A Grim Assessment of British Fiscal Policy

I have been very pessimistic in recent years about the United Kingdom. Now, having just finished giving speeches in Bristol and London, I’m even more pessimistic.

The core problem is that the burden of government spending has expanded dramatically in recent years, in part because of the pandemic.

But there’s been no move to undo the damage. Instead, the (supposedly) conservative governments of Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak have kept the spigots open.

So there’s a new spending baseline showing a permanent expansion in the fiscal burden.

And this does not even include all the additional spending that almost surely will get added because of demographic change.

Sadly, none of the experts I met with on my trip expressed much hope of reversing the nation’s fiscal decline.

Indeed, most of them have a a glum outlook. Including the ones I didn’t talk to. For instance, Fiona Bulmer authored some depressing analysis for CapX about the U.K.’s faux conservatives.

Now a Tory government boasts that it is spending “£407 billion on support for families, jobs and businesses”, borrowing is at its highest level since the war – and that’s only the start. …Ministers, commentators, the Bank of England…seem to believe that we have now finally created a climate in which the magic money tree can flourish. …spending discipline has been completely abandoned over the past year. …We used to believe that individuals and businesses would always be better at spending their own money than government, instead we must now celebrate that the Department of Transport is giving people £50 vouchers to get their bikes mended. The problem is that once public spending becomes celebrated as a virtue then the culture of cost constraint disappears and every part of government will adopt the Oliver Twist approach and constantly come back for more.

As you might expect, governments that spend too much also have bad tax systems.

That certainly is true in the United Kingdom. But, as reported by the Economist, the U.K. seemingly tries to make taxes as punitive as possible.

People in England, Wales and Northern Ireland pay a basic rate of income tax of 20% on annual earnings over £12,570 ($15,612)… Britons must also pay national-insurance contributions (NICs) of 12% of weekly earnings over £242… Recent university graduates with student debt must pay an additional 9% on anything they earn over £27,295. A 40% income-tax rate kicks in at slightly over £50,000, which is when parents also begin to be taxed on a welfare payment known as child benefit. The result can be a 60% marginal tax rate for those with two children and a 70% rate for those with three. For every £1 earned above £100,000, you lose 50p of the £12,570 tax-free allowance; the allowance falls to zero if your income is £125,140 or more. That means at least a 60% marginal tax rate for high-earning taxpayers—rising to over 100% for parents who start losing tax-free child-care benefits as well. …Value-added tax…is levied at a 20% rate on most final purchases by consumers. …Britain has some of the highest taxes on property of any country in the OECD.

Is there any hope of fixing this mess?

That is unlikely, given the profligacy of today’s Tory politicians.

But there is a solution if any of them eventually decide to be on the side of taxpayers. Writing for CapX, Gavin Rice opines that it is time to reform the welfare state and limit spending growth.

Despite Thatcher’s revolutionary attempt to shift responsibility back onto individuals and families, …the welfare state has grown and grown. Since 1948, welfare spending has risen from £11bn to well over £200bn, in today’s money – that’s 18 times more spent on social security than under Clement Attlee’s supposedly socialist Labour government. …spending…has also risen as a proportion of national income from around 4% in 1947 to over 10% by 2019, and is projected to rise to over 12% by 2065. …to sustain even pre-Covid spending habits over the medium term, the Office for Budget Responsibility has estimated that taxes would need to rise by one third in order to stabilise debt… Britain has an ‘inverse pyramid’ society with a minority of working adults sustaining a majority of economically inactive citizens. …when public spending requirements outstrip that growth, there’s a problem.

Since it reflects my Golden Rule, I particularly appreciate the last sentence in the above excerpt.

But I don’t appreciate how recent British Prime Ministers have violated that rule.

Makes me wonder whether Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak are doing more damage to good fiscal policy in the U.K. than George Bush and Donald Trump did to good fiscal policy in the U.S.?

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Thatcher, Lawson, and Pro-Growth Tax Policy

As documented in Commanding Heights: The Battle of Ideas, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan saved their nations from economic malaise and decline.

Today, let’s focus on what happened in the United Kingdom.

Economic liberty greatly increased during the Thatcher years.

She deserves the lion’s share of the credit for the U.K.’s economic rebirth and renaissance, but she also had the wisdom to appoint some very principled and very capable people to her cabinet.

Such as Nigel Lawson, who served as her Chancellor of the Exchequer (akin to a combined Treasury Secretary/OMB Director in the U.S.).

Lawson died last week, leading to many tributes to his role is resuscitating the U.K. economy.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial summarized his achievements.

…our problems are solvable, as they were a half century ago. One of those crucial problem solvers was British politician Nigel Lawson, who died this week at age 91. …the 1970s…was even more miserable in the United Kingdom than it was in the U.S. By the time Margaret Thatcher led the Tories into office in May 1979, inflation was raging and the country had been wracked by strikes in its “winter of discontent”… Lawson entered Thatcher’s administration… He made his historic mark as Chancellor of the Exchequer starting in 1983. He’s best known for his tax reforms, which reduced the top personal income-tax rate to 40% from 60% and brought the top corporate rate to 35% from a 1970s high of 52%. He also was a steward of the Thatcher administration’s privatizations of large state-owned firms and the “Big Bang” financial reforms that would transform London into a global financial center.

In a column for CapX, Madsen Pirie examines Lawson’s work.

Nigel Lawson left a huge legacy. Under his stewardship Britain went from being the sick man of Europe into becoming an economic powerhouse and one of the world’s leading economies. He is regarded by many as the finest Chancellor of the 20th century… Lord Lawson held the firm conviction that lower taxes created space for enterprise and opportunity, and made it his policy that in every Budget he would lower the burden of taxation and abolish at least one tax. …During his tenure, Britain was transformed from being an economy in which most major businesses and services were owned and run by the state, into one in which they became private businesses, paying taxes instead of receiving taxpayer subsidies. Failing and outdated state enterprises became modern, successful private ones. …His 1988 Budget…announced that all taxes above 40% would be abolished, and that the basic rate would be cut to 25%, its lowest for 50 years… Within a very short time, more money was coming into the Treasury from the lower rates than it had been taking in from the higher ones. It was a vindication of the Laffer Curve. …The top 10% of earners had been paying 35% of the total income tax take. Under Lawson’s lower rate that went up to 48%. In rough terms this meant that the top 10% went from paying just over a third to just under a half of total income taxes.

In other words, the lower tax rates in the U.K. had the same positive impact as the lower tax rates in the U.S., both in terms of encouraging growth and confirming the Laffer Curve.

But let’s not forget that there also was spending restraint during the Thatcher years, particularly when Lawson was Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Just like we got spending restraint during the Reagan years.

The moral of the story is that it’s great to have good leaders, and it’s great when those leaders appoint good people.

P.S. If you want the U.S. equivalent of Nigel Lawson, the best historical example would be Andrew Mellon.

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Phantom Austerity at the U.K.’s Government-Run Health System

I often bemoan the fact that government intervention has created an expensive and inefficient health system in the United States.

But that does not mean I want a total government takeover of the health sector like in the United Kingdom.

Given the problems with the U.K.’s National Health Service, that would be like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Interestingly, many folks on the left also recognize that the NHS has problems. But they claim that long waiting lines and needless deaths are the result of too little money.

For example, in a column for the New York Times, Allyson Pollock and Peter Roderick complain that their country’s government-run health system is being starved of funding.

…you don’t have to work in a hospital to know that Britain’s N.H.S. is in the most serious crisis of its history; you just have to be injured, or ill. Thousands of people are estimated to have died in the last year because of overwhelmed ambulance and emergency services. There are 7.2 million people in England, more than 10 percent of the population, on waiting lists for treatments… That the flagship health care service of one of the wealthiest countries in the world is in such a state is shocking, but not without explanation. Decades of marketization, 10 years of Conservative austerity and a pandemic have hollowed out the N.H.S… A government-commissioned report released last year called the years between 2010 and 2020 the N.H.S.’s “decade of neglect.” …The N.H.S. as Britons have known it — accessible, free at the point of use, cherished — is becoming something else. But as long as there are still people willing to fight for it, it’s not too late to save it.

If you read the full column, you might notice something very odd.

The authors share lots of data about the poor performance of the U.K.’s government-run system. And they share some good data about patient dissatisfaction.

But when they complain about how this is the fault of austerity, they don’t share any numbers.

That made me very suspicious, sort of like the dog that didn’t bark from Sherlock Holmes.

So I want to the website for the U.K. Office of National Statistics and found the data showing the breakdown of annual government spending and I looked at the numbers for health expenditures.

Lo and behold, there was no austerity.

If you look closely, there was a very brief slowdown in the rate of growth starting in about 2010, but there were never budget cuts.

Indeed, the burden of NHS spending grew by an average of more than 6.7 percent over the past 25 years – much faster than inflation over the same period.

The moral of the story is that the NHS is doing a lousy job, but it’s not because of a shrinking budget.

It’s failing because big government is bad government (the same lesson we learn when looking at more government and lousy results in the United States).

P.S. I mentioned at the start of the column that I don’t like the current health system in America and that I also don’t like the idea of a British-style system. If you want to know the better approach, click here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

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A Case Study on Corporate Tax and Competitiveness

Last year’s three-part series on corporate tax rates (here, here, and here) primarily focused on the case for low rates in the United States.

Today, we’re going to look at why the United Kingdom should have a low corporate tax rate.

Though the arguments don’t change simply because we cross the Atlantic Ocean.

A low corporate tax rate is a good idea because it means more investment, higher productivity, and better wages.

That’s true in the U.S., it’s true in the U.K., and its true in every other nation.

If you want evidence, Phil Radford’s article for CapX explains why the U.K.’s pharmaceutical industry has contracted while Ireland’s has expanded.

AstraZeneca’s plan to build a $350m pharmaceuticals factory in Ireland rather than the UK was 100% predictable. …the long-term failure of UK pharma highlights how UK policy discussion is light years behind our competitors when it comes to understanding what drives prosperity. …The trend kicked off back in 2011, when US-based Pfizer shifted its Viagra-making plant from Sandwich in Kent to Ringaskiddy, near Cork. This event marked the start of a five-year plunge in UK pharma manufacturing and exports… According to ONS, output in UK pharma manufacturing declined by roughly one-third from 2010 to 2015. Gross value added actually halved. Where did the manufacturing go? Ireland… What’s caused this malady? In a word: taxation. …corporate taxation levels appear to exert a dominating effect on where pharmaceuticals companies locate their factories. …Ireland’s corporate tax rate fell from 40% in 1996 to 12.5%n 2003, and it has stayed at that level for the past 19 years. Meanwhile, the UK’s corporate taxation rate was 30% 20 years ago, and from 2008 it began a gentle drift downwards to 19% where it will remain until April this year, when it will increase to 25%. This means, from AstraZeneca’s point of view, the investment equation is a no-brainer. Even if Ireland is forced to raise its rate to 15%, the country will shortly regain its general comparative level of between one-half and two-thirds the UK rate.

The data in Radford’s article is a damning indictment of the supposedly conservative government in the United Kingdom.

A few years ago, the corporate tax rate was 19 percent and expected to drop to 17 percent. Now, thanks to an unwillingness to control spending, the rate is jumping to 25 percent.

And, as noted in the article, the U.K. lost a $350 million factory. As well as all the jobs and taxable income that it would have generated.

Politicians are winning and people are losing.

P.S. Biden wants to make the same mistake.

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The Continuing Failure of Government-Run Healthcare in the United Kingdom

I’m routinely critical of the many ways that government intervention has created an expensive and inefficient health system in the United States.

But there are countries where government causes even greater problems. So when I want to feel good about America’s clunky healthcare system, I look at the mess across the ocean.

The United Kingdom has a socialist health system. And it’s real socialism, with government running the hospitals and employing the doctors and nurses.

And this produces predictably bad results.

I’ve shared numerous horror stories about that approach (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), but this report from David Parsley is so astounding that even some of my knee-jerk leftist friends may reconsider their support for big government.

Ukrainian refugees who travelled to the UK to escape the war are risking their lives by returning to their homeland to seek urgent medical treatments after giving up on the NHS. Due the NHS pressures and long waiting lists for procedures, Ukrainians living with families across the UK are taking the perilous trip back into a war zone where they are treated by doctors immediately despite Russian bombardments of their towns and cities. …Maiia Habruk escaped Kyiv last spring along with around five million fellow citizens and found a safe haven with a couple in south east London. But she returned to Ukraine in mid-December after failing to get the treatment she needed from her local hospital in Lewisham. …She decided the only way to get the treatment she believed she required was to make the 24-hour trip back to Ukraine, which includes a flight to Poland and a long and dangerous train journey to Kyiv. …Maiia, who witnessed almost daily bombing raids by the Russians while in Kyiv, knows three other Ukrainians in London who sought emergency health procedures back in their war-torn country due to the lack of availability of quick treatment from the NHS.

These people were engaging in cost-benefit analysis. They compared the risk of death, injury, or suffering from Russian bombs to the risk of death, injury, or suffering from languishing on a waiting list in the United Kingdom.

And they decided Russian bombs were the better option.

This disaster is attracting attention in other nations. The Wall Street Journal opined two days ago about the NHS.

