tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post8311340640765121103..comments2023-10-16T11:28:03.544+00:00Comments on Anomaly UK: The predictable damage of the EuroAnomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-8998682449096250212012-02-27T16:21:23.672+00:002012-02-27T16:21:23.672+00:00It's the same phenomenon, but applied to a dif...It's the same phenomenon, but applied to a different field. In England you can't build houses without planning permission (usually unobtainable), in France you can't practise a trade without studying for an unnecessary certificate, in Greece you can't sell stuff online without providing a stool sample. I can only suppose that in Greece the legislation exists to protect existing business interests, who don't want new guys coming along and taking their trade from them. But there is also the possibility that it has been developed by the administrators in order to make work for themselves.<br /><br />I detect a similar tendency in our country with regard to personnel work. In the 60s the average job interview for low grade jobs consisted of something like "Got your boots, ave ya? Start on Monday." Since then personnel officers, who previously only bothered interviewing high grade candidates, have expanded their sphere of operations to include even the mentally sub-normal. To the great benefit of their own little empires, but the detriment of society as a whole. N needs a job, otherwise he will default on his mortgage: personnel officers slow him down, and then he is subject to a CRB check, which gets lost and causes further delay, and then requires 60 days before completion. If he defaults he will be yet another cause of the ongoing credit crunch.<br /><br />It is traditional to blame bureaucracy. But if bureaucracy means you get a passport, a job, a CRB check, permission to import olive oil into U.S. within a matter of hours, then that bureaucracy is good. The trouble is good bureaucracy costs more than bad, but the cutback school prefers cheap to expensive.<br /><br />Rivers silt up: societies become entangled in vast numbers of unnecessary procedures which slow down and even impossibilise growth. This is a characteristic neither of socialist nor capitalist societies, of state enterprises or public ones, or national governments or the EU, but of all of them. The growth of the scope of Law and Education in the Capitalist US, even of medicine, is a good example. Prisons, invented in 19th Century England, are wasteful and in need of rethinking. At any time since the 1960s there have in the UK been approximately 1000 times more aspirant musicians than the market can tolerate.<br /><br />Some lucky countries escape one or other of these excesses: Japan has very few lawyers, for example, the USA far too many. Afghanistan under the Taliban had no musicians, but far too many clerical students (the Dari word for which is Taliban) who double as soldiers. Then of course we must mention 'financial services' and the oldest and most rapacious, literal empire-builders, the military.<br /><br />Strangely, you are one of those who ascribe some good to the EU, in that you think that Ireland's growth may be due to subsidies received from the same. The tiny percentage of any country's GNP which comes from or goes to the EU, compared with national spending, means that either this is irrelevant or the EU subsidisers are the greatest financial wizards in existence. Berlaymont in Brussels, supposedly the seat of an enormous bureuacracy, is no larger than Habitat in Swiss Cottage.<br /><br />The Irish prosperity comes from investment by such as the American computer firms which you mention. The trouble is, the Irish think that these firms have chosen to base themselves in Ireland because 1) it speaks English and 2) it uses the Euro.A Nonny Mousehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15824713232073772433noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-7542196725476435712012-02-23T21:51:03.688+00:002012-02-23T21:51:03.688+00:00Does that go for Greece and Spain too? Loose monet...Does that go for Greece and Spain too? Loose monetary policy will always produce asset-price booms, even without insane planning laws, as in the United States, where monetary policy was effectively designed to cause a housing bubble, as <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/02/opinion/dubya-s-double-dip.html" rel="nofollow">Paul Krugman notoriously called for</a>. But neither Britain nor the US had monetary policy quite as inappropriate as the Eurozone periphery on German interest rates in the 2000s.<br /><br />Unlike Greece, Ireland's economy is basically sound, and it can export itself out of trouble after adjusting to the economic shock: compare <a href="http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/02/22/europes-inevitable-greek-divorce/" rel="nofollow">Felix Salmon's account</a> of some sucker trying to start an olive oil web business in Greece with the fact that the likes of Google and Facebook tend to put their <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-01-24/facebook-said-to-weigh-expanding-european-head-office-in-dublin.html" rel="nofollow">European headquarters in Dublin</a>.Anomaly UKhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-30701077361052554022012-02-23T20:38:32.594+00:002012-02-23T20:38:32.594+00:00Funny I made exactly the same prediction- or at le...Funny I made exactly the same prediction- or at least I didn't use big words like traumatic deflation, I mentioned a crash- but for a completely different reason. The problem was not that Ireland had adopted the European Euro, but that it had adopted the English- London based- practice of pushing up land costs by the adverse use of planning permission. This tactic creates a hot spot where everything is unnaturally expensive. It sucks in foreign workers who love the higher wages which they can save and then repatriate, perhaps investment also. Meanwhile the natives live in hovels, which they can sell for millions of pounds. But in the long run it makes the hotspot's products too expensive to sell elsewhere. England's industry went for a burton long ago. When Ireland's housing, and therefore everything else, was too expensive Ireland's products became uncompetitive.A Nonny Mousehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15824713232073772433noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-26056529996014447502012-02-20T11:06:58.784+00:002012-02-20T11:06:58.784+00:00Well the only way to attain fiscal union is to sel...Well the only way to attain fiscal union is to sell it as the only solution to the euro crisis. <br /><br />And the EU has always wanted fiscal union.<br /><br />ergo,<br />it needed a crisis. Now it has it.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com