On the future of the euro and Europe

I had the pleasure this evening of listening to John Peet, the Europe editor of The Economist, giving a brief yet insightful talk on the future of the euro and how it relates to the future of the “European project” – the political and economic institutions that comprise the European Union. Sadly I didn’t take any notes during the talk and subsequent discussion, but here are a few thoughts.

Mr Peet was correct in saying there seems to be something perverse about poorer countries paying to bail out those with more wealth – countries that have already been bailed out (notably Ireland and Portugal) have been asked to contribute billions of euro to a fund that will likely come tobe used to “rescue” the Italian government and European bankers and bondholders.

Another interesting fact briefly alluded to was that traditionally the European elite have been – either intentionally or otherwise – oblivious to their own role in the crisis. Countries – in particular Greece – were allowed to join the euro even though they failed to meet the fiscal and monetary conditions set out under the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. Moreover, many countries had imposed upon them enormously pro-cyclical monetary policies that caused unsustainable booms – here, Ireland is a principal example. Yet Jose Manuel Barroso has laid the blame for the ongoing sovereign debt crisis almost entirely at the feet of the “markets” and speculators, apparently refusing to contemplate the idea that the eurozone optimal currency area was nothing of the sort.

There are however areas where I found myself in disagreement with Mr Peet. I will do my utmost to represent as faithfully as I can his arguments, but I apologise if my recollection overlooks various nuances in his argument.

The prospect of a Britain largely excluded from the decision making process of the European Union (a scenario envisioned by some commentators in the wake of Mr Cameron’s “veto” of fiscal pact negotiations for the currency bloc) is, in Mr Peet’s view, a troubling one. I agree virtually without reservation that decisions imposed upon Britain without British input is a situation that should be avoided, but I don’t think that this entails the need for greater integration of Britain in an increasingly federalized Europe. Indeed, if the goal is for Britain to have as much influence as possible in the decisions that affect it, then the logical solution would seem to be to withdraw from the institutional structures of the Communities and regain “complete” influence on policy.

It was also said that should the euro fail, it would also be the end of “Europe”. It’s not necessarily true that a catastrophic failure of the single currency would lead to a disintegration of the political settlement that governs the twenty-seven members of the Union and political integration existed long before the euro, but Mr Peet is right to say that it would be made likely, with the single market weakening as national governments attempt populist economics in an effort to restore a semblance of stability should national currencies be reintroduced. Where my own assessment differs from the speaker’s is whether this would be a catastrophic event. I don’t think that it would be. Over the past century, the world has seen a trend toward ever-lowering barriers to trade between economies (notwithstanding the currently-stalled Doha round of trade talks) with free trade taking preference over protectionism. There’s no reason to think that, in the long run, this trend would be counteracted by a potential but by no means guaranteed increase in obstacles to trade between European Union members, most of whom recognise the benefits of such policies entirely independent of the existence of the political Union.

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In Defence of Austrianism

Ron Paul’s comment that “… we’re all Austrians now” might seem odd to those unfamiliar with a school of economics that reached its peak around the 1930s and has since remained largely outside of mainstream thought. Cue Slate’s attempt to explain – and discredit – a system of economic thought that has helped explain the role of prices in economic calculation, discredited socialism and put forward powerful tools for analysing human action.

The article is here.

Here are a few quotes, and thoughts.

Most notably, it seeks to build a strong ethical case for strict libertarianism without admitting that this would lead to any practical problems whatsoever.

I think this point demonstrates that the author has ignored entirely a tenant of Austrian economics – namely, that it’s value free. Austrian economics is based on a priori reasoning (specifically, the action axiom).

The business cycle theory of Mises, Hayek and Rothbard argues that entrepreneurs engage in unsound investments as a result of artificially low interest rates. Slate counters:

 [I]t’s hard to understand why businesspeople would be so easily duped in this way. If Ron Paul and Ludwig von Mises know that cheap money can’t last forever, why don’t private investors? Why wouldn’t firms avoid making the supposedly dumb investments?