The American left can’t seem to quit its desire for single-payer Medicare for All. So it’s worth noting that the United Kingdom, which already has a system resembling that socialist dream, is rethinking it amid another winter of healthcare misery. …Waiting times for ambulances for the most serious calls are getting longer, with the average response time reaching 10 minutes 57 seconds in December, compared to a target of seven. Once patients reach the emergency room, 35% now face waits above four hours… As of November, some 7.2 million patients have been referred for treatment but are waiting for it to start. Of those, 2.9 million have been waiting more than 18 weeks. The NHS considers itself a success if it starts treatment within that four-month window, which is the epitome of defining failure down. …Excess deaths in 2022 were the most since 1951, excluding the pandemic. …The U.S. suffers a chronic problem of healthcare financing but not of health-care delivery. Britain shows that with single-payer you end up with both. The U.K. also shows that single-payer’s biggest victims are low-income people who can’t afford to opt out.

Yet there are nonetheless American politicians who want to copy this failed system.

Allister Heath of the U.K.-based Telegraph has a grim assessment of his nation’s government-run system.

…the NHS is finished. It is broken beyond repair, ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands, and threatening the social fabric and economic performance of our nation. …this 75-year experiment in health socialism has failed appallingly, culminating in a surge in excess deaths, waiting lists that aren’t worthy of a civilised nation, inhumane strikes, intolerable delays for ambulances, explicit rationing… NHS spending is up 12 per cent in real terms since 2019-20; there are 13 per cent more doctors and 11 per cent more nurses, and yet the service delivered 5 per cent fewer treatments in the first nine months of 2022 than in the same period in 2019. …Its six pillars – that it is “free” at the point of use, the full state ownership of hospitals, its complete dependence on taxpayer funding, its supposed culture of altruism, its nature as a shared moral project uniting rich and poor, and its centrally planned workforce – are the very causes of its disintegration.

P.S. I can’t resist some closing comments about the politics of government-run health care.

The first story cited above includes these comments from left-of-center U.K. politicians.

Labour’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting told i “Vladimir Putin is dropping bombs on Ukrainian hospitals, yet patients are travelling back to Kyiv rather than face NHS waiting lists. …Liberal Democrat health spokesperson Daisy Cooper said: “It’s a damning indictment of the government’s record on the NHS that Ukrainian refugees are returning to a war-torn country to access health care.”

Accurate criticisms, to be sure. But both Labour and the Lib Dems simply want to dump more money in the system.

But the so-called Conservative Party does exactly the same thing, as the Wall Street Journal noted in its editorial.

Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2021 pledged an additional £36 billion over three years for the NHS and related home and nursing-home care, funded by a payroll-tax increase. Mr. Sunak and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt followed in November with another £3.3 billion a year for the next two years.

And Allister Heath made a similar observation in his column.

The Cameron-May-Johnson survival strategy was to “neutralise” the NHS by refusing to contemplate difficult reforms, genuflecting endlessly at its altar, prioritising it in every Budget, greatly boosting its funding after Brexit and worshipping it hysterically during the lockdowns; yet, in the end, it was the NHS that neutralised the Tories. Small-state, high-growth Toryism is incompatible with an unreconstructed NHS, with its need for ever-higher taxes. How long will the Conservatives continue to lie to themselves about this?

This is a good opportunity to revisit my “what’s the alternative?” argument.

Self-styled right-of-center parties have to choose whether to become tax collectors for the welfare state or whether to push for entitlement reform. There’s no other alternative.

P.P.S. There is one group of people who are net winners from the U.K.’s government-run system.

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Best and Worst News of 2022

Continuing a tradition that began back in 2013, let’s look at the best and worst developments of the past year.

Since I try to be optimistic (notwithstanding forces and evidence to the contrary), let’s start with the good news.

I’ll start by mentioning that we will now have gridlock in Washington. That’s probably a positive development, but I’ll explore that issue tomorrow as part of my “Hopes and Fears” column for 2023.

For today, let’s focus on three concrete developments from 2022 that unambiguously are positive.

States cutting tax rates and enacting tax reform – Since I’m a long-time advocate for better tax policy, I’m very pleased that more states are moving in the right direction. I especially like that the flat tax club is expanding. I’m also amused that a bad thing (massive handouts from Washington) backfired on the left (because many states decided to cut taxes rather than squander the money on new spending).

Chileans vote against a statist constitution – There was horrible news in 2021 when Chileans voted a hard-core leftist into the presidency. But we got very good news this year when the same voters overwhelmingly rejected a proposed constitution that would have dramatically expanded the power of government.

More families have school choice – Just like last year, we can celebrate that there was more progress on education this year. In 2021, West Virginia led the way. In 2022, Arizona was the best example. And we’ll discuss tomorrow why there are reasons to be optimistic about 2023.

Now let’s shift to the bad news of 2022.

I thought about listing inflation, which definitely caused a lot of economic damage this year. But the bad monetary policy actually occurred in 2020 and 2021 when central bankers overreacted to the pandemic.

So I’m going to write instead about bad things that specifically happened in 2022.

Biden semi-successfully expands the burden of government – The president was able to push through several bad proposals, such as the so-called Inflation Reduction Act and some cronyist subsidies for the tech industry. Nothing nearly as bad as his original “build back better” scheme, but nonetheless steps in the wrong direction.

The collapse of small-government conservatism in the United Kingdom – Just as today’s Republicans have deviated from Reaganism, the Conservatives in the United Kingdom have deviated from Thatcherism. Except even worse. Republicans in the USA acquiesce to higher spending. Tories in the UK acquiesce to higher spending and higher taxes.

Massachusetts voters opt for class warfare – Starting tomorrow, Massachusetts no longer will have a flat tax of 5 percent. That’s because voters narrowly approved a class-warfare based referendum to replace the flat tax with a new “progressive” system with a top rate of 9 percent. Though bad news for the state’s economy will be offset by good news for moving companies.

P.S. I almost forget to mention that the best thing about 2022 occurred on January 10 when the Georgia Bulldogs defeated Alabama to win the national championship of college football.

P.P.S. While 2022 was a mixed bag, history buffs may be interested in knowing that it was the 100th anniversary of a big tax rate reduction (top rate lowered from 73 percent to 58 percent) implemented in 1922 during the under-appreciated presidency of Warren Harding.

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Convergence and Divergence for the United Kingdom

I’m a big believer in looking at long-run trends, particularly whether countries are experiencing convergence of divergence with regards to per-capita economic output.

Poor nations normally should grow faster than rich nations, so we can learn a lot when we see exceptions to this rule based on several decades of data.

• Why does/did South Korea out-perform North Korea?
• Why does/did Chile out-perform Venezuela?
• Why does/did the United States out-perform Western Europe?
• Why does/did West Germany out-perform East Germany?
• Why does/did Hong Kong out-perform Cuba?
• Why does/did Taiwan out-perform China?

I think the answer to these questions is obvious, for what it’s worth.

Today, let’s consider another example. Mike Bird of the U.K.-based Economist tweeted about how the United Kingdom is diverging from Australia.

Since Australia and the United Kingdom have similar levels of economic liberty, some people speculate the divergence we’re seeing has a lot to do with regional economic performance.

That makes some sense. Many of Australia’s trading partners are fast-growing nations in East Asia. More specifically, those countries have been buying a lot of of natural resources from Australian producers.

The United Kingdom, by contrast, has a lot of trade with Europe’s slow-growing nations.

The above chart is based on household disposable income.

So I decided to also check the Maddison database to see whether there were similar changes to per-capita GDP.

The charts don’t match exactly, but the trends are similar (I added the Czech Republic since it was mentioned in the tweet).

So is this the end of the story?

Not exactly. My next step was to add Switzerland to see whether trade with Europe dooms a nation to divergence.

Lo and behold, it is diverging with Australia, but in a positive way. It’s getting comparatively richer over time, just the opposite of what we see in the United Kingdom.

So maybe the real lesson is that there’s more prosperity – and the right kind of divergence – in nations with greater levels of economic liberty.

And Switzerland surely is a good role model for policy.

I’ll close with a couple of caveats. The level of economic liberty is important, but it does not tell us everything. Likewise, the level of growth in neighboring nations is important, but it does not tell us everything. Moreover, I normally like looking at four or five decades of data rather than just 20 years.

All that being said, I’m definitely not optimistic about the long-run outlook in the United Kingdom.

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In Five Sentences, Everything You Need to Know about Bureaucracy

One thing that became very apparent during the pandemic is that government schools are mostly run for the benefit of bureaucrats rather than students.

Not that any of us should have been surprised.

The same is true for other government bureaucracies, as well as parts of the private sector where there is a lot of government intervention that subsidizes featherbedding.

What’s especially galling is when budget increases are used to hire more bureaucrats, yet taxpayers get nothing of value in exchanges.

That’s certainly the case in the United States, where education bureaucracies (and education spending) have dramatically increased, yet there has been no concomitant increase in educational outcomes.

Another examples come from the United Kingdom where the government-run National Health Service gets more money and more bureaucrats every year, as explained in CapX by Fiona Bulmer, yet there’s never an improvement in health outcomes.

Indeed, these five sentences are a perfect example of government bureaucracies in action.

…the NHS in England employs the full time equivalent of 1.2 million people, nearly 200,000 more than they did in 2012.

…in 2021, the NHS was around 16% less productive than before the pandemic.

…one of the managers lamented to me that he could schedule a maximum of four knee operations a day but in the private sector they manage eight a day. 

…7m people on NHS waiting lists.

The NHS, like all organisations where users have no choice defaults to accommodating the providers not the consumers.

I’m left with two conclusions after reading those depressing numbers.

• First, the Conservative Party is unwilling to do anything to restrain spending on the NHS (or any other part of the UK budget), which is why their main role nowadays is to be the tax collectors for the welfare state.
• Second, the so-called national conservatives in the United States, given their dirigiste policy agenda of more intervention and more government spending, seem to want a very similar fate for the United States.

The obvious takeaway, as I’ve previously noted, is that if you don’t want massive future tax increases, there’s no alternative to what critics call “free-market fundamentalism.”

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The Tragic Triumph of Big-Government Conservatism in the United Kingdom

In the past couple of months, I’ve repeatedly addressed the fiscal and economic mess in the United Kingdom.

Today, we’re going to zoom out and identify the main cause of all the problems.

If you look at the annual budget numbers published by the Treasury Department in the United Kingdom, the first thing to notice is that there was a big surge of spending for the pandemic.

One can certainly argue that pandemic-related spending was necessary to deal with a one-time emergency.

Indeed, the same thing happened in the United States.

This second chart, however, shows the real problem with fiscal policy in the United Kingdom. Politicians have used the one-time emergency has an excuse to impose a permanent increase in the country’s spending burden.

This is an indictment of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s profligacy.

Johnson was then replaced by the short-lived Liz Truss, who proposed lower taxes but offered no plan to restrain spending.

And now the new Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, seems committed to an ongoing policy of higher taxes to finance permanently larger government.

In an article for Reuters, William Schomberg reports that the Chancellor of the Exchequer (akin to the U.S. Treasury Secretary) apparently thinks higher taxes are needed to save the economy.

British finance minister Jeremy Hunt said he will have to raise taxes in next week’s budget plan in order to fix the public finances and soften a potentially long recession… “This is going to be a big moment of choice for the country and we will put people ahead of ideology,” Hunt told the Sunday Times in an interview. …Hunt and Sunak are trying to prepare their Conservative Party for the tax increases which could reignite tensions in the party… Hunt was also considering a multi-billion-pound package of support to shield pensioners and benefit claimants from higher power bills, the newspaper said.

At the risk of understatement, Jeremy Hunt knows nothing about economics. Or history.

I wish a reporter would ask him to name a single country, at any point in world history, that achieved more prosperity by raising taxes and increasing the burden of government spending.

I’ll close with a couple of additional observation.

• The U.K.’s version of the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, deserves the lion’s share of the blame for the nation’s shaky financial markets.
• The Sunak-Hunt approach of bigger government inevitably will mean slower growth and less prosperity for the people of the United Kingdom.

P.S. I never thought I would be reminiscing fondly about the fiscal policies of David Cameron and Theresa May.

P.P.S. But Margaret Thatcher is still the gold standard for responsible U.K. fiscal policy.

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European Fiscal Policy Week, Part IV: Bad U.K. Monetary Policy Leads to Bad U.K. Fiscal Policy

I was excited about the possibility of pro-growth tax policy during the short-lived reign of Liz Truss as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

However, I’m now pessimistic about the nation’s outlook. Truss was forced to resign and big-government Tories (akin to big-government Republicans) are back in charge.

As part of my “European Fiscal Policy Week,” let’s take a closer look at what happened and analyze the pernicious role of the Bank of England (the BoE is their central bank, akin to the Federal Reserve in the U.S.).

Let’s start with a reminder that the Bank of England panicked during the pandemic and (like the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank) engaged in dramatic monetary easing.

That was understandable in the spring of 2020, perhaps, but it should have been obvious by the late summer that the world was not coming to an end.

Yet the BoE continued with its easy-money policy. The balance sheet kept expanding all of 2020, even after vaccines became available.

And, as shown by the graph, the easy-money approach continued into early 2021 (and the most-recent figures show the BoE continued its inflationary policy into mid-2021).

Needless to say, all of that bad monetary policy led to bad results. Not only 10 percent annual inflation, but also a financial system made fragile by artificially low interest rates and excess liquidity.

So how does any of this relate to fiscal policy?

