Category Archives: Economics

Bean there, done that

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by Economics • Tags: , , ,

The other day I was in a bank that brought back memories of my youth. There was old wood panelling everywhere, high ceilings, windows, and an old sign in painted lettering on a wood panel advising where the “savings accounts” were to be found. On the wall were pictures of a stud merino ram (reminder of the original basis of wealth on the sheep’s back) and of staff who had gone away to fight (and in half the cases not come back) in the “Great War”. Memories of good service in the relaxed and pleasant staff too.

Have you come across those spare tyres they now put in new cars? Well, when I say tyres they are things about half the width of normal tyres with instructions in big letters telling you not to drive over 80kph with it on and to drive no further than round the corner to get the real tyre fixed. Not terribly practical in the wide open spaces of Australia you’d think would be obvious, but it seems not. I can imagine the finance people in a car company saying -”What do you mean we provide 5 proper tyres with each car? That’s unnecessary. Give them four and a half instead and we can save $20 on each car and add it to our profits”.

When I discovered this new symbol of the modern age I was tempted to start yelling. Did start yelling. Not just at this particular mindless cost-cutting in itself, but as a symbol of all the other mindless cost-cutting. The food packaging that maintains the same size while providing only two thirds the volume of food. The cutting of front counter staff in just about every government agency and private business. The paying for services that used to be part of, well, the service (food, entertainment, baggage on planes – apparently actual seats to go soon). The call centres that redirect your call unerringly to someone who will have no idea of where you live or what you are talking about.

Once upon a time, says this grumpy old man, firms used to increase profits by improving services and quality of goods to attract more customers. Now they increase profits by cutting services and value in order to reduce costs. The customer has gone from being always right to being always dissatisfied. Or is that just me?

Look I know we probably can’t reinstate wood panelling everywhere, and the sheep’s back is no longer quite as roomy, but 100 years ago, before the first world war, cars came with a proper spare tyre, and every shop and agency knew the idea that service came with a smile and good value.

So come on finance people, if you are going to count beans put a few back into the jar instead of always taking more out. You will be amazed at how profitable it can be to have happy customers instead of grumpy columnists.

Icebergs ahead

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by Economics, Environment, politics • Tags: , , , , ,

The other day a container ship ran aground north of New Zealand. Have to be specific because these events happen over and over. As do the scenes of people trying to clean beaches of toxic oil, wash living seabirds and bury dead ones. As do the unseen scenes on the rocks and under the waves, as fish and molluscs and crustaceans and micro-organisms die, and ecosystems stop functioning. As do the press conferences from prime ministers and ministers promising inquiries and revenge and to make sure it “never happens again”. As does media interest. Until the media cycle is over and the cameras disappear to some other newsworthy event.

Until the next time. Because the outrage from public and politicians lasts only a short time and then the event is forgotten. And outrage is reserved for any environmentalist who dares to suggest a bit more regulation of shipping to stop these events happening. Will be dismissed contemptuously by media and politicians alike as a greenie trying to get in the way of profits and jobs, a throwback who doesn’t understand that shipping companies do a much better job of self-regulation and governments should get out of the way.

Then another ship will grind to a halt somewhere and the whole sequence will start all over again.

A demonstration the other day outside Parliament House (a quiet and civilised one in contrast to the “anti-carbon tax” nastiness) about Alzheimers. Bravo to Ita Buttrose for supporting this cause. Small numbers at the protest, just the tip of the iceberg of sufferers now, and as the Australian population ages (including me) the number of Alzheimer’s patients will grow larger and larger. More expense, more carers needed, more anguish for the patient and their family. Another case where an ounce of prevention is worth several tonnes of cure, and the protesters were calling on more research (from scientists of course) to improve treatment, establish causes, and, one day, find a cure (or cures, there are a number of different forms of dementia apparently).

Governments, of all persuasions, everywhere, seem psychologically unable to spent small amounts (relatively) of money now in order to prevent large problems (costing large amounts) later. They especially seem to hate funding research. So they keep blundering along in the dark, driven either by ideology or faulty information (usually both), trying to do patch up jobs, solve a bit of a problem here, a bit there, leaving most of it for successor governments to deal with (or not) at some later date.

Takes a long time and a lot of research to find out where the icebergs are, plan a course, slow and turn the Titanic, no matter what the major environmental or social problem. It’s time governments started funding research, and re-regulating business, to prevent disasters.

