"These Meetings are Carbon Neutral" (Not!!)

This blog comes from Washington DC where the great and the good of the world of international finance –ministers of finance, central bankers, national and international financial bureaucrats, private financiers - and thousands of hangers-on have gathered for the 2007 Annual Meetings of the World Bank Group/IMF. When you enter the main World Bank building, its Atrium is dominated by a huger banner proclaiming “These Meetings are Carbon Neutral”. Even a moment’s reflection makes it obvious that this statement cannot be true. Let’s take the counterfactual (the benchmark against which carbon-neutrality will be judged), to be an otherwise identical world in which the 2007 Annual Meetings are cancelled (well ahead of time) and not replaced with any other similar event or set of smaller-scale regional events. For those attending the Annual Meetings who are normally based in Washington DC anyway, I will assume that the carbon footprint is unchanged. Actually, with the meetings cancelled there will be fewer meetings, less jumping in and out of taxis and less dining out on expense accounts, so even for the Washington DC crowd, cancelling the Meetings would, in all likelihood reduce CO2eq (Carbon dioxide- equivalent) emissions, but I am keen not to overegg my case. For those coming to Washington DC for the Annual Meetings from elsewhere, the cancellation of the Meetings is likely to result in a reduction in CO2eq emissions when we compare their activities in Washington DC to their activities had they remained at home (playing with the children/grandchildren etc.). This is because expense-account living in DC (fine food and drink, air conditioned hotels and meeting venues, other official and unofficial activities) is likely to be more CO2eq-intensive than the activities likely to be pursued under the alternative scenario at home. Finally, there is the carbon footprint associated with transporting many thousands of meeting participants to Washington DC. They come, literally, from all over the world. The vast majority travels by air. It is highly unlikely that the total number of flights is not higher under the Annual Meeting takes place scenario than under the Annual Meeting does not take place scenario. Likewise, the average load of passengers and luggage carried by a typical flight is likely to increase as a result of the Annual Meetings. CO2eq emissions are increasing in both the number of flights and in the load carried per flight. So the statement “These Meetings are Carbon Neutral” is obviously untrue. That raises the question: are those who dreamt up this slogan lying, stupid or both? The use “These Meetings are Carbon Neutral”, could be an application of the principle of lying attributed to Joseph Goebbels: “If you lie, lie big”. [1] With the Nobel for peace going to Al Gore and the IPCC, being green (or at any rate appearing to be green) is a good thing. If you can talk the talk but cannot walk the talk, just fake the walk. Another possibility is that the World Bank’s definition of carbon-neutral is so ludicrously restrictive, that the statement is both correct and utterly misleading. It could mean no more than that the air conditioners have been turned down a few degrees, that the toilet paper is recycled and that so-called carbon offsets have been purchased by the organizers in an amount equal to the net CO2eq emissions created by the meetings. I have argued elsewhere that the carbon offset industry is a gigantic fraud and massive waste of resources. The World Bank should take that banner down.

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[1] Some of the best-known quotes are probably incorrectly attributed to Goebbels. They include "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." and "The bigger the lie, the more it will be believed." Goebbels did assert that something close to the principle attributed to him was practiced by the English. In his paper "Churchill's Lie Factory" he said: "The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous." - Joseph Goebbels, "Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik," 12. january 1941, Die Zeit ohne Beispiel.

Simplify tax regime with common rate on all (capital) income

An earlier version of this blog appeared as a Letter to the Editor in the Financial Times of 18 October 2007.

Of course the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer is being attacked for abolishing taper relief (a capital gains tax rate of 10 percent on an arbitrary selection of capital gains and on other capital income items masquerading as capital gains) and setting a uniform capital gains tax rate of 18 percent. Those who complain are those who stand to lose. Special pleading always masquerades as the defence of the common good: the losers want us to believe that their loss is not only painful to them, but also unfair and damaging to the UK economy. The Chancellor should not listen. Taper relief has no more justification on grounds of efficiency or fairness than would tape worm relief. Further reform of the CGT is required, integrating it fully with the taxation of other forms of capital income, and indeed with the taxation of labour income. The main reasons are tax administration and the preservation of the tax bases for capital income and labour income.