As the Wall Street Journal explained in an editorial on October 10, the BoE’s bad monetary policy produced instability in financial markets and senior bureaucrats at the Bank cleverly shifted the blame to then-Prime Minster Truss’ tax plan.

Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey is trying to stabilize pension funds, which are caught on the shoals of questionable hedging strategies as the high water of loose monetary policy recedes. …The BOE is supposed to be tightening policy to fight inflation at 40-year highs and claims these emergency bond purchases aren’t at odds with its plans to let £80 billion of assets run off its balance sheet over the next year. But BOE officials now seem confused about what they’re doing. …No wonder markets doubt the BOE’s resolve on future interest-rate increases. Undeterred, the bank is resorting to the familiar bureaucratic imperative for self-preservation. Mr. Cunliffe’s letter is at pains to blame Mr. Kwarteng’s fiscal plan for market ructions. His colleagues Jonathan Haskel and Dave Ramsden —all three are on the BOE’s policy-setting committee—have picked up the theme in speeches that blame market turbulence on a “U.K.-specific component.” This is code for Ms. Truss’s agenda. …Mr. Bailey doesn’t help his credibility or the bank’s independence by politicizing the institution.

In a column for Bloomberg, Narayana Kocherlakota also points a finger at the BoE.

And what’s remarkable is that Kocherlakota is the former head of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve and central bankers normally don’t criticize each other.

Markets didn’t oust Truss, the Bank of England did — through poor financial regulation and highly subjective crisis management. …The common wisdom is that financial markets “punished” Truss’s government for its fiscal profligacy. But the chastisement was far from universal. Over the three days starting Sept. 23, when the Truss government announced its mini-budget, the pound fell by 2.2% relative to the euro, and the FTSE 100 stock index declined by 2.2% — notable movements, but hardly enough to bring a government to its knees. The big change came in the price of 30-year UK government bonds, also known as gilts, which experienced a shocking 23% drop. Most of this decline had nothing to do with rational investors revising their beliefs about the UK’s long-run prospects. Rather, it stemmed from financial regulators’ failure to limit leverage in UK pension funds. …The Bank of England, as the entity responsible for overseeing the financial system, bears at least part of the blame for this catastrophe. …the Truss government…was thwarted not by markets, but by a hole in financial regulation — a hole that the Bank of England proved strangely unwilling to plug.

Last but not least, an October 18 editorial by the Wall Street Journal provides additional information.

When the history of Britain’s recent Trussonomics fiasco is written, make sure Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey gets the chapter he deserves. …The BOE has been late and slow fighting inflation… Mr. Bailey’s actions in the past month have also politicized the central bank…in a loquacious statement that coyly suggested the fiscal plan would be inflationary—something Mr. Kwarteng would have disputed. …Meanwhile, members of the BOE’s policy-setting committee fanned out to imply markets might be right to worry about the tax cuts. If this was part of a strategy to influence fiscal policy, it worked. …Mr. Bailey may have been taking revenge against Ms. Truss, who had criticized the BOE for its slow response to inflation as she ran to be the Conservative Party leader this summer. Her proposed response was to consider revisiting the central bank’s legal mandate. The BOE’s behavior the past month has proven her right beyond what she imagined.

So what are the implications of the BoE’s responsibility-dodging actions?

• First, we should learn a lesson about the importance of good monetary policy. None of this mess would have happened if the BoE had not created financial instability with an inflationary approach.
• Second, we should realize that there are downsides to central bank independence. Historically, being insulated from politics has been viewed as the prudent approach since politicians can’t try to artificially goose an economy during election years. But Bailey’s unethical behavior shows that there is also a big downside.

Sadly, all of this analysis does not change the fact that tax cuts are now off the table in the United Kingdom. Indeed, the new Prime Minister and his Chancellor of the Exchequer have signaled that they will continue Boris Johnson’s pro-tax agenda.

That’s very bad news for the United Kingdom.

P.S. There used to be at least one sensible central banker in the United Kingdom.

P.P.S. But since sensible central bankers are a rare breed, maybe the best approach is to get government out of the business of money.

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The Big Question for Tories (and Republicans): What’s the Alternative to “Free-Market Fundamentalism”?

Because of her support for lower tax rates, I was excited when Liz Truss became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Especially since her predecessor, Boris Johnson, turned out to be an empty-suit populist who supported higher taxes and a bigger burden of government spending.

But I’m not excited anymore.

Indeed, it’s more accurate to say that I’m despondent since the Prime Minister is abandoning (or is being pressured to abandon) key parts of her pro-growth agenda.

For details, check out this Bloomberg report, written by Julian Harris, about the (rapidly disappearing) tax-cutting agenda of the new British Prime Minister.

Westminster’s most hard-line advocates of free markets and lower taxes are looking on in despair as their agenda crumbles… When Liz Truss became prime minister just over five weeks ago, she promised to deliver a radical set of policies rooted in laissez-faire economics — an attempt to boost the UK‘s sluggish rate of growth. Yet her chancellor of the exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, faced a quick reality check when his mini-budget, packed with unfunded tax cuts and unaccompanied by independent forecasts, …triggered mayhem… Truss fired Kwarteng and replaced him with Jeremy Hunt as she was forced into a dramatic u-turn over her tax plans. …Truss conceded…and dropped her plan to freeze corporation tax. …Still, some believers are sticking by “Trussonomics”…Patrick Minford,..a professor at Cardiff University, said..“Liz Truss’s policies for growth are absolutely right, and to be thrown off them by a bit of market turbulence is insane.” …Eamonn Butler, co-founder of the Adam Smith Institute, similarly insisted that Truss “is not the source of the problem — she’s trying to cure the problem.”

Eamonn is right.

The United Kingdom faces serious economic challenges. But the problems are the result of bad government policies that already exist rather than the possibility of some future tax cuts.

In a column for the Telegraph, Allister Heath says the U.K.’s central bank deserves a big chunk of the blame.

Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng have been doubly unlucky. While almost everybody else in Britain remained in denial, they correctly identified this absurd game for the con-trick that it truly was, warned that it was about to implode and pledged to replace it with a more honest system. Instead of a zombie economy based on rising asset prices and fake, debt-fuelled growth, their mission was to encourage Britain to produce more real goods and services, to work harder and invest more by reforming taxes and regulation. What happened next is dispiriting in the extreme. …Truss and her Chancellor moved too quickly and, paradoxically, given their warnings about the rottenness of the system, ended up pulling out the last block from the Jenga tower, sending all of the pieces tumbling down. …they didn’t crash the economy – it was about to come tumbling down anyway – but they had the misfortune of precipitating and accelerating the day of reckoning. …Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England…, has been deeply unimpressive in all of this, helping to keep interest rates too low… The idea, now accepted so widely, that the price of money must be kept extremely low and quantitative easing deployed at every opportunity has undermined every aspect of the economy and society. …Too few people realise how terribly the easy money, high tax, high regulation orthodoxy has failed.

Allister closes with some speculation about possible alternatives. If the Tories in the U.K. decide to reject so-called “free-market fundamentalism,” what’s their alternative?

He thinks the Labour Party will take control, and with very bad results. Jeremy Corbyn will not be in charge, but his economic policies will get enacted.

If Truss is destroyed, the alternative won’t even be social democracy: it will be Labour, the hard Left, the full gamut of punitive taxation, including of wealth and housing, and even more spending, culminating rapidly in economic oblivion.

That is an awful scenario. Basically turning the United Kingdom into Greece.

I want to take a different approach, though, and contemplate what will happen if the Conservative Party rejects the Truss approach and embraces big-government conservatism.

Here are some questions I’d like them to answer:

• Do you want improved competitiveness and more economic growth?
• If you want more growth, which of your spending increases will lead to those outcomes?
• Which of your tax increases will lead to more competitiveness or more prosperity?
• Will you reform benefit programs to avert built-in spending increases caused by an aging population?
• If you won’t reform entitlements, which taxes will you increase to keep debt under control?
• If you don’t plan major tax increases, do you think the economy can absorb endless debt?

I’m asking these questions for two reasons. First, there are no good answers and I’d like to shame big-government Tories into doing the right thing.

Second, these questions are also very relevant in the United States. Even since the Reagan years, opponents of libertarian economic policies have flitted from one trendy idea to another (national conservatism, compassionate conservatism, kinder-and-gentler conservatism, common-good capitalism, reform conservatism, etc).

To be fair, they usually don’t try to claim their dirigiste policies will produce higher living standards. Instead, they blindly assert that it will be easier to win elections if Republicans abandon Reaganism.

So I’ll close by observing that Ronald Reagan won two landslide elections and his legacy was strong enough that voters then elected another Republican (the same can’t be said for big-government GOPers like Nixon, Bush, Bush, or Trump).

Switching back to the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher repeatedly won election and her legacy was strong enough that voters then elected another Conservative.

The bottom line is that good policy can lead to good political outcomes, whereas bad policy generally leads to bad political outcomes.

P.S. To be sure, there were times when Reagan’s poll numbers were very bad. And the same is true for Thatcher. But because they pursued good policies, economic growth returned and they reaped political benefits. Sadly, it appears that Truss won’t have a chance to adopt good policy, so we will never know if she also would have benefited from a similar economic renaissance.

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The International Monetary Fund’s Tax-Free Bureaucrats Trying to Sabotage Better Tax Policy in the United Kingdom

It is disappointing that the bureaucrats at the International Monetary Fund routinely advocate for higher taxes and bigger government in nations from all parts of the world (for examples, see here, here, here, here, here, and here).

It is disturbing that the IMF engages in bailouts that encourage bad fiscal policy by governments and reckless lending policies by financial institutions.

And it is disgusting that those IMF bureaucrats get tax-free salaries and are thus exempt from the damaging consequences of those misguided policies.

One set of rules for the peasants and one set of rules for the elite.

The latest example of IMF misbehavior revolves around the bureaucracy’s criticism of recently announced tax cuts in the United Kingdom.

A BBC report by Natalie Sherman and Tom Espiner summarizes the controversy.

The International Monetary Fund has openly criticised the UK government over its plan for tax cuts…In an unusually outspoken statement, the IMF said the proposal was likely to increase inequality and add to pressures pushing up prices. …Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng unveiled the country’s biggest tax package in 50 years on Friday. But the £45bn cut has sparked fears that government borrowing could surge along with interest rates. …Lord Frost, the former Brexit minister and close ally of Prime Minister Liz Truss, criticised the IMF’s statement. …”The IMF has consistently advocated highly conventional economic policies. It is following this approach that has produced years of slow growth and weak productivity. The only way forward for Britain is lower taxes, spending restraint, and significant economic reform.” …Moody’s credit rating agency said on Wednesday that the UK’s plan for “large unfunded tax cuts” was “credit negative” and would lead to higher, persistent deficits “amid rising borrowing costs [and] a weaker growth outlook”. Moody’s did not change the UK’s credit rating.

So what should be done about the IMF’s misguided interference?

Writing for the Spectator in the U.K., Kate Andrews has some observations about the underlying philosophical and ideological conflict..

…the International Monetary Fund has weighed in on the UK’s mini-Budget, offering a direct rebuke of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s tax cuts. …its spokesperson said…‘Given elevated inflation pressures in many countries, including the UK, we do not recommend large and untargeted fiscal packages at this juncture’… But this rebuke from the IMF is the kind of battle the Truss camp might be happy to have. …The IMF takes a political stance on inequality, viewing its reduction as a good thing in itself. Truss and Kwarteng reject this premise – summed up in the Chancellor’s statement last Friday when he called for the end of redistribution politics – and think it’s far more important to focus on ‘growing the size of the pie.’ The IMF’s ‘intervention’ is likely to become an example of the ‘Treasury orthodoxy’ that Truss was so vocal about during the leadership campaign: her belief that a left-wing economic consensus will not tolerate any meaningful shake-up of the tax code or supply-side reform.

Truss and Kwarteng are correct to reject the IMF’s foolish – and immoral – fixation on inequality.

All you really need to know is that the IMF publishes research implying it is okay to hurt poor people if rich people are hurt by a greater amount.

Let’s close by addressing whether tax cuts are bad for Britain’s currency and financial markets

Paul Marshall explained the interaction (and non-interaction) of fiscal and monetary policy in a column for the U.K.-based Financial Times.

Since 2010, the G7 policy framework has been one of tight fiscal and loose monetary policy. …This combination of fiscal austerity and monetary largesse has not been a success. Austerity has not prevented government debt ratios steadily climbing to historic highs. …Meanwhile quantitative easing has fuelled asset inflation for the super-rich and has more or less abolished risk pricing in financial markets. And…it has produced inflation which is still out of control. But now the global policy consensus is in the process of pivoting… A distinctive feature of the UK’s fiscal pivot is the emphasis on reducing the burden of tax on work and business. This is sensible. …the bigger problem for Liz Truss’s government is the Bank of England. It seems that the governor, Andrew Bailey, did not get the memo. Our central bank has been behind the curve since inflation first started to rise sharply in 2021. …The Bank of England effectively lost control of the UK bond market last Thursday when it raised interest rates by 50 basis points, instead of the 75bp that the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank raised by. Its timidity is now having an impact on both the gilt market and sterling. That is the essential context for the market reaction to the mini-Budget. Once you lose market confidence, it is doubly hard to win it back. …a more muscular stance from the BoE to underpin financial market confidence in the UK, even at the expense of some short-term pain.

