both countries a battle ground. I think the reason for that is very clear. This is why I said in the Security Council yesterday: this international terrorism is a movement, it has got an ideology, and its got a strategy; and its strategy is to prevent us establishing in those two muslim countries the democratic state that their citizens want because they know if we do establish that democratic state it is a huge blow to international terrorism, whereas alternatively if they can tip both countries into chaos and instability then they have a chance of bringing benefit for their own warped ideology but that is why it is important. And this is a strategic battle ground. And we didn’t decide to, to, engage them for example in Iraq in that way; they made the decision.
JN: But you see in the way it plays out at home you find the cross party consensus beginning to break down on your latest proposals for the time someone can be detained. And there is real disturbance on the other side of the House about this. We have had a lot of cross party consensus and you can see the strains. And here is a quote “It is all too easy for us to respond to such terror in a way which undermines commitment to our most deeply held values and convictions”. Now to be fair to you, that is Cherie Booth QC talking. It is a widely held view.
PM: It is just as well you told me that before I responded!
JN: I shouldn’t have.
PM: Yeah, see, but, of course it is important that we don’t respond in a way that damages the very fabric of our democracy, but again my plea to people is keep a sense of perspective about this. We are asking for tougher anti-terrorism measures. They are very much in the line with measures throughout the rest of Europe and the, the western world. We are not advocating something that is absolutely unheard of. Part of these measures grew out of a study of what other countries are doing but we have got to face something in our country. We have in my judgement not been tough enough or effective enough in sending a strong signal across the community that we are not going to tolerate engaging in extremism or propagating it or inciting it and that is something that is necessary to do to protect the most basic civil liberty of all which is the right to life on behalf of our citizens. Now I tried for several months before the election to get tougher terrorism legislation through, a lot of people said this was scaremongering and so on; people don’t say that now, of course we’ve got to keep a sense of balance and perspective the whole time in what we do but it is important that that is an improcation (?) that is given not just to me but to people on the other side of this debate as well. And don’t let us talk when we are taking tougher measure on terrorism as I say that would find echoes in most European countries that we are somehow engaged in the destruction of our basic civil liberties, because we are not.
JN: You are talking here about what you still want to do: what do you still want to do, above all domestically, before you take your promised retirement?
PM: The key areas are the seeing through of the reform process in the health service and in our schools so that you keep absolutely true to the principle of equality in terms of access to the health service, in terms of equality of opportunity in our education system. But you make that a reality for today’s world. And so that so that people whatever their wealth can gain access to high quality health care, to high quality schooling and don’t have to be wealth to afford the best.
JN: Do you want to make those changes irreversible before you leave office .. or irreversible in the short term anyway?
PM: I want to put a framework in place, yes, that makes it irreversible that gives us the chance to … you say irreversible, look, anyone could come along and take a different policy decision .. but if what you mean is: do I want to put these changes in place in a way that is really bedded down, yes I do, because I think that is important, because I think for example in the health care system, where again there is massive change going on, the fact is it absurd that people can’t get the opportunity to go elsewhere for their health care treatment if the waiting list is full at their local hospital with their local GP.
JN: I think Prime Minister that you know perfectly well what I mean. What I mean is this: that want to make changes of the sort that couldn’t be reversed by a successor very quickly.
PM: Well obviously if you believe in changes you want to see them last. But if you really mean: do I think that Gordon or anyone else is going to turn around and reverse those changes, no, he is fully behind the change programme both in health and education … erm I think it is important to realise that these are not policies simply that I am behind these are policies taken through by the whole government. And the reason we take them through is that they are working. That is why you have had the massive falls in waiting lists. Look in the few years before we came to power, there was a four hundred thousand increase in waiting lists: they have now fallen by three hundred and fifty thousand and they are falling more.
JN: I assume that means you think he will be your successor?
PM: Well, I’ve said what I have said on that on a number of occasions. I am not going to get back into all those statements again, but I think you know rather than talking in code to one another, let’s just be blunt about it: I want to see a situation where the big changes we are now engineering in our public services, yes they are bedded down and then they can be taken through over time and that is important. And it is important because it brings opportunity to people. And it is completely in line with our basic belief in a more just society because if you are … if too big a gulf comes between what people are able to buy in health care and schools and what they perforce have to accept in the state system that is a huge inequality
JN: And not talking in code you are confident that he sees eye to eye with you on those reforms?
PM: Yes I am, as he said during the course of the election. You know, as I say, this is something that has taken through by us together and by the Government collectively together.
JN: Finally, you have just come from a Bill Clinton fest across the other side of New York , he’s got the great and powerful around discussing the future of the world. Is that what you will are going to be doing in three years or two years or 18 months or whatever it is when you have left office?
PM: I haven’t the faintest idea, Jim, and that is not what I am concentrating on. You’ve got to get on with the job at hand and let the future look after itself.
JN: Prime Minister, thank you very much.
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