Through trivially simple financial engineering (varying dividend pay outs, borrowing and share repurchases) listed companies can seamlessly transform dividends into interest or capital gains. The same can be achieved by unlisted companies when their owners sell the business. This means that, for simple tax administration reasons and to preserve the capital income tax base, only a common tax rate for all capital income, dividends, capital gains and interest, makes sense. Sector, holding period, type of capital, nature of ownership, size of firm, corporate form are all irrelevant.

That only leaves the common tax rate on all forms of capital income to be decided. Efficiency dictates that you tax things at a higher rate the lower its elasticity of demand or supply. In the long run, capital is in infinitely elastic supply. This suggests a zero marginal tax rate on capital income is optimal. In the short run, capital is given – a zero supply elasticity. This suggests confiscatory taxation is optimal. Are we in the short run or in the long run? You take your pick.

Furthermore, most labour income in the UK is in fact capital income, the return on risky investment in human capital – education, training and other skills acquisition. Therefore, to avoid distortions, labour income and all capital income should be taxed in the same way. There also is a tax administration and income tax base preservation argument for taxing labour income and capital income the same way. In small enterprises, where the same persons are both shareholders and workers, income can be transformed seamlessly from wages into dividends and vice versa.

Both efficiency and fairness would be served by taxing all labour income and all capital income the same way. There is no case, of course, for a separate corporation tax. Only natural persons – the beneficial owners of capital should be taxed. There may be a tax administration case for collecting some of the personal capital income tax at the level of the company, as a withholding tax, but there should be full offset of such withholdings.

So, to preserve capital income and/or labour income as a tax base, it is necessary to add together each person’s wages, dividends, interest income and capital gains and to apply a single tax schedule to the total. The highest marginal tax rate on capital gains would therefore be 40 percent, the same as it is for wages and dividends.

A final benefit of my proposed simplification of the capital taxation regime is that it would lift the burden of guilt of engaging in privately profitable but socially unproductive labour from tens of thousands of tax lawyers, tax accountants and other tax efficiency experts and free them for socially productive labour.

Long live debt!

I would like to make a deal with the Right Rev Peter Selby, Bishop of Worcester from 1997 to 2007. I promise not to make public statements about the merits of the Trinitarian doctrine (a form of higher theological mathematics asserting that 3 = 1). In return I would like the Bishop not to write any more nonsense about credit and debt.

In today’s Credo column on the Faith page of the Times of London (“It’s time to stop giving credit to our culture of debt”, The Times, Saturday October 13, 2007, p. 83) the Bishop produces a number of canards about debt. Unencumbered by logic or facts, the Bishop makes a slew of assertions that are, at best, unproven and at worst plain wrong.

Assertion 1: The Jubilee 2000 campaign, advocating debt relief for the poorest nations of the world, "was a remarkable achievement". Case unproven. The Bishop makes the common mistake of confusing poor countries and poor people. The debt relief in question is the forgiving of debt owed by the governments of the poorest nations. It is quite possible, and in a many cases indeed likely, that the vast majority of the citizens of these poorest nations may have been made worse off by the cancellation of part or all of the debt owed by their governments. Most of the poorest countries have appalling governments - repressive, corrupt, incompetent and inefficient. Unlike the vast majority of the population, the rulers of the poorest countries often are rich – their wealth stolen from the people. Debt forgiveness consolidates the hold of these disastrous governments on power and postpones the day that they can be held to account. When trying to help the poor ‘do no harm’ should be an overriding concern. Jubilee 2000 violated the ‘do no harm’ maxim.