He is right.

The Bank of England should be focused on trying to unwind its mistaken monetary policy that produced rising prices. That’s the approach that will strengthen the currency.

And Truss and Kwarteng should continue their efforts for better tax policy so the economy can grow faster.

But better tax policy needs to be accompanied by much-need spending restraint, which is what the United Kingdom enjoyed not only during the Thatcher years, but also under Prime Ministers Cameron and May.

P.S. The IMF also interfered in British politics when it tried to sabotage Brexit.

P.P.S. One obvious takeaway is that the IMF should be eliminated.

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The Much-Needed Reincarnation of Thatchernomics

I strongly supported Brexit in part because I wanted the United Kingdom to have both the leeway and the incentive to adopt pro-market policies.

Imagine my disappointment, then, when subsequent Conservative Prime Ministers did nothing (Theresa May) or expanded the burden of government (Boris Johnson).

Where was the reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher? Didn’t the Tory Party understand the need to restrain big government?

Perhaps my prayers have finally been answered. After jettisoning Boris Johnson (albeit for scandal rather than bad policy), the Tories elected Liz Truss to lead the nation.

And she appointed Kwasi Kwarteng to be Chancellor of the Exchequer (akin to U.S. Treasury Secretary). The two of them have just unveiled some major changes in U.K. fiscal policy.

Allister Heath’s editorial for the Telegraph has a celebratory tone.

…the best Budget I have ever heard a British Chancellor deliver, by a massive margin. The tax cuts were so huge and bold, the language so extraordinary, that at times, listening to Kwasi Kwarteng, I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, that I hadn’t been transported to a distant land that actually believed in the economics of Milton Friedman and FA Hayek. …The neo-Brownite consensus of the past 20 years, the egalitarian, redistributionist obsession, the technocratic centrism, the genuflections at the altar of a bogus class war, the spreadsheet-wielding socialists: all were blown to smithereens by Kwarteng’s stunning neo-Reaganite peroration. …All the taboos have been defiled: the fracking ban, the performative 45pc tax rate, the malfunctioning bonus cap, the previous gang’s nihilistic corporation tax and national insurance raids. The basic rate of income tax is being cut, as is stamp duty, that dumbest of levies. …Reforms of this order of magnitude should really have happened after the referendum in 2016, or after Boris Johnson became Prime Minister in 2019… Truss..has a fighting chance to save Britain, and her party, from oblivion.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial has a similarly hopeful tone while also explaining the difference between good supply-side policies and failed Keynesian demand-side policies.

This is a pro-growth agenda that is very different than the tax-and spend Keynesianism that has dominated the West’s economic policies for nearly two decades. …Mr. Kwarteng axed the 2.5-percentage-point increase in the payroll tax imposed by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and canceled a planned increase in the corporate income tax rate to 26% from 19%. …Kwarteng also surprised by eliminating the 45% tax rate on incomes above £150,000. The top marginal rate now will be 40%… A frequent complaint is that there’s no evidence tax cuts for corporations or higher earners will boost demand. Maybe not, but that’s also not the point. Britain doesn’t need a Keynesian demand-side stimulus. It needs the supply-side jolt Ms. Truss is trying to deliver by changing incentives to work and invest. A parallel complaint from the same crowd is that Ms. Truss’s policies—which they just said won’t stimulate demand—will stimulate so much demand the policies will stoke inflation. This has been the experience with debt-fueled fiscal blowouts since the pandemic, but Ms. Truss’s plan is different. She’s not throwing around money to fund consumption. She’s using the tax code to spur production.

The editorial concludes with a key observations.

Britain has become the most important economic experiment in the developed world because Ms. Truss is the only leader willing to abandon a stale Keynesian policy consensus that has produced stagflation everywhere.

Here’s a tweet that captures the current approach, with “liberal” referring to pro-market classical liberalism.

This is the “Singapore-on-Thames” approach that I’ve been promoting for years. Finally!

In a column for Reason, Robert Jackman gives a relatively optimistic libertarian assessment of what to expect from Truss.

…will her arrival in Downing Street bring an end to the big-state, big-spending style of her predecessor? …Within the Westminster village, Truss has long been regarded as a torchbearer for liberty—a reputation that stretches back to her days working at various small-state think tanks. Since entering Parliament in 2010, she has been a member of the Free Enterprise Group… As trade secretary, Truss was responsible for delivering on the good bit of Brexit—jetting around the world to sign tariff-busting trade deals. She was good at it too, quickly securing ambitious agreements with Australia and Japan. …But will Liz Truss’ premiership put Britain back on track to a smaller state? Some things aren’t that simple. …Truss has long been an advocate of relaxing Britain’s punitive planning laws, which would make it easier to build much-needed homes and energy infrastructure.

As you might expect, the analysis from the U.K.-based Economist left much to be desired.

Liz Truss, Britain’s new prime minister, is now implementing Reaganomics…comprising tax cuts worth perhaps £30bn ($34bn) per year (1.2% of gdp)… The fuel that fiscal stimulus will inject into the economy will almost certainly lead the boe to raise interest rates… No matter, say Ms Truss’s backers, because tax cuts will boost productivity. Didn’t inflation fall and growth surge under Reagan? …Ms Truss’s cheerleaders seem to have read only the first chapter of the history of Reaganomics. The programme’s early record was mixed. The tax cuts did not stop a deep recession, yet by March 1984 annual inflation had risen back to 4.8% and America’s ten-year bond yield was over 12%, reflecting fears of another upward spiral in prices. Inflation was anchored only after Congress had raised taxes. By 1987 America’s budget, excluding interest payments, was nearly balanced. By 1993 Congress had raised taxes by almost as much as it had cut them in 1981.

By the way, the article’s analysis of Reaganomics is laughably inaccurate.

Meanwhile, a report in the New York Times, writtten by Eshe Nelson, Stephen Castle and Mark Landler, also has a skeptical tone.

But I’m surprised and impressed that they admit Thatcher’s policies worked in the 1980s.

Britain’s new prime minister, Liz Truss, gambled on Friday that a heavy dose of tax cuts, deregulation and free-market economics would reignite her country’s growth — a radical shift in policy… the new chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, abandoned a proposed rise in corporate taxation and, in a surprise move, also abolished the top rate of 45 percent of income tax applied to those earning more than 150,000 pounds, or about $164,000, a year. He also cut the basic rate for lower earners and cut taxes on house purchases. …It is hard to overstate the magnitude of the policy shift from Mr. Johnson’s government, which just one year ago had announced targeted tax increases to offset its increased public spending… The chancellor’s statement in Parliament on Friday underscored the free-market, small-state, tax-cutting instincts of Ms. Truss, who has modeled herself on Margaret Thatcher, who was prime minister from 1979 to 1990. Thatcher’s economic revolution in the 1980s turned the economy around.

The article includes 11 very worrisome words.

…so far there has been no indication of corresponding spending cuts.

Amen. Tax cuts are good for growth, but their effectiveness and durability will be in question if there is not a concomitant effort to restrain the burden of spending.

Truss and Kwarteng also should have announced a spending cap, modeled on either the Swiss Debt Brake or Colorado’s TABOR.

P.S. In addition to worrying about whether Truss will copy Thatcher’s track record on spending, I’m also worried about her support for misguided energy subsidies.

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Energy Policy and Big-Government Tories

I don’t like big-government Republicans in the United States, so it naturally follows that I don’t like big-government Tories in the United Kingdom.

Indeed, I wrote just a few days ago about the new leadership race for the Conservative Party in the U.K. and wondered whether either of the candidates has what it takes to reverse Boris Johnson’s failed statism.

I hope one of them is the reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher (just as I’ve been waiting decades for another Ronald Reagan).

We will find out relatively quickly. The race for Prime Minister will be decided next month and I will be very interested to see whether the winner fixes two very foolish energy policies.

The Wall Street Journal has a pair of excellent editorials this month.

On August 18, the paper opined about a bone-headed policy to cap energy bills.

Britain’s ruling Conservatives have imposed some awful energy policies in recent years, but their cap on household energy bills deserves a special mention. The scheme has been an economic loser, and now it’s becoming a political loser in ways that illustrate the dangers when parties of the right play socialism lite. …The cap traces back to…when Tory Prime Minister Theresa May embarked on a campaign to position the Conservatives as a kinder, gentler party. The effort didn’t work politically. In that year’s snap election she lost the majority… But the price-cap notion lived on and she implemented it in 2019. …The cap has exacerbated economic havoc in Britain’s energy market. As global gas and other commodity prices started to rise in 2021, energy retailers found it impossible to pass to consumers the prices retailers were paying for the energy they were supplying. This has contributed to a wave of bankruptcies… Meanwhile, since it only raises prices at a lag rather than limiting them, the cap leaves households frighteningly exposed to recent movements in global gas prices… The moral: Even half-hearted energy price controls are political losers for conservative parties.

It’s worth noting that energy prices are needlessly high in part because of bad government policy.

Which brings us to the WSJ‘s August 12 editorial.

Reports this week point to spiraling costs for households and businesses this winter, pushing millions of Britons closer to poverty. It’s a steep price for climate alarmism. …Politicians are eager to dodge responsibility for this disaster, and Russia offers a convenient excuse. …But these trends are inseparable from Britain’s homegrown fixation with achieving net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050. That’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s worst mistake… Various green charges add £153 to the annual household bill… But other net-zero costs lurk in household energy bills and budgets. The electric grid operator spent about £3.4 billion over the past year…a cost that tends to be higher due to the unreliability of wind and solar, and that’s passed to consumers… Another imponderable is how much lower gas prices would be if Britain produced more itself. Conservative Party administrations have flirted for years with proposals for shale-gas fracking in northern England only to lose their nerve. …So much for those who say conservative parties need to adopt the left’s climate agenda to court younger voters. Net zero has turned the Tories into the party that is impoverishing Britain.

In other words, bad policy is bad politics, which is the mirror image of my contention that good policy is good politics.

We will see whether the Tories have learned that lesson.

P.S. Some otherwise sensible people in the U.S. are flirting with making the same mistake with energy policy. Perhaps the failure of such policies in the U.K. will teach them something (but I won’t hold my breath).

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The United Kingdom Needs another Margaret Thatcher

I was a big fan of Brexit (the United Kingdom voting to leave the European Union), but I’m very disappointed about the subsequent failure to create “Singapore-on-Thames.”

The above clip was my “under-reported story of the week,” as part of the most-recent episode of the Square Circle.

The main argument for Brexit was to escape the European Union, which is destined to become a “transfer union.”

To be more specific, the combination of demographic decline and fiscal decay means the bureaucrats and politicians in Brussels eventually will obtain the power to impose taxes in order to redistribute money to failed economies in places such as Italy and Greece.

Indeed, that process already is underway.

By voting for Brexit, the people of the United Kingdom can escape the sinking ship and thus will not be forced to subsidize the bad policy of other nations.

But there was a second reason to support Brexit, which was to give the U.K. the leeway to become the Singapore of Europe.

Would that be a good outcome? Assuming the goal is more prosperity, the answer unambiguously is yes.

As you can see from the chart, Singapore easily has eclipsed the major countries of Europe.

And the idea that the U.K. might copy Singapore’s pro-market policies has been a big part of the Brexit debate, with libertarians and small-government conservatives cheering the possibility and folks on the left dreading that potential outcome.

Any search engine will find thousands of stories about this topic. Here’s a tiny sampling to give readers a flavor.

Sadly, my friends on the left did not need to worry about the U.K. becoming an outpost of laissez-faire policy.

Boris Johnson won a landslide victory in 2019 by promising the “get Brexit done,” but he then proceeded to raise taxes and expand the burden of government spending.

So what’s the current state of play?

In a story for the Washington Post, William Booth writes that Brexit has been a failure.

Boris Johnson…is…the man who “got Brexit done.” So how is that going? What can be said about the post-Brexit Britain that Johnson is leaving behind? …Most people don’t think Brexit has delivered on its lofty promises… With “get Brexit done” as his slogan, Johnson led his party to a landslide election victory. …he oversaw Britain’s departure from the union with one of the hardest possible versions of Brexit… But the government has struggled to show the benefits. …it is clear that although Brexit has not sunk the British economy, it has not produced a boom, either.

But the relevant question is why there was not a boom.

The simple answer, as I noted in the above interview, is that there was no effort to create Singapore-on-Thames. Indeed, the supposedly conservative Tories, under Boris Johnson, went in the opposite direction.

And that explains why supporters of economic liberalization are not very happy. Opining for the U.K.-based Telegraph, Allister Heath is rather depressed.

Statist ideology, historical naivety, cowardice and short-termism have crippled our country. Orthodox thinking has turned out to be wrong in almost all areas that matter, from the economy to energy to planning. …The electorate noticed, kicking Labour out and voting for Brexit, but the politicians let them down. Nothing really changed… Ludwig von Mises, in his Critique of Interventionism, explains how social-democracy is an unstable middle point between capitalism and socialism. This is especially true today. All problems, even when caused by failed Left-wing policy, trigger increasingly hysterical demands for even more state action. …We have a Tory government, but the political climate is veering hard-Left.

This brings us back to what I said in the interview. Boris Johnson has been deposed as leader of the Conservative Party.

Now there’s a race between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss to see who will be the new party leader – and thus the new Prime Minister.

