Horizontal vs. Top-down Control

When I was growing up I got really into the "grand" global conspiracy. I went to see David Icke speak with my brother in a relatively small room in Stoke on Trent around 2002. There were only maybe a couple hundred people in the audience.

Later on, around 2007, I got really into economics and libertarianism. I began to think a less about the "global" conspiracy. Suddenly most of what I saw going on in society could be explained by economic incentives. 

For one thing, people like free stuff, of course they are going to vote it for themselves whenever they can. They don't typically see this as looting the commonweal, living at the expense of their neighbour, but "fair" in light of the challenges they face in life. Society has never told public sector workers, for example, that this is shameful, all is fair under democracy. A vote is a vote and a policy is a policy.

As a corollary, those individuals that make up government want power - even if it is power to "do good" according to their own values. One way the government can get power, while garnering the support of the populace, is to bribe people with handouts. People who receive benefits are from the state are likely to be supporters of the state. All the public servants, school teachers, university professors, campaign contributors, not to mention the politicians themselves, are basically bought off with public funds to be tacit allies of government. In addition to this, they keep an underclass on welfare, who can always be relied upon to support the institution of government out of fear of starvation. 

When our societies were not very affluent, only a small percentage of people's income could be appropriated in taxes because, say, a "0% reduction in the average person's living standards would have  been huge. As we have grown richer, the total tax many people pay is far in excess of half of their income. This allows the government to have a far greater number of people than ever before on its payrolls to protest tax increases, however, it does not cause the tax-payer themselves to starve. In addition to this, they believe they are at least in receipt of some services that have come to be seen as impossible to provide without government by the great majority of people, including roads, hospitals and schools. By this final act, the support of even the net tax-contributors are won over to the idea of government, and all of this is explainable merely by the incentives of the system itself. This is what you could more or less expect to happen in an affluent democracy. 

It's power being solidified, it's not difficult for the corporations, who deal with huge sums of money, to buy the government. In fact they are incentivised to do so. As soon as a corporation gains a greater return on their investment by lobbying the government than they do from serving their customer, that is what they are going to do. This completes the circle. 

Organisations like WHO, IMF, World Bank and CDC work in the interests of the corporations, but people think they are "government" agencies; which they take to mean working in the public interest.  

Now, this doesn't mean I don't believe individual conspiracies take place. For example, murder of Jeffrey Epstein. Other conspiracies such as The Lavon Affair or Operation Gladio are even freely admitted to have occurred. It just means that I don't necessarily think these need to be centrally orchestrated in smoky rooms by the same cabal of powermongers. 

The term conspiracy theory, itself, is simply used to dismiss claims out of hand and relieve people of the need for further investigation. The term "conspiracy theorist" is synonymous with "nut," and it is popular to psychologize people who believe in conspiracies as having some strange motive to find patterns where there are none. However, someone can have psychological tendencies which drive them towards a position - and that position can still be true! One of the appeals of the "conspiracy theorists" in the pre-YouTube world was exactly that they would bring context to a media landscape devoid of it, where the media would portray complex events as a snapshot in time. For example, propagandizing the populace with the claim that, "Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds," without showing either of the videos of Donald Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, meeting with Hussein in the 80s to sell him weapons.

Like many, recent events regarding the Global Pandemic (or "Globalist Plandemic" to conspiracy theorists), like many, have really made me think again of the global conspiracy again.

A global conspiracy, of course, could exist, and by its very nature of being secret and covert we would not even know about it.

My question though, remains, what is actually the scarier thought?

If there are just a handful of evil men who are orchestrating world event, up to no good, then it is relatively easy to depose them.

If it is not a centrally planned conspiracy then the world becomes far harder to fix. You have a nice neighbour, but he doesn't believe you should be able to operate a hair salon without a licence. Your drinking buddies want to take your guns. Your churchmates don't think gays should be allowed to get married. Another friend says Soviet Russia wasn't real communism and real communism has never been tried. All the people at your local theatre group support you being taxed to pay for allopathic medical treatments that you disagree with, taking money from you to pay big pharma. Atheists want Christians to pay for abortions. Meat eaters want vegans to pay for subsidies to dairy farmers. 

In other words - control is not exerted upon you vertically, from above, but horizontally, by the very people around you, whom you love.