The difficulty for the entrepreneur comes in determining which interest rate fluctuations are driven by the changing time preferences of market participants, and which are driven by central bank manipulations. Investment in longer production processes certainly makes sense in the first case given the increase in total available savings, but evidently not in the second case. This is true particularly in longer periods of “cheap credit” where entrepreneurs who did make investments are able to make greater profits than those who were more cautious, encouraging a greater number of firms to make investment decisions that will eventually be demonstrated as unsound.

 Many of the original Austrians found their business cycle ideas discredited by the Great Depression, in which the bust was clearly not self-correcting and country after country stimulated real output by abandoning the gold standard and engaging in deficit spending.

The idea that the Great Depression was an example of the failure of the free market has been tackled time and time again. Mr Hoover’s presidency was one of unprecedented deficit spending and debt expansion, and his policies of protectionism  preventing the necessary decline in real wages continued under Roosevelt. If the author of the Slate article wants an example of a recession dealt with according to a largely Austrian prescription, he would do well to look at the recession that hit the United States in 1920-21.

As a final point:

Unfortunately, however, it’s the Austrian school, which preaches despair and demands no action at all, that has the most effective political champion and the most dedicated followers.

The Austrian school does not preach despair. If anything, it does the reverse – it says the way that a society can be returned to prosperity is by getting government out of the way. Yes, recessions are evil, but they are a necessary evil. If government allowed them to occur, instead of artificially maintaining factor prices and bailing out bad business, the despair would be mitigated and the economy could return to growth on secure foundations.

Most Western economies have been subject to massive stimulus spending and monetary “easing”, more often than not without success. The proponents of this economic activism seem to be blind to its failures, and in response demand more and more intervention. I’m forever curious as to what they would view as discrediting their economic outlook – just how much money must be confiscated by taxation or the printing press before they realise borrowing your way out of debt and spending your way out of recession doesn’t work?

 

 

Europhile to the Core

I can do little better than link to this post on the Telegraph‘s blog section, criticizing the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg for attacking the House of Lords for being undemocratic whilst speaking unfalteringly in support of his own special interest, the unelected bureaucrats at the European Commission.

It was not the Lords who decreed that many fishermen will be prohibited from going to sea for more a one day a week, nor which helps itself unasked to money from our taxpayers. Nor was it we who imposed requirements on our NHS to employ foreign doctors unable to speak English and which discriminate against British born and trained young doctors. Like the restrictive employment laws which are now costing jobs here in Britain all these interferences in our country and many more come from the apparatus in Brussels of which Mr Clegg is a one-time employee.

So we might ask our Deputy Prime Minister: “What about the Eurocrats?” Are they not a closed society in which power is entrenched in the hands of an unaccountable elite? Indeed, so much power that they have recently carried out coups d’état against the elected governments of Greece and Italy.

Crazy-nomics?

Two points stand out after watching via iPlayer Stephen Sackur’s interview with Marine le Pen, leader of the French Front National, for the BBC’s Hardtalk.

•  Ms le Pen proposes to repeal laws that restrict the Banque de France lending to the government at low interest rates, removing her country from international financial markets. The same financial markets that have forced eurozone leaders to accept that they saved too little in the good times and spent too much in the bad and enact policies to bring their fiscal policies to more sustainable levels. In short, she proposes opening the door to massive government deficits that ultimately come at the expense of the people who are forced to pay the money back through taxes or, as is more likely, through having their spending power reduced by inflation.

• The French economy certainly suffers from being uncompetitive on the global stage and Ms le Pen is correct that some of that is as a result of being unable to devalue the currency in much the same way the United Kingdom did during 2008 – 09. Yet uncompetitiveness would persist under her leadership even in France returned to the franc – the country’s would-be president denied categorically that France is harmed by its restrictive labour laws, including collective bargaining agreements that are imposed on third parties and the minimum wage, which serve to push up relative labour costs and actively contribute to the country’s declining competitiveness.