Both of them claim they will move policy back in the right direction. I’m guessing Ms. Truss is the better option, but my main point in the discussion was that the United Kingdom desperately needs another Margaret Thatcher.

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Evidence for Lower Corporate Tax Rates, Part III

To begin Part III of this series (here’s Part I and Part II), let’s dig into the archives for this video I narrated back in 2007.

At the risk of patting myself on the back, all of the points hold up very well. Indeed, the past 15 years have produced more evidence that my main arguments were correct.

• Lower corporate rates reduce double taxation
• Lower corporate rates reduce taxes on people
• Lower corporate rates boost worker income
• Lower corporate rates boost competitiveness
• Lower corporate rates generate revenue feedback

The good news is that all these arguments helped produce a tax bill that dropped America’s federal corporate tax rate by 14 percentage points, from 35 percent to 21 percent.

The bad news is that Biden and most Democrats in Congress want to raise the corporate rate.

In a column for CapX, Professor Tyler Goodspeed explains why higher corporate tax rates are a bad idea. He’s writing about what’s happening in the United Kingdom, but his arguments equally apply in the United States.

…the more you tax something, the less of it you get. …plans to raise Corporation Tax and end relief on new plant and machinery will result in less business investment – and steep costs for households. …Treasury’s current plans to raise the corporate income tax rate to 25% and end a temporary 130% ‘super-deduction’ for new investment in qualifying plant and machinery would lower UK investment by nearly 8%, and reduce the size of the UK economy by more than 2%, compared to making the current rules permanent. …because the economic costs of corporate taxation are ultimately borne both by shareholders and workers, raising the rate to 25% would permanently lower average household wages by £2,500. …the macroeconomic effects of raising the Corporation Tax rate to 25% would alone offset 40% of the static revenue gain over a 10-year period, and as much as 90% over the long run.

To bolster his argument for good policy on that side of the Atlantic Ocean, he then explains that America’s lower corporate tax rate has been a big success.

Critics of corporate tax reform should look to the recent experience of the United States… At the time, I predicted that these changes would raise business investment in new plant and equipment by 9%, and raise average household earnings by $4,000 in real, inflation-adjusted terms. …By the end of 2019, investment had risen to 9.4% above its pre-2017 level. Investment by corporate businesses specifically was up even more, rising to 14.2% above its pre-2017 trend in real, inflation-adjusted terms. Meanwhile, in 2018 and 2019 real median household income in the United States rose by $5,000 – a bigger increase in just two years than in the entire 20 preceding years combined. …What about corporate income tax revenues? …corporate tax revenue as a share of the US economy was substantially higher than projected, at 1.7% versus 1.4%.

If you want more evidence about what happened to corporate tax revenue in America after the Trump tax reform, click here.

Another victory for the Laffer Curve.

Not that we should be surprised. Even pro-tax bureaucracies such as the International Monetary Fund and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have found that lower corporate rates produce substantial revenue feedback.

So let’s hope neither the United States nor the United Kingdom make the mistake of undoing progress.

P.S. The specter of a higher corporate tax in the United Kingdom is especially bizarre. Voters chose Brexit in part to give the nation a chance to break free of the European Union’s dirigiste approach. But instead of adopting pro-growth policies (the Singapore-on-Thames approach), former Prime Minister Boris Johnson opted to increase the burden of taxes and spending. Hopefully the Conservative Party will return to Thatcherism with a new Prime Minister (and hopefully American Republicans will return to Reaganism!).

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The United Kingdom’s Failed Post-War Socialism

I’m in the United Kingdom for the Free Market Road Show and had planned on writing today about the awful economic policies of Boris Johnson, the supposedly Conservative Prime Minister.

Yes, he produced an acceptable Brexit, but otherwise has been a big spender. Sort of the a British version of Trump or Bush.

But I’m going to give Boris a (temporary) pass because I can’t help but vent my spleen about this sign I saw yesterday while touring the Imperial War Museum in London.

As you can imagine, I was irked by this bit of pro-socialist propaganda.

Since when does a government takeover of private industry lead to “a fairer, more caring society”?!?

Maybe that was the intention of the voters who elected Clement Attlee, the Labour Party who became Prime Minister after the 1945 election.

The real-world results, though, were disappointing. Indeed, the sign acknowledges that the post-war recovery was anemic.

But it then put the blame on conscription.

As a sensible Brit would say, this is utter bollocks.

Plenty of other nations drafted men into military service, yet they still managed to enjoy decent growth.

Why did those countries enjoy more prosperity? Because they didn’t copy Clement Attlee’s horrible mistake of nationalizing industry (genuine socialism, by the way).

Indeed, while the United Kingdom was becoming the “sick man of Europe,” West Germany boomed in large part because it went in the other direction, getting rid of dirigiste policies such as price controls.

There is a happy ending to this story.

Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979 and privatized industries – in addition to other pro-growth reforms such as spending restraint and tax-rate reductions.

As a result, the United Kingdom in a very short period of time managed to overtake Germany in the Fraser Institute’s rankings for economic liberty.

I’ll close with a thoughtful and magnanimous offer.

I’ve corrected the mistaken wording on the sign at the Imperial War Museum. I hereby offer – free of charge – this new version.

P.S. It’s a long program, but I strongly encourage readers to watch Commanding Heights: The Battle of Ideas, which tells the economic history of the 20th century. You’ll learn how Thatcher saved the U.K. economy and how Reagan saved the U.S. economy.

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The Deadly Impact of Government-Run Health, Part I

I’m not a fan of the government-distorted health system in the United States.

Various laws and programs from Washington have created a massive problem with third-party payer, which makes America’s system very expensive and inefficient.

But it’s possible to have a system that is even worse. Americans can look across the ocean at the United Kingdom’s National Health Service.

Our British friends are burdened with something akin to “Medicare for All.”

But it’s even worse because doctors and nurses are directly employed by government, which means they have been turned into government bureaucrats.

And government bureaucrats generally don’t have a track record of good performance. That seems to apply to health bureaucrats, as captured by this Alys Denby column for CapX.

Numbers are no way to express a human tragedy, but those in the Ockenden Report into maternity services at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust are nonetheless devastating. The inquiry examined 1,592 incidents since 2000. It found that poor care led to the deaths of 201 babies and nine mothers; 94 babies suffered avoidable brain damage; and one in four cases of stillbirth could have had a different outcome. That’s hundreds of lives lost, and hundreds of families suffering unimaginable pain, all on the watch of ‘Our NHS’. …the report is strewn with examples of individual cruelty and incompetence. Bereaved parents…were given excuses, false information and even blamed for their own child’s death. The Health Secretary has said that vital clinical information was written on post-it notes that were swept into the bin by cleaners. …The NHS has a culture of arrogance, sanctimony and impunity.

And here are some excerpts from a 2021 article in National Review by Cameron Hilditch.

The NHS has proven itself comprehensively and consistently incapable of dealing with a regular flu season, something that crops up at the same predictable time of year in every country north of the equator. It has long been obvious that Britain’s single-payer health-care system isn’t fit for purpose even in normal times, much less during a global pandemic. Yet the NHS’s failures are systematically ignored. …age-standardized survival rates in the U.K. for the most common kinds of cancer are well below those of other developed countries, which translates into thousands of needless deaths… The excess deaths that the U.K. is suffering…along with the crushing physical and mental burdens borne by British doctors and nurses ultimately redound to this long-term failure of British culture. By transforming a medical institution into a cultural institution for the sake of forging a new, progressive national identity, Britons have underwritten decades of deadly failure.

This is damning information.

To be sure, mistakes will happen in any type of health system. But when government runs the show, the odds of appropriate feedback are much lower.

If you don’t believe me, click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

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Britain’s Big-Government Tories

After the people of the United Kingdom voted to escape the European Union, I wondered whether the Conservative Party would “find a new Margaret Thatcher” to enact pro-market reforms and thus “take advantage of a golden opportunity” to “prosper in a post-Brexit world.”

The answer is no.

The current Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, deserves praise for turning the Brexit vote into Brexit reality, but his fiscal policy has been atrocious.

Not only is he failing to be another Margaret Thatcher, he’s a bigger spender than left-leaning Tory leaders such as David Cameron and Theresa May.

Let’s look at some British media coverage of how Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak (the Chancellor of the Exchequer) have sided with government over taxpayers.

Allister Heath of the Telegraph has a brutal assessment of their profligacy.

Rishi Sunak’s message, repeated over and over again, as he unveiled a historic, epoch-defining rise in public spending financed by ruinous tax increases. It was a Labour Budget with a Tory twist and the kind of Spending Review that Gordon Brown would have relished… the cash was sprinkled in every possible direction. Sunak is Chancellor, but he was executing Boris Johnson’s cakeist vision: a meddling, hyperactive, managerialist, paternalistic and almost municipal state which refuses to accept any limits to its ambition or ability to spend. …The scale of the tax increases is staggering. …This will propel the tax burden from 33.5 per cent of GDP before the pandemic to 36.2 per cent by 2026-27, its highest since the early 1950s… The picture on spending is equally grim: we are on course for a new normal of around 41.6 per cent of GDP by 2026-27, the largest sustained share of GDP since the late 1970s. …The Budget and Spending Review are thus a huge victory for Left-wing ideas, even if the shift is being implemented by Right-wing Brexiteers who have forgotten that the economic case for Brexit wasn’t predicated on Britain becoming more like France or Spain. …Labour shouldn’t be feeling too despondent: the party may not be in office, but when it comes to the economy and public spending, they are very much in power.

Writing for CapX, James Heywood explains one of the adverse consequences of big-government Toryism.

Simply stated, the U.K. will go from bad to worse in the Tax Foundation’s International Tax Competitiveness Index.

…in the Cameron-Osborne era, the Conservatives focused on heavily on making Britain competitive and business-friendly, with significant cuts to the headline rate of corporation tax. …in his recent Tory conference speech, Boris Johnson trumpeted the virtues of an ‘open society and free market economy’, promising that his was a government committed to creating a ‘low tax economy’.  Unfortunately, when it comes to UK tax policy the direction of travel is concerningly divorced from the rhetoric. The latest iteration of the US-based Tax Foundation’s annual International Tax Competitiveness Index placed the UK 22nd out of 37 OECD countries when it comes to the overall performance of our tax system. …Nor does the UK’s current ranking factor in the Government’s plans for future tax rises. …the headline rate of corporation tax had fallen to 19% and was set to fall to 17% by 2020. That further fall had already been cancelled during Sajid Javid’s brief stint as Chancellor, in order to pay for additional NHS spending. At the last Budget, Rishi Sunak went much further, setting out plans to gradually raise the rate from 19% to 25% in April 2023. That is a huge tax measure by anyone’s standards… On top of that we have the recently announced Health and Social Care Levy… If we factor all these new measures into the Tax Foundation’s Competitiveness Index, the UK falls to a dismal 30th out of 37 countries.

For what it’s worth, the United Kingdom’s competitiveness decline will be very similar to the drop in America’s rankings if Biden’s fiscal plan is enacted.

In other words, there’s not much difference between the left-wing policy of Joe Biden and the (supposedly) right-wing policy of Britain’s Conservative Party.

No wonder a British cartoonist thought it was appropriate to show Rishi Sunak morphing into Gorden Brown, the high-tax, big-government Chancellor of the Exchequer under Tony Blair.

I’ll close with the observation that conservatives and libertarians in the United Kingdom need to create their own version of the no-tax-hike pledge.

That pledge, organized by Americans for Tax Reform, has helped protect many (but not all) Republicans from politically foolish tax hikes.

It is good politics to have a no-tax pledge, but I’m much more focused on the fact that opposing tax hikes is good policy.

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Comparing Prosperity: The United States vs. Europe

I periodically write about the importance of long-run growth and about the importance of convergence (whether poorer countries are catching up with richer countries, as suggested by theory).

This is because such data, especially over decades, teaches us very important lessons about the policies that are most likely to generate prosperity.

I’m revisiting these issues today because John Cochrane, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a former professor of economics at the University of Chicago, recently wrote a column that contains a must-see chart showing how some of the major European nations have been losing ground to the United States over the past several decades.

The main thing to understand is that European nations were catching up to the United States after World War II, which is what one would expect.

But that trend came to a halt about 40 years ago and now these nations are suffering divergence instead of enjoying convergence.

Here’s some of Cochrane’s analysis.

…the US is 54% better off than the UK.. France…50% less than US. …the US is 96% better off than Italy. …And it’s been getting steadily worse. France got almost to the US level in 1980. And then slowly slipped behind. The UK seems to be doing ok, but in fact has lost 5 percentage points since the early 2000s peak. And Italy… Once noticeably better off than the UK, and contending with France, Italy’s GDP per capita is now lower than it was in 2000. GDP per capita is income per capita. The average European is about a third or more worse off than the average American, and it’s getting worse.

What’s most remarkable, as I wrote about back in 2014, is that the gap between the United States and Europe is “getting worse.”

Cochrane wonders if this is evidence against the European Union’s free-trade rules.

This should be profoundly unsettling for economists. Everyone thinks free trade is a good thing. The European union, one big integrated market, was supposed to ignite growth. It did not. The grand failure of the world’s biggest free trade zone really is a striking fact to gnaw on. Sure, other things are not held constant. Perhaps what should have been the world’s biggest free trade zone became the world’s biggest regulatory-stagnation, high-tax, welfare-state disincentive zone. Still, “it would have been even worse” is a hard argument to make.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s “a hard argument to make”. I’ve pointed out – over and over again – that Europe’s reasonably good policies in some areas are more than offset by really bad fiscal policy.