 

Can Government Make a Business Run "For The Good of Society" ?

The New York Post recently reported that a judge in Indiana has temporarily barred Starbucks from closing 77 Teavana stores that were failing because "the very profitable Starbucks could absorb the financial hit". Industry experts said the ruling will send a chill down the spines of distressed retailers, and with good reason! The prospect of not being able to shut down an outlet that is bleeding the rest of the business may have countless unintended consequences that will affect not just owners but consumers in general. Firms are likely to take this as a signal to be more cautious about opening up new stores, and become reluctant to invest, take risks, and employ people in the first place. Customers stand to lose.

Amidst the debate upon the justice of the justice in question, I heard a voice clamour, "The question is not of profit, but whether a business should be run for society or society should be run for business!" and to be quite frank the claim struck me at first as vacuous; professing much while saying very little. Yet we must admit that throughout history many governments have believed they were "serving society" (rather than the business community) by forcing companies to fix prices, continue operations at a loss, or even subsidising or bailing them out with public funds. Many have believed this is in the interest of "the greater good."

Could it be that government forcing Starbucks to maintain unprofitable stores - in some circumstances - would be good for society?

First we should examine the use of the word "society" itself. Rather than bring clarity, it obscures the issue, making it more difficult to apprehend the facts of the matter. Who exactly is society and how do we measure what is and isn't good for it? Society is made of a whole bunch of different individuals and groups with different interests, and what is good for one might not necessarily be good for another.

It's not that keeping a Teavana open despite the owner's desire to close it won't be good for anyone; clearly the proprietor of the shopping centres is willing to fight hard for what they stand to gain, and certainly regular patrons will be happy to be able to get their regular cup of chai before leaving a hard-days-shop. However, the point is the move privilege a few individuals who want to continue going to those outlets at the expense of everyone else in the area who has demonstrated that they would rather something else opens up in that space instead. Starbucks then will need to recuperate the loss somehow or other, perhaps by increasing prices slightly at all other locations. If the locality can only sustain the demand for three tea houses and the unprofitable Teavana happens to be the forth then they are also bleeding demand away from the other three, and so on. We can continue counting negative consequences to other parties.

If Starbucks are deprived of however many millions it costs to operate 77 unprofitable stores that is less money they have to invest in stores that are wanted by enough people to keep them afloat. It's less cash for shareholders who will take it out to the shops to spend it or reinvest it in other businesses, it's less for Starbucks customers who have to pay slightly more for a cup of coffee and therefore don't have to spend on something else, it's less for Starbucks employees who might have to forego a raise because there is less to go around..

Clearly the effect of this policy is not something that can be broken down into whether it ‘benefits society’ or not. All we can say is that it benefits some groups and harms others.

It seems ironic to me that most of those who will cheer on the judges ruling, forcing Starbucks to run 77 tea outlets - against their own interests - for the interests of others are probably the most likely to complain when a Teavana opens up that it will "drive out" locally owned tea houses (which are probably actually collapsing under the strain of the regulations they have to comply with, not being able to afford Starbucks team of expensive lawyers and accountants.) If anything you'd think this crowd would be cheering on the closures! As they carry with them a certain prejudice that whatever vexes big business is necessarily good for the rest of us, we can only conclude that supporting the ruling is less about what is good for society and more about what is bad for Starbucks.

If you're not growing you're dying.

It takes a long time to make changes in public institutions. You have to get enough of the public interested to make it an issue, you might need to get into the media which itself is a hell of a job and even if you do rouse some attention the best most people can hope for is to vote, and they need to vote for one of the package deals on offer. Even if your reform is quite modest and sensible and its benefit is uncontroversial, it may be adopted by a party who have several other ideas on your mind that you disagree with. There is another path, and that is to get a small concentrated number of people who already have a lot of influence to get on board with your ideal and push it through as a bill but even then the matter is not settled; it needs to go through levels of bureaucrats, managers and administrators before the change enters into the system at large and even then many employees will resist the change because they resent being told what to do by central planners.