The loaded hot dog

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by Economics, Media • Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Did you see where Denmark has placed an extra tax on fatty foods to try to begin reducing obesity problems in their society? Don’t know why the Scandinavians are so much better at this kind of thing than we are. Yes I do. The other day an expert suggested raising the tax on soft drinks, noting that these had no nutritional value at all to even partly compensate for the masses of pure sugar they contained. Immediate outrage from the food and grocery council, and you could sense a media campaign coming on, politicians being lobbied, small children weeping in tv interviews, legal cases underway. A similar pattern in response to attempts to increase tax on alcopops, prevent fast food companies marketing to children, introduce plain packaging for cigarettes, reduce pub opening hours.

We are an odd people. One class of chemicals – cocaine, cannabis, heroin, ecstasy – we say are bad for our children, bad for health, bad for society, and we throw enormous resources at trying to stop their distribution and sale to anyone. Another chemical, found in tobacco, we recognise is extremely harmful but we don’t ban it, just stop it being directly advertised, and try to warn people of its ill effects. And we are unsurprised when the tobacco industry fight every step of the way and manages to delay meaningful actions for years and decades.

Another chemical, alcohol, is also very damaging to individuals, families, society. We impose some restrictions on its advertising and sale to juveniles while simultaneously promoting it in the media, allowing sale of products aimed at juveniles, increasing its general retail availability, and allowing places that sell it to stay open all night. We deal with the resulting mess by increasing the number of police and their powers to clean up afterwards. Any attempt to reduce opening hours to those of a few years ago is met with a massive political campaign.

Finally a group of chemicals – fat and sugar – which we know is doing great harm to our health, are freely added to foods, promoted with massive advertising campaigns, freely sold to anyone young and old. Any attempts to suggest that we should even try the softly softly approaches of reducing consumption by increasing tax on such products and reducing their advertising reach is met with instant outrage and political capitulation. All continues as before.

There are huge profits to be made from all these products, which is why on the one hand the drug smugglers and pedlars continue to risk long jail sentences or even death from their competitors, and why on the other hand powerful political lobbies work very hard to prevent any action that would further decrease tobacco use or significantly decrease alcohol and junk food consumption.

There must come a time, surely, when we recognise the inconsistency and tell the various lobbyists to shut up?

To tax and to please

by Economics, politics • Tags: , , , , , ,

Another NSW state budget, they seem to roll around quicker than ever these days. All follow the same pattern – all budgets that is, not just NSW. The Leader/Treasurer, after massive pressure from International Monetary Fund, big business, some economists, radio shock jocks, choose a permitted figure for total budget expenditure in a year. Divide it up between your ministers. pass it down. Each minister has a lump sum. Divides it up between portfolio areas depending on who argues best and which electorates are marginal, pass it down. In each portfolio area departmental heads decide which institutions and programs have the most forceful public servants, pass it down. Heads of institutions and programs decide which underlings they like best, pass money down to their activities. Sort of a trickle down effect from top to bottom. By the time it gets to the bottom, the actual people who do the work, the operations that provide services, have a sum of money to work with that bears no necessary relation to the work they need to do.

Country towns in particular find themselves the victims of this age-old process, and so schools are shut down, hospitals have few services, bridges decay, railway lines are closed, as public servants try to pull up blankets to cover the chin while leaving the feet to freeze, or vice versa. Services move from country town to cities, people follow them out, jobs are lost. It’s a process 100 years old or more.

Could we try it back to front, upside down please – not trickle down but grass-roots up. The citizens of a town say what services they need to make the town livable and viable. They tell the local service providers, who work out what money will be needed to provide those services in health, education, transport. They pass the results up through the department, the ministry, and on to the Treasurer who adds them all up and passes to the Leader of the government. “So” he says, “this is the amount we need to run this state/country in a decent way for its citizens. Right, let’s see where we can find the money.” The two of them set about the task of making the sums add up (helped greatly by the fact that more people will remain in employment), working to the principle that those who can most afford it contribute the most. Also to the principle that big business, taking advantage of all the public services provided, and using up non-renewable resources (especially in the case of mining), will contribute the most.

At the end of the day the two columns reach the same total. The leader, knowing that the next year the process will be even easier as all regions of the state, all parts of the economy, begin to thrive equally, gives a little cheer and asks the Treasurer – “Do you want to tell the shock jocks or will I?” The Treasurer, remembering that they have increased the Shock Jock tax by introducing a cost per word, says “No, you do it”, and both of them have a beer to celebrate a job well done.