Think of the different types of economic policy as classes for a student. If a kid flunks one class, that’s going to produce a sub-par grade point average even if there was good marks in all the other classes.

That’s what has happened on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Europe is suffering the consequences of a stifling tax burden and an onerous burden of government spending.

Besides, I suspect some of the benefits of free trade inside the European Union are offset by the damage of the E.U.’s protectionist barriers against trade with the rest of the world.

P.S. Some people may wonder why Germany was not included in Cochrane’s chart. I assume that’s because the reunification of West Germany and East Germany about 30 years ago creates a massive discontinuity in the data. For those interested, Germany is slightly better off than France and the U.K., according to the Maddison data, but still lagging well behind the United States.

P.P.S. Speaking of Germany, the divergence between East Germany and West Germany teaches an obvious lesson.

P.P.P.S. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that America started out-performing Europe after Reaganomics was implemented.

P.P.P.P.S One obvious takeaway from Cochrane’s data (though not obvious to President Biden) is that the United States should not be copying Europe. Unless, of course, one wants ordinary Americans to be much poorer.

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Boris Johnson’s Fiscal Policy: Politics over Prudence

Two years ago, I wrote about how two former Prime Ministers in the United Kingdom, David Cameron and Theresa May, did a very good job of restraining spending.

On average, spending increased by only 1.8 percent per year last decade, which helped to substantially reduce the fiscal burden of government relative to the private economy.

That was an impressive result, and it adds to the collection of success stories showing what happens when governments obey fiscal policy’s Golden Rule.

That was the good news.

The bad news is that spending restraint evaporated once the pandemic began.

The worse news is that the current Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has no intention of restoring fiscal discipline now that the coronavirus is fading away.

The Wall Street Journal opined on the new budget that was just released by the supposedly conservative government.

London has spent some £407 billion ($568 billion) on pandemic relief since last year… This has blown a hole in public finances, with the fiscal deficit expected to be around 10% of GDP this year. …Britain’s political class, and especially the governing Conservative party, …faces pressure to “pay for” all this relief. …an increase to the corporate profits tax rate to 25% from 19%…freezing previously announced increases in the thresholds for personal income-tax brackets. This tax hike on the sly is estimated to raise an additional £18 billion starting next year from beleaguered households who discover inflation pushing them into higher brackets. A holiday on the stamp duty on property purchases will expire in October, walloping households as the recovery is meant to begin. …The government’s Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that by 2026 tax revenue as a share of GDP will be 35%, the highest since 1969. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think tank, estimates that the additional £29 billion in annual revenue expected by 2026 amounts to the largest tax increase in any budget since 1993. …This Tory government came to power promising to unleash Britain’s entrepreneurial businesses for a post-Brexit growth spurt, and freeing those animal spirits is even more important after the pandemic. A super-taxing budget is a huge gamble.

The WSJ focused on all the tax increases.

Allister Heath’s column in the Daily Telegraph informs us that the bad news on taxes is a predictable and inevitable consequence of being weak on spending restraint.

For the past 50 years, the Tory party had believed that high tax rates, especially on income and profits, were bad for the economy and had strived to cut them. Today, this is no longer true… The Tory taboo on increasing direct rates of taxation…is over… Britain will continue its shift to the Left on economics, sinking ever-deeper into a social-democratic, low growth, European-style model… Johnson, sadly, is planning to increase spending permanently by two percentage points of GDP and taxes by one. He is a big-government Conservative… the main problem facing the public finances longer-term isn’t the economic scarring from the pandemic, but the fact that the Tories are determined to keep increasing spending as if Covid never happened. …Reaganomics is over in Britain, dead and buried, as is much of the economic side of Thatcherism.

Here’s a chart from the U.K.’s Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR), which shows both taxes and spending as a share of gross domestic output (GDP).

I’ve added some text to show that there was fiscal progress under Thatcher, Cameron, and May, along with fiscal profligacy under Blair (and during the coronavirus, of course).

I also used OBR data to construct this chart, which shows inflation-adjusted spending over the past five decades, as well as projections until 2025.

The most worrisome part of the chart (and the biggest indictment of Boris Johnson) is the way spending climbs at a rapid rate in the final four years.

P.S. Because of my strong support for Brexit, I was very happy that Boris Johnson won a landslide victory in late 2019. And he then delivered an acceptable version of Brexit, so that worked out well. However, it definitely doesn’t look like he will fulfill my hopes of being a post-Brexit, 21st century version of Margaret Thatcher.

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The Best and Worst of 2020

One of my traditions, which started in 2013, is to share the year’s best and worst policy outcomes of the past 365 days.

For instance, last year I celebrated Boris Johnson’s landslide victory in the United Kingdom and also was very happy that Colorado voters preserved TABOR. But I bemoaned Trump’s protectionism and fretted about the ever-rising burden of government spending.

So what can we say about 2020?

The big news of the year was the pandemic, of course, but my best-and-worst list focuses on public policy.

In other words, this column will highlight the positive or negative actions of politicians (or voters) rather than the vindictiveness of Mother Nature.

So let’s look at major developments in 2020, and we’ll start with the good news.

Illinois voters preserve the flat tax – The only good feature of Illinois fiscal policy is that the state’s constitution mandates a flat tax. The big spenders in Springfield despise that policy, but they can’t get rid of it without permission from voters. So, led by the state’s hypocritical governor, they put an initiative on the ballot to allow discriminatory tax rates. Fortunately, the people of Illinois rejected the class-warfare measure by a comfortable 53.3 percent-46.7 percent margin.

An acceptable Brexit deal – The people of the United Kingdom wisely voted to leave the European Union back in 2016, but a genuine escape from Brussels did not seem likely until Boris Johnson’s landslide victory in 2019. Even then, it wasn’t clear that the European Union’s spiteful officials would agree to unfettered trade in a post-Brexit environment. Fortunately, there is now an agreement that – while far from perfect – does allow the U.K. to escape the sinking ship of the E.U.

Voters reject the War on Drugs – I’ve never liked drugs and I recognize that there will be social harms with legalization. That being said, the social harm from prohibition is much greater, so I’m pleased that voters all over the nation approved ballot initiatives to give people more freedom to get high.

Now for the bad news of 2020.

Washington’s bungled response to the pandemic – As indicated above, the existence of the coronavirus doesn’t count as bad policy, but the federal government’s incompetent response certainly belongs on this list. We learned, over and over and over and over again, that bloated bureaucracies do not deliver good results. Heck, we’re still learning that lesson.

China clamps down on Hong Kong – As a long-time admirer of Hong Kong’s market-driven economic vitality, I’m saddened that China is increasing its control. So far, Beijing is focusing on ways of restricting Hong Kong’s political autonomy, but I fear it is just a matter of time before economic freedom is negatively impacted. For what it’s worth, I’m also distressed that economic policy seems to be moving in the wrong direction in Mainland China as well.

Chilean voters put the nation’s prosperity at risk – One of the world’s biggest success stories during my lifetime has been Chile’s shift from authoritarian statism to capitalist prosperity. Poverty has dramatically declined and Chile is now the richest nation in Latin America. Sadly, voters approved an initiative that could result in a new constitution based on the welfare state vision of “positive rights.”

I’ll close with a bonus section, so to speak.

2020 election – If you care about trade and spending, then Biden’s victory may turn out to be good news. If you care about taxes and red tape, then Biden’s victory may turn out to be bad news.

But I thought the biggest election takeaway is that the left did not do well in congressional races or state races.

And I suppose I should add that it’s good news that Democratic voters ultimately opted not to nominate some of the awful politicians who ran for president, most notably Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

And I’m tempted to add that they also wisely rejected Kamala Harris, but that backfired since she’s now going to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

P.S. I’ve already cited my 2013 and 2019 editions. If you’re curious, here are my best and worst for 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014.

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A Real-World Depiction of Life under Socialism

When making the case against socialism, I’ve pointed out how that coercive ideology is an evil and immoral failure.

But maybe the best argument is contained in this very short video that was shared by a group of Tory activists in the United Kingdom.

Ms. Badenoch is now a member of the United Kingdom’s Parliament, and she was describing what it was like to grow up in Nigeria, a country where capitalism was not allowed to flourish.

Given the upside-down incentive system created by socialism, it’s no surprise that she endured hardship.

And while her story is just an anecdote, there is overwhelming evidence that nations with more economic liberty generate much better outcomes for ordinary people.

If you’re interested in learning more Ms. Badenoch, the U.K.-based Daily Mail profiled her back in 2017.

Kemi Badenoch is black; although British-born, she was raised in Nigeria by African parents, returned to England when she was 16 and rose from impoverished first-generation immigrant to parliamentarian in just 21 years. …Kemi, 37, married with two young children, won her safe seat in rural Essex with a 24,966-seat majority after Sir Alan Haselhurst, 80, stood down after 40 years. …What’s more, she was chosen ahead of Theresa May’s special adviser Stephen Parkinson, a Cambridge-educated white male. Kemi’s maiden Commons speech…marked her as a rising star. She spoke of her African childhood, saying: …‘Unlike many colleagues born since 1980, I was unlucky enough to live under socialist policies. It is not something I would wish on anyone, and it is just one of the reasons why I am a Conservative.’ …Kemi has a refreshing view of politics. …She supports Brexit — ‘the greatest ever vote of confidence in the project of the United Kingdom’ — and her heroes are Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher…she made a last-minute decision in favour of Leave. ‘And since, I’ve felt more and more confident that it was the right one,’ she says. ‘Many people who voted Brexit warmed to me because they felt I wasn’t a typical Leave voter. I’ve no time for those who say, “Brexit is all about racism.” That’s offensive. ‘It’s about sovereignty, bureaucracy and how we make our laws. …Kemi is fired up by the patriotism of the emigre who chose to live in Britain. ‘I’m Conservative because of the experiences I’ve had,’ she says. ‘I know what it’s like to live in a Third World country run by a regime with Socialist principles. It shaped my outlook and helped me appreciate how great Britain is.’

She was on the correct side on Brexit and Thatcher was one of her heroes. And she got the seat after beating out an ally of Theresa May, who was on the wrong side of Brexit.

That’s a very nice combination, but I want to zoom out and make a big-picture observation about how Ms. Badenoch’s move to the United Kingdom is part of a global pattern.

Simply stated, people vote with their feet against socialism.

People didn’t try to escape from West Germany to East Germany.

There are no caravans marching toward Venezuela (notwithstanding this satire).

Refugees aren’t in ramshackle boats trying to go from Florida to Cuba.

By the way, people also vote with their feet against big government inside the United States.

Needless to say, there’s a lesson to be learned from these migratory patterns.

P.S. If you like first-hand accounts of what it’s like to live under socialism, I recommend these videos from Gloria Alvarez, Thomas Peterffy, and two Venezuelans.

P.P.S. Ms. Badenoch’s video is only 37 seconds, but you can also learn about socialism in videos that last 10 seconds or less.

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English Hypocrite Joins the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame

One of the most-nauseating features of government is how politicians and bureaucrats impose lots of restrictions on ordinary people, yet then officially or unofficially create exemptions for themselves.

• Bill and Hillary advocating for higher death taxes, but then rigging the system so they could avoid that unfair levy.
• Elizabeth Warren sending her kid to private school while seeking to restrict better education for other people’s children.
• Bureaucrats at the OECD getting tax-free salaries while urging ever-higher taxes for people in the private sector.

The coronavirus pandemic has created a new opportunity for the political class to flaunt its privileged status while stepping on the rights of ordinary people.

The Wall Street Journal opined on this issue today and noted plenty of elected officials have decided to exempt themselves from lockdown rules.

A good sign that a government policy is misconceived is that its most energetic promoters can’t abide by it. The coronavirus outbreak has exposed this sort of hypocrisy more than a few times. Mayor Bill de Blasio famously visited his favorite YMCA for a workout even as his office was telling the rest of New York City to stay home. In Chicago, salons and barbershops were shut down while Mayor Lori Lightfoot allowed herself a haircut. Beaumont, Texas, Mayor Becky Ames flouted her city’s shelter-in-place order to have her nails done.

But these examples are trivial compared to the actions of Neil Ferguson, the officious British government employee who has been publicly hectoring his countrymen to follow stay-at-home orders, but decided those rules didn’t apply to his f*buddy.

Neil Ferguson, the epidemiologist at Imperial College,…led the researchers who predicted that, absent a forceful governmental response on movement and commerce, Covid-19 could cause more than 500,000 deaths. That modeling was soon scaled back, but Mr. Ferguson has since become a familiar figure in Britain for urging the government to impose strict shelter-in-place orders. It appears Mr. Ferguson wasn’t sheltering in place. Or, rather, he was but his paramour, Antonia Staats, wasn’t. …Ms. Staats had crossed London at least twice since citywide lockdowns were imposed in March—a clear violation of government rules. He has resigned from his position as government adviser.

I’m not surprised Ferguson is a hypocrite. It goes with the territory.

But I do wonder how he became a government adviser with the Conservative Party supposedly in charge? I thought Republicans were the “stupid party.”

In any event, the U.K.-based Sun is famous for its clever headlines (sort of like the New York Post), and this latest scandal is no exception.