If we take the example of our education system there has been no small amount of evidence on how to improve it since the 60s when a wave of intellectual idealists from the flower power generation began discussing how "getting things right" when it came to government could change the world. Some of this data has been around for over fifty years, some of it is still coming out. Have these reforms not been adopted for a lack of political will? Yes to a degree but also because of the insurmountable obstacles to mustering the political will. The largest is the simple fact that most people are more comfortable doing what they have always done than doing something new. Doing things differently is anxiety-provoking and it is very irritating to be told or forced to do it by an authority figure, even one who has the evidence on their side, when you think, "Well I have been on the front lines doing it this way my whole life, this is how I was taught to do it in four years of university I think you'll find I know how its done thank you very much you government busy body."

One of the reasons why markets are so important, and why products adapt to user preferences far quicker is because only one person needs to be bothered enough to accept a new innovation in order to force all the other providers in their sector to step up and do a better job. They can do that by matching the innovation, by implementing one that is equally valuable, by providing an inferior service but at a lower price, or in numerous other ways - but the fact is they have to step up and serve customers or on average over time they will be out of business. This means people don't even need to all be receiving the same service or a one-size-fits-all but it does mean that services that are way behind the times will fall out of favour. Public institutions are not under the same pressure to adapt to the times because people cannot divest from them easily since they are funded through the tax system rather than voluntary contributions that can be withdrawn if the service is poor, and also because they have a relative monopoly on the provision of services in their sector which means that people can't compare their performance to those of competitors who are trying different approaches which may have their own advantages or drawbacks.

People need to have a choice when it comes to services if the quality of services is to increase and not stagnate or fall behind the times. This is not because "ruthless tooth n' nail capitalist competition drives innovation" but simply without the petri-dish of trial and error which is a multitude of entrepreneurs with different information and ideas trying to sell them to a skeptical public there is really no way of discovering the best way of doing things. No one has all the answers, but many people have some of the answers, and by constantly turning over the soil society learns to combine the best ideas and discard the worst ones over time. The soil of government turns very very slowly and that's why innovation in the private sector continues (despite various government restrictions on who can innovate) while public institutions stagnate and become more expensive each year while providing poorer standards to the people.

6 Reasons Why Healthcare is so Expensive in the USA

- In many states if you want to open a hospital you are obliged to go before an official board and demonstrate that the community needs this hospital and that you are willing and able to fund it all by yourself. The people on the board are going to be the big hospital administrators from already existing institutions who want the competition like a hole in the head.

- Nineteen states are even limited to having only a single medical school! There are only 123 in the US despite thousands of perfectly capable students being turned away every year because they can't find places.

- Not everything a doctor does requires 7 years of training but the law requires everyone to have at least 7 years of training to do it. (In some cases a practitioner will have to do 4 years of undergrad, 4 years of medical school, then 3 years residency by the end of which many are so burned out and seriously debt laden before they even begin their career.) The natural prescription is to allow doctors surgeries, clinics and hospitals to train and certify their own assistants to take responsibilities off the hands of highly specialised staff so that fully fledged professional can focus their time and attention on what they alone are capable of doing. Healthcare costs would plummet.

- In December 2011, the Administrator for the Centres for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Dr. Donald Berwick asserted (as he was leaving his job) that 20-30% of health care spending in the US is going to waste. He listed the five major causes as over-treatment, failure to coordinate care, the administrative complexity of the system, burdensome rules, and outright fraud.

- One study found that per capita prescription drug spending in the United States exceeds that in all other countries, $858 compared with an average of $400 for 19 other industrialized nations, and the most important factor allowing manufacturers to set high drug prices was market exclusivity, protected by monopoly rights awarded upon Food and Drug Administration approval and by patents.

- A Harvard Business Review analysis published in 2013 revealed that while the U.S. healthcare workforce grew by 75 percent between 1990 and 2012 a whopping 95% of the new employees were administrative staff rather than doctors or nurses meaning 19 administrative workers for every doctor. The Annals of Internal Medicine last year, observed 57 physicians found that 29 percent of total work time was spent talking with patients or other staff members and another 49 percent was spent on electronic record keeping and desk work.


I am writing a book called Why is Healthcare in America so Expensive if you want to get notified about it when it's ready download my last book for free.

The River: Public Policy or Private Responsibility?

What is common to many is least taken care of, for all men have
greater regard for what is their own than what they possess in
common with others. 