Cum grano salis

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by Economics, politics • Tags: , , , , ,

When you hear outrage over restriction to free speech don’t think that the outraged are concerned to maintain open and civilised discussion in which Renaissance values inform our politicks. And don’t think that they are lovingly concerned with the voiceless and little-voiced. Don’t think that they are happy to encourage and support the rights to speech of unions, greenies, the unemployed, migrants, women, Indigenous people. No, they are outraged that there might be some limit on the financially-lucrative socially-damaging politically-conservative-promoting vicious outpourings of the shock jocks.

When you hear outrage over the attempt to help problem gamblers don’t think that the outraged are determined to keep helping small sporting clubs and other community groups. And don’t think they have thought long and hard about libertarian philosophy and are determined that nothing should infringe personal liberty. Oh and don’t think the clubs are only concerned for the interests of the average members, the families, just wanting a good night out. No they are concerned with growing their enterprises bigger and bigger, turning them into multi-million dollar businesses from which CEOs do very nicely, thank you. And if their wealth and status owes a great deal to gambling addicts and their destroyed lives and families, well, what then? If they didn’t take their money someone else would.

When you hear outrage over business regulation don’t think that the managers and their associations are concerned that their businesses should be totally free so as to better serve the community in every possible way. Don’t think that these are people wanting nothing more than to do good for the community of which they, too, are a part, after all, and who are concerned that regulation might impede their public benefaction. Oh and don’t think these are people who have carefully considered the theory and practice of business regulation and its role in protecting the environment and worker’s rights, and have reached an intellectual assessment that the market achieves these aims much better. No, these are people whose sole concern is that regulation might slightly reduce shareholder profits and their own grotesquely inflated salaries and perks.

Three organisations, three causes, three guys, three suits, one voice, one big pork pie. You want salt on that pie?

Toot Toot

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by Economics, Environment • Tags: , , , , ,

Well the Very Fast Train stirred on its tracks the other day and blew its whistle. Toot Toot, remember me? Well yes, and a jolly good idea you are too, but are we there yet? Not quite. There is no doubt that running a very fast train to link Brisbane-Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne makes a lot of sense in order to cut down air travel as we need to reduce greenhouse gas production wherever we can. But there are quite a few Buts that I would like to see settled (leaving aside the economic ones that I am sure teams of economists are working on).

First it must not be designed by using a ruler to join up the capital city dots and only avoiding places where the train might fall off a cliff or have to have a tunnel drilled through Kosciusko. We really don’t need a broad line of destruction smashing through forests, wetlands, native grasslands, cave systems, rocky outcrops, or indeed productive farms. This time before starting a major project a map needs to be put together by ecologists and agricultural scientists of areas that must not have a train track blasted through them. The VFT must make way for the environment, not the other way round.

My second criterion is to do with energy. I assume the idea is to have the whole track electrified, but I hope this isn’t going to be electricity derived from coal fired power stations, or the object of reducing greenhouse emissions would be severely dented. It must be possible to insist that the line be accompanied by solar and wind farms at intervals to provide the power directly to the line (and also to nearby towns).

Speaking of nearby towns, the relationship between the line and towns such as Goulburn, Yass, Wagga, Albury needs to be very carefully worked out. Obviously there need to be quick and efficient links for passengers. Not much point in getting from Sydney to nearly Yass in an hour if it then takes another hour or more to travel by occasional slow bus on winding roads to Yass itself.

Which brings me to transport of goods. If we are going to construct this massive project its purpose needs to be to substitute not only for personal travel by plane but for goods travelling long distances by roads. Hands up anyone who doesn’t think we need to get semi-trailers, B-doubles, off the highway? No hands? Now I am obviously not a train engineer, but it seems to me that the project needs to include, if it doesn’t already, provision for (presumably a bit slower) very fast goods trains. Just as with passenger movement, the movement of goods would need to be carefully coordinated and with the ability to speedily off-load into regional centres.

Not much to ask, and I’m sure my questions will be answered. Then it’s full steam ahead. Toot toot.