Let’s conclude that Ferguson deserves to be the second Brit in the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame (joining the chap who worked in law enforcement while moonlighting as a jihadist).

P.S. For what it’s worth, Ms. Staats is a left-wing activist, so she’s part of a long tradition of statists who want more power for government, but conveniently don’t think they should be subject to the rules imposed on the rest of us.

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Happy Brexit Day

Today is Brexit Day. As of 6:00 P.M. EST (Midnight in Brussels), the United Kingdom no longer will be a member of the European Union.

This is definitely good news in the long run since the U.K. will now be somewhat insulated from inevitable economic crises caused by the European’s Union’s dirigiste economic model and grim demographic outlook.

Whether it’s also good news in the short run depends mostly on decisions in London, such as whether Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Tory government expand economic freedom (which should be the case, but there are worrisome signs that the spending burden will increase).

But Washington and Brussels also will play a role since the U.K. wants to sign free-trade agreements. This could be a problem since the E.U. will be tempted to behave in a spiteful manner and Trump and his trade team are protectionists.

But let’s set that aside for the moment and look at the big picture.

The Wall Street Journal nicely summarized the key takeaways in yesterday’s editorial about Brexit.

The EU was founded on the notion that only an ever-deeper economic union—with an ever-closer political union close on its heels—could secure peace and prosperity… Most continental political leaders, if not their voters, still believe this. …British voters think otherwise. Their 2016 vote to leave the EU, ratified in December’s general election, was not a vote for war and poverty. …voters had the temerity to assert themselves despite resistance from a political and bureaucratic class invested in the status quo. …One feature of this new politics is how immune voters have become to economic scaremongering… Britons instead have heard European anxiety that Brexit will trigger a “race to the bottom” on economic policy. What this really means is that EU politicians are aware that a freer economy more open to commerce at home and trade outside the EU would deliver more prosperity to more people than continental social democracy. British voters may not embrace this open vision in the end, but they’ve given themselves the choice. …All of this frightens so-called good Europeans…because it’s a direct challenge to…their “European project.” Central to this worldview is a distrust of…markets… A Britain with greater political independence and deep trading ties to Europe without all the useless red tape and hopeless centralizing could be a model. …Britain’s voters in 2016, and again in 2019, chose peaceful and prosperous coexistence with their neighbors rather than mindless but relentless integration. It’s the most consequential choice any European electorate has made in at least a generation.

Amen.

Brexit is very good news (December’s election in the U.K., which ensured Brexit, was the best policy-related development of 2019).

It means more jurisdictional competition, which is good news for those of us who want some sort of restraint on government greed.

And it means less power for the E.U. bureaucracy, which has a nasty habit of trying to export bad tax policy and bad regulatory policy.

Brexit also is a victory for Nigel Farage. Here are his final remarks to the European Parliament.

After 25 years of fighting for independence, this is my final contribution in the European Parliament.

We were told to leave with our British flags, and that's exactly what we did. pic.twitter.com/cBfycWfsN7

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) January 29, 2020

Farage has been called the “most consequential political figure in a generation in Europe, perhaps the whole of the West.”

This actually may be true. Brexit almost surely happened because of Farage’s efforts.

And to achieve that goal in the face of unified establishment opposition is truly remarkable.

Speaking of establishment opposition, let’s close today with an updated version of a PG-13 song about how the British people responded to the practitioners of “Project Fear.”

P.S. You can enjoy other Farage speeches by clicking here, here, and here.

P.P.S. And you can enjoy more Brexit-themed humor by clicking here, here, and here.

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Taxes Will Be a Royal Pain for Meghan and Harry

I’m part of the small minority that thinks the big news from the United Kingdom is that “Brexit” will finally happen, thanks to Boris Johnson’s landslide victory last month.

Most everyone else seems more focused on the latest development with the royal family. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, better known as Harry and Meghan, have decided to partially extricate themselves from the cloistered world of the monarchy – in part so they can take advantage of “the freedom to make a professional income.”

More power to them, I guess, if they can monetize their celebrity status.

The U.K.-based Economist expects that they’ll rake in lots of money.

In stepping down as “senior royals” while pronouncing that they “value the freedom to make a professional income” the Duke and Duchess threaten to unleash the spirit of capitalism on the very core of the monarchy. …The Sussexes are determined to turn themselves into a global brand. Their first move after they announced that they were stepping down from many of their royal duties was to unveil the name of their brand, Sussex Royal… Various branding experts have pronounced that Harry and Meghan have “a ready-made brand” that could earn them as much as £500m in their first year. InfluencerMarketingHub, a website, points out that, with 10m Instagram followers, they could expect $34,000 for a sponsored post. …They will need more than Prince Harry’s inheritance, which is estimated at £20m-30m, to keep up with the global super-rich.

I don’t have a rooting interest in their financial success. Indeed, I suspect they’ll wind up being annoying hypocrites like Harry’s dim-bulb father, lecturing us peasants about our carbon footprints while they fly around the world in private jets.

That being said, I am interested in the intricacies of international taxation.

And that will be a big issue for the couple according to Town and Country.

Now that Meghan and Harry intend to retreat from their royal roles, attain “financial independence,” and live part-time in North America, Meghan and Archie’s tax and citizenship plans are a little up in the air. …Meghan is still a US citizen, and therefore required to pay US taxes on her worldwide income. Prince Harry could technically elect to be treated as a US tax payer and file jointly with Meghan, but “he would never do that,” explains Dianne Mehany, a lawyer specializing in international tax planning. …When Meghan and Harry announced their engagement back in 2017, Harry’s communications team confirmed to the BBC that Meghan “intends to become a UK citizen and will go through the process of that.” …Once gaining UK citizenship, Meghan could elect to relinquish her US citizenship, and save herself the trouble and expense of filing US tax returns. “The only problem there is, she would have to pay the exit tax,” Mehany notes…regardless of what type of employment or contract work Meghan pursues, it will be taxable in the US. …”The real tricky thing,” Mehany notes, “is to make sure they don’t spend too much time in the United States, so that Harry becomes a resident of the United States, at which point his entire worldwide wealth would become subject to US taxation, which I know they want to avoid.”

For all intents and purposes, Meghan and Harry will face the same challenges as a multinational company.

• Multinational companies have to figure out where to be “domiciled” just as Meghan and Harry have to figure out the best place to reside.
• Multinational companies have to figure out where to conduct business, just as Meghan and Harry have to figure out where they will work.
• Multinational companies have to figure out how to protect their income from taxes, just as Meghan and Harry will try to protect their income.

For what it’s worth, the Royal couple already is being smart.

As reported by the U.K.-based Telegraph, they’re minimizing their exposure to the rapacious California tax system.

The Duchess of Sussex has moved her business to a US state used by the super-rich to protect their interests from scrutiny. The Duchess’s company Frim Fram Inc was moved out of California in December and incorporated in Delaware, which tax experts suggest could be done to avoid being hit with tax liabilities in California. …the move was made on New Year’s Eve…”You would want to do it on New Year’s Eve simply because if you go one minute into the next year you would owe some taxes to California for the year of 2020,” said Alan Stachura, from financial services firm Wolters Kluwer. …Mr Stachura, who helps companies incorporate in Delaware, added that the state offers “a tax benefit for items like trademarks and royalties”. …Experts say there are several benefits in moving a corporation to Delaware, including the state’s flexible business laws and its low personal income tax rates. …A source said that as the Duchess is no longer resident in California it was appropriate for the registration to be moved.

I can’t resist commenting on the last line of the excerpt. The fact that Meghan is no longer a resident of California is irrelevant.

After all, she’s not becoming a resident of Delaware.

Instead, she and her husband are being rational by seeking to minimize the amount of their money that will be diverted to politicians (the same is true of everyone with any sense in the United Kingdom, whether they are on the right or on the left).

It’s a shame Meghan and Harry feel too insecure to acknowledge that reality.

P.S. The Town and Country article noted that Prince Harry “would never” allow himself to become a tax resident of the United States because he wants “to avoid” America’s worldwide tax system. That’s completely understandable. He probably learned about the nightmare of FATCA after marrying Meghan and wants to make sure he’s never ensnared by America’s awful internal revenue code.

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Hopes and Fears for 2020

Yesterday’s column was my annual end-of-year round-up of the best and worst developments of the concluding year.

Today I’ll be forward looking and give you my hopes and fears for the new year, which is a newer tradition that began in 2017 (and continued in 2018 and 2019).

With my glass-half-full outlook, we’ll start with the things I hope will happen.

Supreme Court strikes down civil asset forfeiture – It is nauseating that bureaucrats can steal property from citizens who have never been convicted of a crime. Or even charged with a crime. Fortunately, this disgusting practice already has attracted attention from Clarence Thomas and other sound-thinking Justices on the Supreme Court. Hopefully, this will produce a decision that ends this example of Venezuela-style government thuggery.

Good free-trade agreements for the United Kingdom – This is a two-pronged hope. First, I want a great agreement between the U.S. and the U.K., based on the principle of mutual recognition. Second, I want the best-possible agreement between the U.K. and the E.U., which will be a challenge since the political elite in Brussels has a spiteful desire to “punish” the British people for supporting Brexit.

Maduro’s ouster in Venezuela – I already wished for this development in 2018 and 2019, so this is my “Groundhog Day” addition to the list. But if I keep wishing for it, sooner or later it will happen and I’ll look prescient. But I actually don’t care about whether my predictions are correct, I just want an end to the horrible suffering for the people of Venezuela.

Here are the things I fear will happen in 2020.

A bubble bursts – I hope I’m wrong (and that may be the case since I’ve been fretting about it for a long time), but I fear that financial markets are being goosed by an easy-money policy from the Federal Reserve. Bubbles feel good when they’re expanding, but last decade should have taught us that they can be very painful when they pop.

A loss of economic liberty in Chile and/or Hong Kong – As shown by Economic Freedom of the World, there are not that many success stories in the world. But we can celebrate what’s happened in Hong Kong since WWII and what’s happened in Chile since the late 1970s. Economic liberty has dramatically boosted prosperity. Unfortunately, Hong Kong’s liberty is now being threatened from without and Chile’s liberty is now being threatened from within.

Repeal of the Illinois flat tax – The best approach for a state is to have no income tax, and a state flat tax is the second-best approach. Illinois is in that second category thanks to a long-standing provision of the state’s constitution. Needless to say, this irks the big spenders who control the Illinois government and they are asking voters this upcoming November to vote on whether to bust the flat tax and open the floodgates for an ever-growing fiscal burden. By the way, it’s quite likely that I’ll be including the Massachusetts flat tax on this list next year.

I’ll also add a special category for something that would be both good and bad.

Trump gets reelected – Because Trump is producing better tax policy and better regulatory policy, and because of my hopes for judges who believe in the Constitution’s protections of economic liberty, it would be good if he won a second term.

Trump gets reelected – Because Trump is producing worse spending policy and worse trade policy, and because of my concerns never-ending Keynesian monetary policy from the Federal Reserve, it would be bad if he won a second term.

Happy New Year, everyone.

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Don’t Copy the United Kingdom’s Government-Run, Single-Payer Health System

I’m on my way back to the United States from England. My election-week coverage (starting here and ending here) is finished, but I’m still in the mood to write about the United Kingdom.

Yesterday, I shared some “Great Moments in British Government” and today I want to look at the U.K.’s single-payer health scheme.

The National Health Service (NHS) is inexplicably popular. Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn basically competed over who would dump the most money into the system.

This near-universal affection is a mystery. There’s a lot of data suggesting the system doesn’t work.

Consider these details from a column by a British doctor.

One of the most curious political phenomena of the western world is the indestructible affection in which the British hold their National Health Service. No argument, no criticism, no evidence can diminish, let alone destroy, it. …Yet again, however, the NHS is in ‘crisis.’ The British Red Cross has called the present situation an incipient humanitarian crisis, as if the country were now more or less in the same category as Haiti after a hurricane… The current NHS has a budget 50 per cent greater than it had 10 years ago. It employs 25 per cent more doctors than it did then. …but the net result, according to those who say the present situation is the worst ever, is that it is less able than ever before to perform satisfactorily its most elementary tasks such as treating emergencies promptly. …The difference in the standard mortality rate of the richest and poorest is now almost double what it was when the NHS began. …in 2014 the Commonwealth Fund of New York, a foundation whose purpose is to promote an effective, efficient and equitable health care system, published a report in which it compared 11 western health care systems. …The measure on which it was next to worst was the number of deaths preventable by health care. …thousands of people die every year in Britain who would have been saved in any other country in Europe.

Here are some passages from a recent editorial by the Wall Street Journal.

The NHS managed to treat only 83.6% of emergency-room patients within four hours in October, compared to 89.1% a year earlier and well short of the government’s target of 95%. …The NHS also missed its target for 93% of patients with suspected cancer to be seen by a specialist within two weeks of referral by a family doctor. In September, 90.1% of patients saw a specialist within two weeks, down from 91.2% in September 2018. A bureaucrat or Senator Elizabeth Warren might think that’s good enough for government work. But it’s definitely not for the nearly 10% of patients and their families who had to live with a suspected cancer diagnosis… Politicians who want a U.S. version of the NHS via Medicare for All should explain why they want Americans to catch this British disease.

Here are some insights from a former British hospital director.