The Front National are not short on policies and rhetoric that should make them unelectable even discounting their apparent economic illiteracy – the people of France should take note.

A Pair of Links

Via Cafe Hayek.

Cato’s Daniel Mitchell has eight questions to ask the supports of protectionist trade policies.

An article in the Times from a few years ago on why the government can’t simply legislate poverty out of existence. Human rights frequently create “human wrongs”, Jamie Whyte argues.

Obama, Productivity and Unemployment

From Carpe Diem:

While traveling by car during one of his many overseas travels, Professor Milton Friedman spotted scores of road builders moving earth with shovels instead of modern machinery. When he asked why powerful equipment wasn’t used instead of so many laborers, his host told him it was to keep employment high in the construction industry. If they used tractors or modern road building equipment, fewer people would have jobs was his host’s logic.

“Then instead of shovels, why don’t you give them spoons and create even more jobs?” Friedman inquired.

President Obama has gone on record in the past as saying that ATM machines destroy jobs. He’s even developed his own theory as to why productivity gains are leading to the current jobless “recovery” in the United States. He would do well to acquaint himself with the level-headed and common sense thinking of Mr Friedman.

Government Cover-up

The Indian government has asked for a scene in the upcoming James Bond film to be rewritten in an apparent attempt to hide their complete inability to provide sufficient infrastructure capacity.

Originally, the scene called for Bond to jump a motorcycle onto the roof of a moving train, which was packed with folks riding the rails illegally . . . local government asked the production team to remove the roof riders from the film (don’t tell the boys from Slumdog Millionaire…).

 

 

Profit Motives

Nick Clegg has derided the profit motive when it comes to the market for education. He is implicitly and explicitly arguing that the profit motive will hurt standards and social mobility.

Perhaps he should read this report, compiled by the Adam Smith Institute.

From the report’s author, James Croft:

It’s widely held that business-led educational ventures maximise profit at the expense of pupil outcomes. This is one of those myths that has arisen because of misleading (and often politically motivated) press coverage of occasional instances of things going wrong blown out of all proportion. The truth is that in contrast to other ownership models proprietorial school businesses, whether directly accountable to their owners or to shareholders, are tightly managed and rarely engage in the sort of profiteering that compromises quality for short-term gain. They know their markets and they are keenly aware of the expectations of their customers.

My study found that of the 489 proprietorial schools operating in England in 2010, 87 educate their pupils for less than the ‘revenue only’ maintenance figure of £5,320 (33 of which by £1,000 or more), at the same time apparently able to make a modest profit. A further 71 were doing so for less than the combined revenue and capital figure of £6,240. In addition, according to a third benchmark, allowing for total fee remissions of up to 10 per cent,154 a further 41 were found to be educating their pupils on fees less than £6,864, on a comparable basis to that of schools in the state-maintained sector. This represents 41% of all proprietorial schools. As a group they outperformed equivalent trust schools on key teaching and learning related criteria by a significant margin (on all criteria for those inspected by Ofsted, and 3/5 for ISI). There is widespread evidence of generous bursary provision for the disadvantaged too – something I hope to be able to detail more fully in a forthcoming study.

Bang goes the theory that for-profits are interested in only one thing.

I’m Still Not Sure

The Leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, made it quite clear that he thinks that public sector strikes over pensions were wrong “at a time when negotiations are still ongoing”. Indeed, he gave virtually identical answers along those lines to six very different questions asked by Max Farquar.

 

It would seem, though, that Mr Miliband still isn’t convinced that he managed to put his message across. In his keynote address to the Trades Union Congress, he said:

But while negotiations were going on, I do believe it was a mistake for strikes to happen.

I think we might have grasped what you’re getting at this time, Ed.

Career Progression

I think it is fair to say very few support teachers ever receive a promotion of a similar scale to that of Mohamed Ibrahim, who is moving from Newman Catholic College to Mogadishu to take on the role of Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs in Somalia’s embattled Transitional Federal Government.