Hundred years war

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by Economics • Tags: , , , , , , ,

Annoyingly can’t find my copy to check (why is it that you can always find all the other books except the precise one you want, whichever that one is?) but there is a moment in “The Longest Day” which is relevant to the politics of the day. All day on June 6 1944 fighting has raged on the beaches of Normandy, and up the frighteningly steep cliffs. By the end of that long day a few of the allied troops have got past the last line of German coastal defences and have emerged on to the farm land at the top of the cliffs. They pause, exhausted, and then an officer calls them to move on out and into France. The battle in effect is over, and what comes now is the consolidation, the digging of defensive positions, the establishment of infrastructure to get the heavy equipment moving, planes landing, communications working.

Was reminded of this the other day when Obama, some three years late, gave a speech in which he suggested that since America’s budget problems were in no small part the result of the slashing of taxes for the rich begun by Reagan and continued by his disciples, it would be good if, pretty please, the rich could begin paying just a little bit more of their obscenely bloated wealth for the common good of the country. Just a little bit you understand, nowhere near what they had been happily paying in Reagan’s time.

The response was both outraged and depressingly predictable, Obama, said the mouthpieces of the super rich, was engaging in “class warfare” …

… Had to pause at that point, get my breath back, taken away by the astonishing audacity and hypocrisy of that response.

Right, back now.

The period since that June day has been marked by new battles in two phases. In the first phase the kind of world that the American, British and Canadian soldiers; and, on other battlefields, Australian and New Zealand soldiers, had fought for, was gradually brought into being. As I’ve written before, there were moves to better support the old and the poor, provide better health and education services for all, do something about the degrading environment, develop a society in which the disparities of wealth were not as great as they had been.

Think of it, if you can (since I am forced into a topsy turvy world here by my stubbornness in sticking with my original, poorly chosen, metaphor), as the German Army invading France, introducing good German customs into a country needing social reform. The German Army, in this Looking Class (sorry, Glass) War, being the good guys.

But now the Allies (bad guys remember) have landed on the beaches. Have brutally pushed back social, economic reforms in America, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Forced the progressive back up the cliffs pushed through the last defences, emerged triumphant on the cliff tops. Now for the digging in and consolidation of their gains.

So now we see nonsense like the “class warfare” tag, applied by the super rich 1% against the poorer 99% and accepted, unquestioningly, as a valid talking point by the media, their heavy equipment rolling across the countryside in support. We see court cases to destroy plain packaging in cigarettes, deposits on bottles; we see massive advertising campaigns to prevent action on coal seam gas, poker machines, mining resource taxes, carbon price; we see push back on progressive taxation, club opening hours, labelling of alcohol, national parks, workplace laws, public education and health, voting rights, and so on. The rich officer class and their willing foot soldiers are trying to make sure that they will hold this ground forever, make it impossible for progressives to fight back, lock in place the most regressive policies seen in 100 years.

It’s been a long day, but they seem to have won.

But now we want our money back

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by Climate Change, Economics, Environment • Tags: , , , , , ,

In 1975 anthropologist Hannah Middleton published a book on Aboriginal land rights called “But now we want our land back”. The title was a quote from one of the Aboriginal people she worked with. It’s many decades since I read it, and I can’t remember what interpretation she placed on the phrase, which was often quoted in the years that followed. But I reckon the meaning was along these lines. When white fellas arrived in Australia they laid claim to individual ownership of pieces of land – owned them, used them, excluded others from them, grew rich from them. This attitude to land was completely alien to the Aboriginal people watching this process with some bemusement (while trying to avoid being killed as they tried to keep using their ancestral lands to sustain themselves). “Silly white fellas, how could you own land? Land owned you.” Land was owned by everyone and no one in an Aboriginal group – no individual could alienate a piece of land from the rest of the group, the concept made no sense. Still, if the white fellas wanted to pretend that it did make sense, behave in this silly way, let them get on with it, they would come to their senses one day.

But they never did, and the consequences of their behaviour impacted every Aboriginal person on the continent. By the 1970s they had had enough – OK, you’ve had your fun, we went along with the joke for 200 years, but now we want our land back.

I feel the same way about the rise and rise in the number of billionaires, the result, all around the world, of policies (including very low tax policies) designed specifically to cause a rise and rise in the number of billionaires. We all know, don’t we, that you can’t really have such disparities of wealth in society. Oh we can pretend for a while that it is real, laugh along at the antics of the nouveau rich and the oldeau rich as they flaunt their Lamborghinis and diamonds and influence on politicians, but we all know it is as silly a concept as owning land in an Aboriginal society.