—Aristotle

The idea of aspects of the natural world being "privately owned" strikes as rather crass to most people and perhaps with some good reason as it brings to mind a vision of heartless mercenaries sacrificing nature to the pursuit of profit. Industrialists, we are led to believe, can only possibly view nature as a means to and end rather than an end in itself, and in doing so reduce it to a disposable commodity.

However, this prevailing assessment does not take into the equation the fact that true ownership is attended by responsibilities to which an owner must be held accountable. Where rights entail responsibilities (as they have in the past under common law), and these responsibilities are enforced, the claim to a property will serve naturally as an incentive to conserve that property. In effect owners will become custodians.*

* (The words "ownership" and "property" have perhaps simply taken on negative connotations synonymous with exploitation for various historical reasons, and so it is essential in order to dialogue on these topics that we make explicit the fact that our definition of ownership is one that not only entails property rights but property responsibilities.)

Most people presume that government must fulfill the role of protecting the natural world, but this arrangement throws up some rather dubious incentives. When governments write policy documents about rivers, lets say, they tend to be for the purpose of  delineating who is allowed to exploit the river, on what terms, and in what measure. Special favours can always be handed out to cronies or campaign contributors; to “stimulate local business”; or for any other political ends that might attract short term support for office-holders regardless of the long term consequences. The rights to log a forest can be sold off to the highest bidder and the tax payer can be left with the burden of restoring it to health.


Where the river (or forest) has particular ownership (rather than general ownership) it is fully in the interests of the owner (or owners) to keep it permanently in pristine condition for at least three reasons. (Owners also need not necessarily be private companies or individuals, but also charities, trusts, worker or consumer cooperatives, NGOs, or any form of organisation - that notwithstanding,  even if held by a private corporations these same incentives will apply.)

The first is in order to retain (or even increase) the resale value of the river. The better condition the river is kept in the higher its value will become; and even if the proprietor has no plans of ever selling the river they still have no interest in losing whatever outlay they have sunk into acquiring it in the first place. As such, a particular owner has the maximum incentive to protect against the river being polluted and to take whatever action is necessary to prevent it from being polluted. As a rightful owner they have the legal and moral right to take action against anyone who pollutes the river because the polluter has damaged the value of their property.  As it is not under general ownership where everyone has as much right to abuse it as anyone else does, the proprietor's interests are aligned with the interests of the natural world, thus he is risen to the level of a custodian. 

Secondly, a well-kept resource is renewable - it can turn a profit indefinitely. A badly-kept resource cannot. If a river is ill-kept the return on the investment for acquiring that resource will soon dry up (no pun intended.) As such an owner who does not know how to take care of the river will stand to gain more from passing it on to someone who does than from keeping it. A superior custodian will be able to pay more to acquire the river since they know how to put it to good use indefinitely.  The best experts in keeping a river running cleanly stand to gain the most from owning them and therefore will be able to pay more to acquire them than those who lack that expertise. In this way those who are the best custodians of resources will end up with them in their care on average over time. (The same would go for forests, fisheries, or grazing lands; where altruism is not enough to motivate environmental concern, rational self-interest will usually do the trick.)

Thirdly, if the river is not properly kept and becomes polluted, this is inevitably going to have negative effects on neighbouring lands, industries and settlements as the pollution is carried by the river onto other people’s property. At this point, as the last line of defence against irresponsible misuse and management of the river is the threat of litigation against the owner for his negligent and harmful management of his property. Where others have suffered harm, loss of health, or damage to their own property, a particular owner should be forced to pay damages and reparations to restore them to their original condition. They can lose their personal property and have to forfeit ownership of the river if they are found guilty of causing damages. When the government causes environmental catastrophes, as they often have, they can only be tried in their own courts, and even so the property of decision-makers is never at stake - even if found guilty of wrong-doing, the public purse will eventually foot the bill. As officials in public institutions tend to have a diffusion of responsibility it is hard to hold particular culprits to account for their actions, rarely will a department be shut down or replaced where abuses occur as they are presumed essential even having "made mistakes". Often state officials have sovereign immunity, occasionally one or two resignations will be tendered as a  token gesture, but the machinery of the institution remains as well as the lack of moral hazard which set it up to fail.

