I was reading 'Britannia Unchained' - the right wing Tory 'shadow manifesto' but five of the 2010 Tory MP intake over the weekend. I hated parting with payment, but you have to know what these people are thinking.
It's an extraordinary book, not least because it is so badly researched and so many of its claim are so obviously unfounded (for example, that 40-45 of adult lives are now spent in retirement a claim that would require people, on average, to retire before their 54th birthday). But it's not what it gets wrong that worries me (much). It's the philosophy inherent in it that is most troubling. Of this there are almost countless examples, but let me take one which has not, as far as I know, been highlighted elsewhere.
On pages 88 and 89 there is a section called 'Black Market Buccaneers'. In essence the argument is that innovation can't happen when there is regulation and so we should be grateful for the existence of the black market - including Chinese counterfeiting - as this is where true innovation now occurs. It's an amazing claim that those who cheat and steal others ideas are to be applauded. But they go further. This is the concluding paragraph of the section:
Clearly, law and order, intellectual property rights ad consumer laws exist for a reason, and are on the whole beneficial But as a sheer experiment in what the poorest entrepreneur's can achieve when nearly all of society's strictures are relaxed the informal economy is pretty hard to beat. The tradeoff between risk and reward is more visible here than anywhere else. As Steve Jobs once famously said, 'It's more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.'
That is an extraordinary claim.
They happily acknowledge that this free-riding sector may be worth $10 trillion a year - a least one seventh of the world economy. I believe it a little more - at $11 trillion. Either way, about $3 trillion of tax is lost as a result.
That tax, if paid, would end the need for aid.
That tax, if paid, would have saved Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal.
That tax, if paid, would end child poverty.
That tax, if paid, would educate the poor.
But the Tories ignore that: they only see the individual goal of being a pirate - making a virtue of theft in the process. They ignore the collective and all the value it creates.
And they also implicitly endorse tax cheating. It's a sickening philosophy. And it's alive and well in the Tory party, which explains why they really aren't trying to close the tax gap.
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Thanks for reading this, Richard – so we don’t have to!
Would this come under the definition of ‘rent seekers’?
After all, a pirate is one who appropriates the property (intellectual property in this case) made or invented by others, in order to profit from it. That is, they are not actually innovating, so much as stealing the profits of the innovations of others.
It may be ‘fun’ being a pirate but it doesn’t actually originate anything new – except an income stream.
Still, we shouldn’t be surprised. This is the party of Grant Schapps / Michael Green / Sebastian Fox / whoever he is this week.
Richard, I can’t even be bothered to read this book, which perhaps is wrong of me, but when you hear a quote on the lines of ‘the British are some of the worst workers in the world..’, I came to the conclusion that the authors were either being deliberately provocative, or are now so extreme that the whole thing is an extended rant against the society in which these weirdos are elected representatives.
So now the party of ‘law and order’ and that used to promote itself as pro-British is now in favour of criminality and against the whole idea of British society!?
The more the ideas of the libertarian right fail, the more extreme they become, like any other fanatic. I seem to remember reading that in the dying months of WW2 in Europe, Hitler railed against the German people for being on the losing side in his war of annihalation against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ , and demanded a total scorched earth policy in the face of the advancing Red Army. Thatcherism/neoliberalism/private good, public bad has produced the biggest economic crises for decades, but whose fault is it? Society as a whole, apparently!
Can I suggest reading ’23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism’ by Ha-Joon Chang as an antidote…
Done that
I pruned the garden with a vengeance instead
What you’ve highlighted is one of the many hypocricies that sit at the heart of Tory thinking/philosophy, Richard. The party of law and order: not if you’re a tax avoider/evader or IP cheat, but certainly if you’re a ‘rioter’ and steal a pair of trainers or bottle of water. One law for the rich and another for the poor. That’s how they’ve always been and that’s how they remain, despite Cameron’s short lived – and failed – attempt to turn them from the nasty party.