…the people at the very top of the NHS’s regional and national organisations still truly believe in command and control. They are the only people left who still believe in the power of the five year plan to solve pressing public policy problems. They set targets in the same way as the managers of the Soviet tractor factories… The hospital I was involved in had a problem with its A&E waiting times. We were provided with “help” from multiple NHS intervention teams. There were so many of them that they arrived in a bus… Each of them wanted slightly different information, each had a different view of what the problem was… After several weeks of this they came up with an action plan containing 147 individual actions, each of which then had to be measured and monitored and reported back to the intervention teams. We all knew that the action plan was there to tick the box required by the central bureaucracy, not to solve the problem. …Every profession has its own powerful union, dressed up as a professional body, that is quite happy to hold their employer to ransom. When I was on the hospital board it took two years of negotiations to get the pharmacists to work shifts so that the pharmacy could stay open until 7pm.

Even the left-leaning Guardian recognizes there are major problems.

British households will need to pay an extra £2,000 a year in tax to help the NHS cope with the demands of an ageing population, according to a new report that highlights the unprecedented financial pressures on the health system. …The report said the NHS has been struggling to cope… Niall Dickson, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, which commissioned the report and represents 85% of NHS bodies, said: “This report is a wake-up call. And its message is simple – if we want good, effective and safe services, we will have to find the resources to pay for them.” …“If we are to have a health and social care system which meets our needs and aspirations, we will have to pay a lot more for it over the next 15 years. This time we won’t be able to rely on cutting spending elsewhere – we will have to pay more in tax…” The report said…the money would have to be found from the three main sources of government revenue: income tax, VAT or national insurance.

An expert from the U.K.’s Taxpayers Alliance exposes some warts in the NHS.

Hardly a day goes by without stories of how cash-strapped the service is and how it is on the brink of collapse. According to pretty much everyone in the newspapers, on the TV, and on social media the solution is simple – more money. …The NHS is certainly in a sickly state, but more money is not the solution. International league tables frequently rank the NHS near the bottom in terms of healthcare quality. Moreover, the UK ranks 19th out of 23 for mortality amenable to healthcare and 20th out of 24 developed countries for cancer survival. The failings of the NHS are perhaps best summed up by The Guardian…: “The only serious black mark against the NHS was its poor record on keeping people alive”. …A specific ‘NHS tax’ is a particularly bad idea. …throwing more money at the NHS is not an adequate solution. Scotland spends more money per capita on healthcare than England, but has longer waiting times for appointments and slower response times for ambulances. …As the head of the NAO Amyas Morse observed… “Over the last ten years, there has been significant real growth in the resources going into the NHS, most of it funding higher staff pay and increases in headcount. The evidence shows that productivity in the same period has gone down, particularly in hospitals.”

Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute also reveals some NHS shortcomings.

The United Kingdom’s single-payer system is in turmoil. It’d be foolish to import that failed model. The NHS has rationed care for decades. But wait times and delays have gotten markedly worse in recent months. The NHS recently canceled 55,000 non-urgent operations… Last month, nearly 15 percent of emergency-room patients had to wait more than four hours to be seen by a physician. The conditions are so bad in U.K. hospitals that, in a letter to the nation’s government, 68 British emergency room physicians recently complained about patients “dying prematurely in corridors” as a result of overcrowding. …no amount of money can fix a system in which government bureaucrats, and not markets, determine how to distribute healthcare resources.

Bruce Bawer is certainly not impressed with the NHS.

…the Brits have been brainwashed for generations into thinking their NHS is some kind of miracle. …What makes this NHS-worship especially grotesque is that the NHS, far from being successful, is a world-class disaster. Last July the BBC reported that the NHS was “increasingly” rationing such treatments as “hip and knee replacements and cataract surgery … as well as drugs for conditions such as arthritis.” …the NHS has always “covertly” rationed health care…cutting corners, canceling operations and doctor appointments, and extending already long waiting times even for urgent treatments. In October came reports that patients’ obesity and tobacco use were increasingly being used as excuses for denying them care. In November, a Cambridge University study concluded that 120,000 Brits had perished unnecessarily during the previous seven years…hospitals all over Britain — including operating rooms and maternity wards — were infested by cockroaches, maggots, insects, and rats. …the NHS is no role model. On the contrary, its history is a cautionary tale — and its prospects are nothing less than nightmarish.

Charles Hughes of the Manhattan Institute shares some grim news about the NHS’s performance.

A tracker from the BBC found that for 18 months hospitals across England, Wales, and Northern Ireland have failed to meet any of their three key targets, namely four-hour waits at the emergency department, cancer care within 62 days, and treating at least 92 percent of patients for planned hospital care or surgery within 18 weeks.  Waiting lists have ballooned. As of August 2017, the most recent month of data available, 409,000 had been waiting longer than 18 weeks for hospital treatment, an increase of almost 73,000 from the previous August. The median wait now stands at 7.1 weeks. …Citizens dissatisfied with rationing and wait times are turning to alternative options, forbidden in Canada. About 10 percent of people purchase supplemental private insurance for more timely treatment, many through company offerings. …Profit-driven hospital firms have seen a 15-25 percent year-on-year increase in the number of patients paying for their treatment themselves. People are also venturing abroad in their quest to get needed medical care. According to the Office of National Statistics, the total number of people leaving the U.K. for medical care surged from 48,000 in 2014 to almost 144,000 in 2016.

Some of the rationing and delays are simply due to government incompetence.

Some of it involves targeting certain segments of the population.

The NHS will ban patients from surgery indefinitely unless they lose weight or quit smoking, under controversial plans drawn up in Hertfordshire. The restrictions – thought to be the most extreme yet to be introduced by health services – immediately came under attack from the Royal College of Surgeons. …In recent years, a number of areas have introduced delays for such patients – with some told operations will be put back for months, during which time they are expected to try to lose weight or stop smoking. …The criteria also mean smokers will only be referred for operations if they have stopped smoking for at least eight weeks, with such patients breathalysed before referral.

My understanding is that the NHS does a good job with emergency care (you get maimed in a car accident) and a decent job with routine care (your annual check-up).

But you’re in big trouble if you have a chronic condition. Like people with cancer in Scotland.

More than 1,300 cancer patients in Scotland suffered agonising delays of more than two months to start treatment last year in breach of government targets. New figures show that, on average, 110 patients every month waited longer than 62 days for medical care after they were red-flagged by doctors for suspected cancer. The disclosure has prompted a wave of fresh criticism of the SNP, which in 2007 made a manifesto pledge to “ensure” suspected cancer patients were diagnosed and treated within 62 days.

I want to close by basically replicating some of my conversations from this past week with ordinary people in and around London.

When I highlighted shortcomings of the NHS, they routinely got defensive, admitted that their system isn’t perfect, and then attacked the American health system.

I think I surprised them by then stating that the U.S. healthcare system is a convoluted mix of waste and inefficiency.

I basically tried to give them this short speech, pointing out that our problems also are caused by government.

The Brits mess up their system by having the government directly provide medical care. We mess up our system with government-created third-party payer. In either case, the results aren’t pretty.

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Great Moments in British Government

Technically, my coverage of U.K election week began last Monday with a look at Jeremy Corbyn’s radical statism, and ended yesterday with some analysis of Boris Johnson’s victory.

But since I’m still in England, this is an opportune time for a new edition of Great Moments in British Government.

For those who aren’t regular readers, I should add that “Great Moments” is a sarcastic term for odd stories that illustrate the incompetence and venality of government (state, local, foreign, etc).

We’ll start with a story that shows how insiders use government as a racket to enrich their lifestyles.

Local councils are spending millions on luxury cars for mayors and officials in “ceremonial” roles, an investigation has found. Over the past three years, 207 local authorities have spent more than £4.5million on vehicles including Bentleys, Jaguars and S-class Mercedes, information disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act reveals. The cars were used by mayors, lord mayors or chairmen. The TaxPayers’ Alliance, a campaign group which carried out the investigation, said the money went on officials who “often fulfil ceremonial duties within their local authority and serve as the ‘first citizen’.

Sounds like Washington’s gilded class!

For our next example, bureaucrats in the United Kingdom don’t do a very good job of teaching traditional subjects such as math and reading, so they’ve decided to try sharing their knowledge on a rather unconventional topic.

Children as young as six are being taught about touching or ‘stimulating’ their own genitals as part of classes that will become compulsory in hundreds of primary schools. Some parents believe the lessons – part of a controversial new sex and relationships teaching programme called All About Me – are ‘sexualising’ their young children. …Documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday detail how All About Me classes involve pupils aged between six and ten being told by teachers that there are ‘rules about touching yourself’. An explanation of ‘rules about self-stimulation’ appears in the scheme’s Year Two lesson plan for six and seven-year-olds. Under a section called Touching Myself, teachers are advised to tell children that ‘lots of people like to tickle or stroke themselves as it might feel nice’. …In one, pupils are told that when a girl called Autumn ‘has a bath and is alone she likes to touch herself between her legs. It feels nice’.

For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t have wanted my kids being exposed to this kind of topic, but I must admit that bureaucrats probably have some expertise on the matter.

Next, we have a story about a woman getting fined for feeding birds.

Neighbours complained about birds flocking to Maureen Francis’ garden after she began feeding them with bird seed and other food… Wiltshire Council gave Francis the protection notice after receiving complaints and told her she could only put out one ‘small caged bird feeder’. But she refused to comply with their demands, leading to the council taking her to court ‘for the sake of the neighbours’. When Francis failed to attend the hearing last week, magistrates convicted her of failing to comply with a protection notice in her absence. She was fined £250 for over feeding the animals and ordered to pay almost £1,600 in costs. Councillor Jerry Wickham, Wiltshire Council’s cabinet member for public protection, said: “Our officers made numerous attempts to engage with Mrs Francis to try and resolve this problem. “We were reluctant to take legal action but for the sake of the neighbours, prosecution was the only option.”

Gives over-criminalization a whole new meaning.

Last but not least, British officials decided it’s okay if a two-second journey is replaced by a one-hour trip.

Motorists in southwest England will need to pay special attention when driving through Dorset County next week, where officials are putting a 41-mile detour around a 65-foot stretch of construction work. …The small section of road A352 in Godmanstone, Dorset, will be closed Monday through Friday while construction crews work on a new sewage system… The detour is estimated to take an hour to complete. The closed portion of the road would take just over two seconds to travel at the 30 mph speed limit. …The council acknowledged that most residents will ignore the lengthy detour and use smaller roads to get around the construction work. Anyone caught using the closed stretch of road will be fined $1,291.

A few years ago, a clever entrepreneur in the United Kingdom dealt with a similar detour by building a private toll road.

I don’t know if such an option exists in this case, but I can state with considerable confidence that this impossibly inconvenient detour wouldn’t be an option if a private road company was making a sewage repair.

Why? Because private companies cater to customers.

Which is a good excuse to re-share this classic scene from Ghostbusters.

Amen.

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U.K. Election Week, Part V: A Tory Landslide for Brexit and Beyond

I was very surprised by the 2016 election in the United States, but I didn’t have a rooting interest, so I watched the results mostly for reasons of morbid curiosity.

Because of my support for Brexit, by contrast, I was intensely interested in the results of yesterday’s election in the United Kingdom.

So you can imagine my joy when the BBC announced at 10:00 last night that Boris Johnson and the pro-Brexit Conservative Party were going to win a landslide.

Here are maps showing the results, as well the seats that changed hands (it’s a parliamentary system, so a party that wins a majority of seats can form a government).

At the risk of oversimplifying, the Conservative Party (the Tories) prevailed because they picked up dozens of working class seats. Like American Democrats (at least in 2016), the Labour Party has been captured by the urban left and lost touch with ordinary people.

But here’s the data that I find most encouraging.

When asked before the election about why they might be worried about a Corbyn government, every single group of voters (even Corbyn supporters!) was concerned that he would spend too much money.

And many of them also were concerned he would damage the economy.

Why is this data encouraging?

Because we’re always told about polls suggesting the people support bigger government. I’m skeptical of these polls because they basically ask voters whether they would like Santa Claus to exist. So it’s not a big surprise the people say they want free things from government.

This data, however, suggests that – when push comes to shove – they understand that freebies aren’t free. As Margaret Thatcher warned, left-wing governments eventually will run out of other people’s money.

Now that Boris Johnson has won and has a big majority, what comes next?

I’m assuming a genuine Brexit will happen (yes, politicians have a nasty habit of doing bad things, but I can’t imagine Johnson engaging in the level of betrayal that would be required to strike a deal for a Theresa May-style Brexit in name only).

So I’ll be watching two other issues.

1. Will Boris become the next Margaret Thatcher? I’ve already fretted that he’s too sympathetic to big government, but hopefully he pursues a pro-market agenda. Lower tax rates and genuine federalism (explained here by the Institute of Economic Affairs) would be a good place to start.
2. Will the U.K. and E.U. agree to a good trade deal? In hopes of avoiding regulatory competition, the European Union doubtlessly wants any future trade deal with the U.K. to be based on regulatory harmonization. That would be very bad news. The U.K. should pursue a pact based on genuine free trade and mutual recognition.

Fingers crossed for good answers to these questions.

P.S. Regarding yesterday’s election, there were some big losers other than the Labour Party. The people who sell property in places such as Monaco, Cayman Islands, Jersey, Bermuda, and Switzerland doubtlessly are disappointed that there won’t be an influx of tax refugees escaping a Corbyn-led government.

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