Regime Uncertainty

A seductive (if poorly considered) critique of markets is the notion that they are so wildly unpredictable and inherently unstable that we need government to watch over them and intervene to mitigate their excesses. There is a great irony in this position which I will reveal.

Economist John Maynard Keynes (1883 – 1946) made perhaps the most famous case for this view, coining the term "animal spirits" to describe the irrational, impulse-driven whims of market-actors based on arbitrary expectations that could only cause instability. The idea itself seems to make sense because it's hard for intellectuals, who love chewing over ideas and coming up with bright plans, to see how a society could run coherently without a single plan. The truth is, market economies are actually planned - there is just no central plan. What happens on a market is that lots of individuals make little plans to roll out their bright ideas into the through businesses, charities, and other organisations, hoping to influence as many people as possible. The plans which prove successful on the small scale attract resources and grow steadily in their impact. Other planners emulate them and adapt their own plans in light of their success. Meanwhile those plans which prove to be failures never get far off the ground.

This means that, left to their own devices, markets have their own self-correcting mechanisms which Keynes appeared to have overlooked. While in any situation there may be entrepreneurs, investors, and consumers who do indeed make poor or irrational decisions and make mistakes (driven by their animal spirits) there will always be others who succeed as well. The mechanism of profit and loss allocates the pool of available capital to those producers who make good predictions as to what consumers (you and I) want over the long term and reallocate them away from those who use the badly. This limit the scope of damage caused by bad or incompetent decision-makers. Where people fail, the results of those failures will be limited to some small number of people. This can not be said of failures of government which might extend to affecting the entire society.

Now, here's the irony. Even allowing for Keynes his hypothesis that markets are inherently unstable, how can the prospect of intervention by government, at any time, into the economy do anything but make the market more unpredictable and make it more difficult for the "little planners" to make long-term decisions? Over the course of 20 years a government could change 5 or more times. With each change in administration the form of state interventions in the economy can change dramatically, as can the political philosophy driving it. Plans can be added or scrapped at any time. Government can increase or reduce taxes at whim, or increase or decrease spending. They can pass new tariffs, grant subsidies, institute licensing laws and regulations or scrap them. Government-mandated Central Banks (like The Bank of England or The Federal Reserve) can increase or decrease interest rates; expand the money supply or contract it. Plus what makes those calm and virtuous actors themselves immune to the influences of the animal spirits? Do they not too have emotional whims, not to mention voters and campaign contributors to please?

Yes, when the specter of government hangs looming over the economy conditions can rapidly and unpredictably change at any time, in countless ways and this can only exacerbate the problem that the Keynesians plan to solve. Economist Robert Higgs called this the phenomenon of "Regime Uncertainty", where investors fear it may be hard or even impossible to foresee the extent to which future government actions will alter the “rules to the game.” As a result, investors become averse to taking risk (much in the way that Keynes feared they might) not due to a lack of government intervention – but in anticipation of it!

Private investors have "skin in the game." Their own self-interest should motivate them to only take certain risks of personal loss, and investigate all the available information to make robust decisions. But public servants are forever fated to spending other peoples money on other people. The best people at making decisions with money are most likely not in government. They're probably out there in the free market making "Little Plans" to launch a new businesses or product that might one day spread out to the furthest reaches of the earth the way mobile phones are now reaching the world's poorest populations in Africa.

I'm in the process of writing a book called "The Errors of Keynes" if you would like to receive updates about it please grab my free eBook and you will get an update when it's good to go.

The Excesses of Capitalism

The government - we are told - is necessary to protect us from the excesses of capitalism, and whatever gripes the average person might have about their elected officials, almost all of them can agree upon this.

But there's a problem with thinking the government can ever enter the economy as a fair referee rather than merely playing into the hands of whatever factions are most rich, powerful, and influential; because as soon as a corporations can make more money by angling for government favours than they can by serving customers that is exactly what they are going to do. Not necessarily because they are evil - but because it becomes the rational thing to do.

On an open market where only voluntary exchanges are permitted a business can only turn a profit by  providing something that the general buying public wants. No matter how greedy the corporate fat-cats may be, if they fail to 'cough up the goods' (and services) that people want they will go to the wall. [all puns intended] In this way the market forces otherwise self-interested people to apply their self-interest to social ends.

