Two questions on productivity

A couple of quick ones:

1. Turn on, tune in, drop out

Robin Hanson says we are living in a "dream time", when survival instincts have been dulled by wealth so that Nature has (temporarily) let us get away with acting stupidly. I recall the old saying, "From clogs to clogs is only three generations" (i.e. the middle generation spends it all).

In this context, it's also interesting to note how at a time when we're drugging children and old people to stop them being a nuisance, libertarians are calling for young adults to have the right to zombiefy themselves with "harmless" mind-altering substances. Yes, they will still be able to work, some of them, for some time; I guess the same argument goes for functioning alcoholics. Dream on... until, as the Germans say, "Aus der traum, lieber Freund."

I've known black people who maintain that drugs liberalisation (and the associated laissez-faire approach to law enforcement) is a plot to keep their children in subjection. I tend to put it down to middle-class selfishness, instead; but I can see why they might think that.

2. Think big, think small

As higher taxation looms, some are already trying to draw a distinction between "productive" and "unproductive" workers. Well, effectively, practically everybody (including the poor) pays 40% tax already, when you look at the combination of income tax, National Insurance and sales taxes; though I do agree that a proposed 50% higher-rate income tax rate is likely to generate various avoidance strategies that will mostly wipe out the hope-for extra revenue.

But if Mish's friend "BC" is right, we are entering a "Schumpeterian Depression", during which big biz uses its access to finance to crush small enterprise; and so it may be a decade before young entrepreneurs develop the muscle to get out from under and start to succeed.

Besides, how much big business is founded on destroying small businesses and the self-employed? What, for example, if we looked at it closely, would be the real, total net benefit of the giant supermarkets? Weigh up the cheaper prices against the exploitation of their suppliers and the ruination of small shopkeepers - and the smashing of one of the ladders by which the aspirant working class - and their children - could rise and become self-supporting.

What do our politicians control?

Plenty has been said about the EU and how it rules us, withour ever having had our consent to do so. But equally, our daily lives are governed by giant firms, often foreign-based.

For example, (and I offer this merely as a tiny, representative instance) I now have to pay a Frenchman to talk to a Welshman.

On September 8, 1966, the first (and very beautiful) Severn Bridge opened. It was constructed with the inventive help of the Royal Engineers (my father included), who floated prefabricated sections of the roadway on pontoons down the river, to be hoisted into position by cranes atop the towers that would hold the suspension cables.

I stood on the Welsh side with my mother and brother, listening to the Queen's speech from across the water, and watched as the Royal car came through. (Only a West Indian family near us had had the forethought to buy some flags on sticks to wave as Her Majesty passed.) The toll for cars was the then-equivalent of 35 US cents.

30 years later, a second bridge was completed, crossing further down the estuary to Cardiff and West Wales. A new holding company was formed (Severn River Cossings plc), as a partnership between John Laing plc, a French firm, GTM-Entrepose, and others.

John Laing plc is based in London and controls assets worth £698 million (December 2008 accounts); but the revenue from both bridges went to GTM-Entrepose which was subsequently taken over by Vinci Concessions SA, a subsidiary of Vinci SA, which controls assets worth almost 52 billion Euros and is based in Rueil-Malmaison, France.

The toll for cars is now £5.40 (you pay to get into Wales; any fool who wishes to leave can do so for free), and as late as last month there were protests that this highwaymanning is hampering trade and transport. But what, exactly, can the private citizen, the commercial haulier, or even the professional politican do? Doubtless any attempt by HMG to intervene would be challenged in a European court.

I think our national politicans are little better than a species of fraudster, pretending that they can do something for us but (I suspect) privately agreeing among themselves that they are powerless. In which case, all they can do is take instructions from their wealthy patrons and (perhaps partly out of impotent spite) divide and bully the insignificant people, some of whom (at permitted intervals, to be determined by their masters) vote them into office.

And now, I want to wave my little flag.