Quite apart from the damage to society that such grotesque differences in wealth cause (just as damage to Aboriginal society would be caused by individual land ownership), their origin lies, ultimately, in grotesquely unequal exploitation of the Earth’s resources. Directly or indirectly a billionaire can only be created by using millions of times the resources, destroying millions of times the ecology, spewing out millions of times the amount of greenhouse gas, as your ordinary everyday existing-on-a-few-hundred-dollars-a-year member of the rest of the 7 billion non-billionaire citizens of the planet.

So it was fun for a while, going along with this fairytale of how good billionaires were for the Earth, but now the party is over, now it is getting serious, and now we want our money back. Now is the time for every country in the world to tax billionaires at a 99% rate (still leave them with at least ten million dollars each, but I’m a generous man, and a Lamborghini is not cheap to run given its petrol consumption). The resulting billions, trillions of dollars, to be poured into replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy, protecting and repairing damaged ecosystems; and providing decent health care, and sustainable housing and employment and agricultural enterprises for the rest of the population of the world.

They’ll be happy enough, the billionaires, I reckon, had a good run, knew it couldn’t last forever. Can hear them now, singing along, CD in the Lamborghini sound system, with a former radical rock star (now minister in a socialist wealth-redistributing Labor government of course) “The time has come, to say fair’s fair, to pay the rent, to pay our share”. To the world.

Rare Earth

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by Economics, Environment • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Don’t know if you saw the report about “rare earths” a group of, obviously, rare minerals now apparently essential for all sorts of electronic goods and military purposes. China has pretty much cornered the market on them and other countries are trying to find other sources so as to have a competitive market. Trouble is they are hard to find, and are in low concentrations so you need to dig out huge volumes of soil/rock and process it, and there are waste products notably radioactive ones which need to be somehow disposed of. Now given all that you would think our government would get scientists on to finding alternatives to rare earths, but no, some Australian mining companies are gearing up to find and mine the stuff and to hell with the damage they cause. Money to be made.

This approach of getting stuff you can’t eat from underground, while wrecking the land above that can produce food, is already in operation with the fight over coal seam gas extraction. Tony Abbott got himself into trouble the other day, wavering between appeasing his own party’s supporters the miners, or the National’s supporters in the farmers. He finished up satisfying neither. But given the lack of really good deep rich soils in Australia, the proposition that we should wreck some of the best in southern Qld and northern NSW, extracting gas in a process that pollutes soil and water supplies and will add to greenhouse gas production when burnt, seems, politely, insane.

On the other hand we can actually improve our farming land. Starting in the 1930s when Louis Bromfield discovered the benefits of minimum tillage and retaining humus in the damaged farming soils of America, the benefits of such an approach are rediscovered every few years. But in recent years an added incentive, if one was needed, for retaining and building organic content, is the idea that such practices can help in removing CO2 from the air and “fixing it”. The government and Greens have just passed a bill (opposed by the Coalition) in which farmers will be paid a price per tonne of carbon sequestered in the soil. At the time of writing I don’t have the details of the bill and while it is a win-win situation for farmers and the environment, the price will need to be high enough to not only encourage farmers to build carbon levels in soil, but to maintain those practices over decades. In addition, for it to have any significant impact on carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the areas needed will be huge (say a million hectares or more). So it isn’t any kind of “answer” to climate change but every little helps, and being paid to build soil organic matter seems like a good deal to me.

Anyway, it’s certainly better than digging huge open cut mines and spreading thorium, or injecting stuff into coal seams and polluting the water table.

Mark Twain said “Buy land, they’re not making it anymore” or, more importantly, I say, “take care of your farming land, they certainly aren’t making any more of that.”

Do or die

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by Economics • Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Yet another dumb, uneducated, religious fundamentalist, anti-science, neoconservative, gun-toting Texan has emerged from that backward state to eye off the White House where he could apply his talents on a wider stage. Rick Perry – shudder.

Not much point in dissecting this good old boy who is aiming to outdo Bachmann in the craziness stakes, the few remaining Americans capable of rational thought are doing that, but I want to pick up on one aspect of his political beliefs out of the many he shares with our own wild-eyed cowboy Tony Abbott. Perry wants to get rid of all regulation.

This of course is the fundamentalist faith of neocon libertarian true market believers, and Rick would be right at home, Right at home, with our very own bunch of market, market and nothing but the market true believers in the IPA. Perhaps they could offer him a visiting fellowship if that running for president thing doesn’t work out.