Ivan…you’re giving Cameron way too much credit here. You may not have been aware of the Conservative charm offensive leading up to the 2010 GE. Everyone remember Boris on HIGNFY but we used to also get Ed Vaizey and budding Tory MP Michael Bull (is that right?)on The Wright Stuff, Michael ‘Kim Jong Un’ Gove on Late Review…I’m seem to remember many others. This was an amazing strategy. God, I even remember gormless Gideon on Newsnight, I think it was, allowing himself to be filmed pinning one his kids’ paintings on his bedroom wall (I’d love to know if anyone else remembers that). It’s screaming out to the populace….we are really NORMAL. HONESTLY.
Now we have Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism. The charm offensive worked….it really worked. When it will have triumphed is when Boris gets parachuted into Zac Goldsmith’s constituency, wins the Conservative leadership battle (perhaps Cameron will retire gracefully to be with his family, sorry, I meant the international lecture tour), and Britain gets its first cartoon Prime Minister. Boris isn’t stupid but he wants us to think he is and so we get 60,000 people in a London park shouting his name over and over.
When he becomes PM then it really might be over…
While Tory bashing and name calling is fun, isn’t there some truth in the statement that intellectual property rights have gone too far (I seem to recall reading Stiglitz on this).
I have an idea at the moment for a product that is not in any shops and cannot be purchased on the internet. I went to a UK agency specialising in patent protection and they have said there is a product which may be similar already patented and they will charge me £1,500 for a full patent search. The patent is in China, which is probably where my product would have to be made, so I will also need to take Chinese patent advice.
Given that my idea was for something small that could be a nice earner, but won’t make a fortune, I have no rationale choice but to give up. It doesn’t strike me that this is in anyone’s interests, its just the world we live in.
I accept that – but this is not what they’re saying
Please don’t make excuses for them
Oh yes, it’s completely barmy.
“But as a sheer experiment in what the poorest entrepreneur’s can achieve when nearly all of society’s strictures are relaxed the informal economy is pretty hard to beat. The tradeoff between risk and reward is more visible here than anywhere else”
“Visible” in this sense meaning that the law is imposed by organised crime rather than society. And if you threaten a monopoly you get shot. Very entrepreneurial!
To quote someone, Steve Jobs, who has just recently died and who might not want to be attached to this disgusting philosophy is actually pretty sick if you think about it.
Yet I think I’m correct in saying that Tim Berners-Lee refused to patent his invention or perhaps better, ‘construction’ of the WWW, so that all of this lovely entrepreneurship could take place. If only he had patented it (as any one of these Conservative ‘thinkers’ would have done), charged a decent amount for every act of web browsing, then we might all be living under the benign dictatorship of Benevolent Commander Tim. You know what…that actually seems more appealing than any future Conservative vision!
What on earth were you thinking Tim??!!!!
Steve Jobs was a ‘pirate’ in creating the Macintosh group within the heart of Apple, whose corporate structure, he felt, was becoming overbearing and too focused on the then-current cash cow, the Apple II. See http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Pirate_Flag.txt for the real meaning of the phrase.
It’s also worth remembering that he said it 30 years ago, before being forced out of Apple by Jon Sculley, the corporatist he had hired as Apple’s CEO, starting up his new ‘skunkworks’ NeXT Computer (which flopped), then eventually getting acquired by Apple again as they had completely stalled on creating a replacement operating system for the Mac.
Extract from ‘Britannia Unchained‘
“But as a sheer experiment in what the poorest entrepreneurs can achieve when nearly all of society’s strictures are relaxed the informal economy is pretty hard to beat. The trade-off between risk and reward is more visible here than anywhere else.”
This “experiment” already has a model on the Isle of Man (Jersey and Guernsey) where “society’s strictures are relaxed permanently” and the “informal economy” flourishes. Unfortunately the “trade-off” is a dishonest exchange of money for suffering and the “risk and reward” as “visible” as muck in dung heap but as lucrative as anything “anywhere else” on earth…
Only the Tories, and their circle of questionable bankers, worthless celebrities and tax haven loving lowlifes could dream up this crxp ….