Critics may still complain about "tooth and nail" competition, but at least on a free market firms are competing to serve you better and win your disposable income. As soon as the government intervenes in the economy one thing is for sure: companies will compete for control over legislative bodies and the strings of the public purse. This is where the real "tooth and nail" begins.

According to The Sunlight Foundation for each of the 5.8 billion dollars spent by America's 200 most politically active corporations between 2007 and 2012 on federal lobbying and campaign contributions by they got $741 in return in kickbacks and benefits.

To pay for these kickbacks tax-payers were left $4.3 trillion dollars poorer - but that's not all.  $5.8 billion was spent in political gaming instead of invested in jobs and product development. These incentives drive companies to misallocate resources by making products that the general public doesn't want profitable, and products that they do unprofitable. In other words, the government has become the client of these corporations rather than their customers.

Firms might lobby or contribute to political campaigns to earn the exclusive right to provide government with their products. This will give them a huge advantage over competitors even if they are producing inferior or more expensive services. They can lobby for subsidies on their own goods or tariffs on cheaper or superior competitors.They can get the government to pass laws about who can and cannot operate in their sector.

Mandatory licenses, fees, reviews, huge stacks of forms, inspections, make it expensive for small start up businesses to enter the market and compete on an equal playing field. Companies spend millions of dollars on accountants, lawyers, actuaries and bureaucrats - not to mention tens of thousands of hours - to make sure they comply with the entangling webs of red tape, and make no mistake this harms the public. The costs are reflected in the price of products, and those are millions of dollars and tens of thousands of hours that are not being spent on more productive work that would benefit others. The rounds of "regulation" inflate corporate profits more and more, by cutting small firms out the market and directing sales to bigger firms who can afford specialists or whole departments to play the game.

By changing the incentive structure of the economy to favour profit through political influence over serving customers the government corrupts the market rather than moderating its excesses.

Beauty Salon Economics

One of the most fundamental things about economics which most people who are passionate about politics do not understand is that the economy is not just like a chess board where you can move one piece with deterministic and predictable consequences. On the contrary, an economy is an intricate fabric of interrelated institutions and actors all of whom act relative to one another. Any one move creates a cascade of domino effects. If the price of milk changes dramatically then orange juice sales might be affected - you just never know.

The role of a good economist is to be able to follow the threads of consequences liable to result from a policy so that the short-sightedness of policy-makers (and would-be policy makers) seeking some immediate and favourable end does not result in a multitude of negative unintended consequences into the bargain. (Clearly this goes to the very heart of why I called this blog Seeing the Unseen.)

Many policies can end up having the opposite effect from what is intended.

For example, supposing some of the fancy hair salons are getting irked because cheap salons are popping up everywhere and giving people poor quality haircuts. They're giving the whole industry a bad name. So a coalition goes to the government to pass standards and licensing laws in the hairdressing industry (in some places you currently need a license to braid hair.) That's going to improve the quality of haircut going around, right?

Not necessarily. Now all the hair salons have to send their employees to college for two years to get a license, and when they graduate they are expecting much higher pay because they just sunk two years into an education which they didn't see  any money during. Some of them went out drinking with their student loans, the rest still had rent to pay, and most of them accumulated debts. What's more the salons need to consult special accountants or lawyers to make sure they can prove that they are adhering to the new regulations - even the ones who are way ahead of the law and already providing far better conditions and services than what has been mandated. These professionals often charge upwards of $100 an hour. Many independent salons simply can't afford the increase in costs and have to close down entirely; others have to jack prices up to pay for the extra costs of compliance and staff. In some areas only one salon is left standing and since people have less choice they can afford to let standards slip.

With the price of haircuts going up lots of people decide to go without. They cut their friends hair at home, badly. Or they get pretty good at it and don't have to go to the hairdressers any more but take longer to prepare for going out and miss out on the chat and gossip. What's more everyone who does still go for a professional haircut has less left over to spend on a manicure or something else nice, so other industries also suffer. You can add to that the marginal increase in taxes to pay the civil servants in the new public body which acts as a regulator for the hairdressing industry. Now those people are involved in busy work instead of making commodities and providing services that improve people’s living standards in real terms and rather than paying into the public purse they are a net drain on it.