But the whole thing is as puzzling as the beliefs of Catholics or the southern evangelicals of Texas (evolution? Nah). I have as much difficulty with it as I do with the appearance of virgin mary on toasted cheese, or christ on a creeper (you don’t want to know). But I’ll give it a go.

Normal people believe that it is best to regulate airlines to stop planes crashing, pharmaceuticals to stop side effects, food preparation to stop food poisoning, factories to prevent rivers being poisoned, and guns to stop people being shot.

The Rick Perrys of this world (?) believe nothing of the sort. They start from the premise that regulation costs a business money, either directly or through opportunity cost, and that as a result really rich people will get richer a bit more slowly. Because they are either very rich themselves or best buddies with those who are, they think this is a BAD THING.

But because you can’t admit this is all just about greed they erect a philosophy around it. The idea seems to be that if there are two airlines and one takes advantage of lack of regulation to skimp on maintenance and training and the other doesn’t then the planes of the first one will crash, people won’t want to fly with them and they will go broke. Triumph of the market, no need for that silly old regulation, so twentieth century.

Except, and I think you will have spotted this for yourselves, for one tiny little flaw, nothing at all really. The theory relies on quite a few people who used airline A, well, dying, suffering in fact an opportunity cost of the potential life they could have had if strict regulation had stopped any crashes.

Oh, yes, that’s an extreme test of market force theory, but not an unfair one. Don’t regulate food preparation standards and wait for enough people to get sick, the word to get around, and a restaurant loses business, goes out of business if it doesn’t mend its ways, wash its hands. Don’t regulate speed limits on roads and, after a certain number of crashes the speeds will average out at a safe level (yes indeed suggested by an Australian libertarian).

Poorly built houses collapsing in storm, children’s toys with lead paint, untested drugs in pharmacies, sweat shops in every suburb, all media owned by Rupert Murdoch? Not to worry, when the public knows about these things the market will swing into action. Oh, sure, casualties along the way – injury, disease, death – price you pay for perfect freedom. What’s that? Well, yes, the freedom of the corporations, obviously, what are you a socialist?

But as if the idea that testing the market involves, if it must, injury and death, to maintain the purity of vision of the Libertarian gurus like Hayek and Paul (his son, almost unbelievably, named after Ayn Rand), was not bad enough, it also depends on another contradiction. If an unregulated media becomes owned by just one or two powerful owners, each with their own corporate interests in other segments of the economy, and each depending on advertising from the airlines, builders, drug companies, children’s toy makers and such like, then the chances of those media outlets exposing shonky or dangerous goods to the public so the “market” can decide is, oh, let me guess, approximately 0%. And just in case a rogue reporter does manage to survive somewhere in the bowels of a giant media conglomerate, the corporations, as we have seen recently, have all sorts of tricks up their sleeves in the form of astroturf organisations and legal injunctions and donations to political parties to prevent truth ever getting out.

Have I missed something? Yes indeed. The consequences of deregulation on individuals and their inability, in a real world outside the pages of Randian fantasy novels, to do anything about it, is obvious enough. Still, I suppose you could argue that an individual may, eventually, become informed about stuff by word of mouth and observation. But there is a whole other category of failure, bad enough even in a semi-regulated world, that has no remedy. Damage to the environment is always an externality – the tragedy of the commons is that everybody dumps rubbish in it and someone else has to pay to clean it up. At least where there are attempts at regulation, however feeble, companies might decide it is less costly, if penalties are high enough, to clean up their act than to poison water and air and soil. With no regulation there is no “consumer” to discourage environmentally damaging behaviour, and a company that did, altruistically, decide to put filters on chimneys or outlet pipes would incur costs not incurred by its competitors. Only a massive public campaign which managed to effectively aim at boycotting a company’s products might be effective, and it would be met by astroturf crazies, union thugs, legal jackals, and media disinformation campaigns.

But the faith of the true believers like Perry and Abbott is unshaken by any analysis – just as in religion the less evidence the more faith, and no evidence at all requires the greatest faith and the surest path to paradise. Those calling for theocracies in what were once western democracies are doing so from the safety of hard-won secular societies. In the same way those calling for an end to all regulation are doing so from an economy and society which still, in spite of the best efforts of the neocons, is based at least nominally on the idea that some regulation is needed to save capitalism from itself. In both cases I have the feeling that the religious and economic fundamentalists should be careful what they wish for – they wouldn’t, in the real world, like what they got.