I choose a relatively trivial example (no disrespect ladies) because it's perfectly illustrative of how a seemingly simple and innocuous policy suggestion - mandatory hairdressing licenses - can generate more than its fair share of consequences. An alternative is for a series of private watchdogs to certify only hairdressers that meet their standards and give the ones who do an official number and sticker to put in their window; because they are competing they have to keep the costs of certification to a minimum (no $100 an hour fees), and people who are not fussed to pay extra for a certified cut can take a risk on somewhere cheaper or go by word of mouth.

Occupational licensing makes for an interesting case because it is almost ubiquitously considered in the public interest and even necessary to prevent catastrophe, and yet there is actually zero evidence that it leads to a higher quality of service provision. Zilch!

Usually all it means is that instead of taking budget options people with fewer means have to go without any services at all! This is a topic to which we will have to return to in more detail, check back! :)

Why The State will Not solve Social Problems

The impulse of the state is not to solve social problems but to create as many dependents as possible, including a bloated public sector full of Marxists and as many people as possible on welfare who they can then turn on whenever they need someone to blame for their own excesses. That is why the size of government grew massively even under so-called free market Thatcher who made hand-outs to big business and sent military spending through the roof. Every dependent will make justifications for the existence of the state as a necessary evil and attack the free market which takes people out of poverty. The natural state of everyone who is born is poverty; all wealth was created by individuals for themselves or to trade with other people for something which they agree upon in a voluntary exchange. Voluntary exchange enriches both parties as each trader values what they get from the trade more than what they part with, and so trade takes people out of poverty not government. Government retards this organic process by putting restrictions on who can trade with whom under what circumstances and passing an ever increasing litany of laws that make it impossible for poor people to find employment so that many people will have to compete for few jobs and accept whatever conditions are given to them. This creates dependency upon which government survives. To complete the trick the government directs the attention of the oppressed to their crappy bosses rather than the conditions which created the crappy bosses, those state interventions which restricted the number of jobs.

The government cannot solve social problems because the government lives on social problems. If tomorrow everyone woke up in a world without crime then what need for a large police force? In a world with little poverty and many routes out of poverty, then what need for huge welfare programs and government bureaucrats to administer them? If there wasn't a shortage of medical staff pushing the price of medical care through the roof then who would tolerate a million people on NHS waiting lists? If we didn't fear any enemies in the Middle East or Russia what need for a large military and curtailments on civil liberties? Who would need government without social problems? Who would want it? It is in the interests of government to perpetuate social problems internally and create enemies abroad, then blame all of this on capitalism and the free market so the average individual will call on government to save them.

If we want to solve social problems we need to dig in with our own hands and start helping. We can volunteer, create organisations, or support organisations that are already doing good work. 

A bunch of looters!

States are a cancerous growth on society. A bunch of looters. They enjoy the de jure privilege of not having to gather resources and property the way all other people and institutions do by request or by voluntary exchange. They bribe half the electorate to vote for them with free stuff and blackmail the other half with dependency and fear of starvation. 

They assimilate already existing institutions and make them worse. The NHS is an expression of the general will of the people to have universal healthcare. The state assimilates that and creates waiting lists a million lives long.

They supplanted organic institutions for providing welfare in the community and replaced them with a system that condemns generations to poverty.

Their moral and philosophical basis is so vacuous and without merit that they had to create a religion called democracy - the most prevalent religion, and least appraised for its virtues (or lack thereof as would more accurately be the case.) Their intellectual vassals coined bullshit theories like "the social contract" to post-fact rationalize their desire to run the lives of others by force, then disseminate them through an education system which teaches a false version of history designed to make people see bondage as freedom and freedom as slavery. More than ever, academics play the role that the churches played in the dark ages - they are apologists for state power. On one hand they claim individuals have moral obligations to government to which they did not consent, on the other they deny their right to their lives and the product of their labour by appealing to Hume's Law and post-modern doctrines which claim that no universal morality between men can exist. Universities tell people what they should learn and what to think rather than help them become fully fledged, skilled individuals with brilliant critical faculties, self-esteem, and strong ethics.

Once states are abolished people will look back on them the way we look back on slavery.