Assertion 2: The need to get across “a systemic analysis of the nature of runaway debt, its roots in the creation of money by lending and borrowing, and the potential dangers for the world of both domestic and international debt.” Here the Bishop makes a factual statement about runaway debt. Where is (was) this runaway debt? The UK? The US? Everywhere in the world? Clearly, one can point to specific instances of excessive borrowing. Some households in the US and the UK have undoubtedly engaged in this. Elsewhere there is too little debt and borrowing. In the People’s Republic of China, for instance, it would probably be welfare-enhancing for the government to raise spending on education, health and environmental investment, and to finance at least part of this by borrowing, thus absorbing the excessive saving of Chinese households and public enterprises. Apart from his factual errors, the Bishop also confuses money creation with credit and borrowing. One can have lending and borrowing without money creation and money creation without lending or borrowing. The Bishop is confused about what money is, how it is created and what it does. He is in good company. Most people haven’t got a clue about the meaning and modalities of money. But fortunately, most monetary ignoramuses don’t display their ignorance by writing about it in the Times.

Assertion 3. “It is obvious that if you allow financial institutions to make huge profits by lending large multiples of the deposits they hold, you are allowing them to create money”. This is complete gobbledegook. For those who care, there are many operational definitions of money, ranging from narrow money (coin and currency plus commercial bank deposits with the central bank) to broader monetary aggregates, typically the sum of coin and currency in circulation, plus some subset of the deposits of certain deposit-taking institutions, plus some of the close substitutes for these deposits. ‘Creating money’ – an unfortunate and imprecise phrase that appears to attribute divine powers to the ‘money creating’ institutions – does not require financial institutions to make huge profits; neither do financial institutions that make huge profits necessarily create money. If financial institutions lend huge multiples of the deposits they hold, they must be financing that lending out of non-deposit resources (the wholesale markets, for instance, as Northern Rock did). This may have been reckless, but has nothing to do with money creation.

Assertion 4. “This failure of understanding has led to the use of debt as an instrument not just for uncontrolled personal consumption but also for building hospitals, schools and even prisons. The disciplines of living within your means, of allowing public functions to be provided by democratically accountable institutions, and of not using tomorrow’s resources today are forgotten as the young are trained in indebtedness as a condition of obtaining their tertiary education”. This is complete nonsense. The institutions and financial instruments that permit borrowing and debt (the cumulative total of all past net borrowing), represent a wonderful manifestation of human ingenuity – the Bishop might even call it a gift from God; I certainly would. Without borrowing and debt, each household, each firm and each government could only invest what it saves itself. That would lead to gross inefficiency and a colossal waste of resources. The financial means for financing investment are not necessarily distributed in the same way as the capacity to come up with productive and profitable investment projects. Without debt and borrowing, each family, enterprise and government would have to be financially self-sufficient. The creation of enterprises on a scale larger than cottage industries would have been extremely difficult. Material standards of living would be at the level of India and China before the 1980s.

Consider the state of UK infrastructure (social overhead capital). Transportation infrastructure is sub-standard and clapped-out. Many hospitals are a disgrace; many primary and secondary schools are in need of further capital investment; there is prison overcrowding. Clearly, there is a strong case for large-scale catch-up investment in infrastructure. To finance all of this temporary investment boom with a balanced budget would be inefficient, as it would require large temporary increases in average and marginal tax rates. It would also be unfair, because the benefits from the improved infrastructure will benefit future generations as well as current ones. These future beneficiaries should contribute towards the cost of the investment.

There is another reason why borrowing by governments may be fair. Government borrowing tends to shift the burden of financing the government from the old to the young and from current to future generations. If the pattern of the past 225 years persists, future generations are likely to be better off than us. Shifting the tax burden to future generations that are likely to be better off than ourselves, is something even the Bishop might not object to.

The same holds for student loans to finance tertiary education. It is efficient and can be made fair. The returns to investing in a tertiary education accrue overwhelmingly to the student in the form of higher future income and greater job satisfaction. It is only fair that those who benefit should pay. Taxing the average Briton to subsidize the tertiary education of persons who, after completing their tertiary education, may well be richer than the average Briton, is unfair. Clearly, the risk of failing to complete the tertiary education programme or of failing to achieve a higher income for some other reason should not be a deterrent to enter tertiary education for students from poor backgrounds. That’s why repayment of the student loans should only begin once the income of the former student is above some appropriate threshold level. Requiring students to pay for their own tertiary education, if necessary by borrowing, is both efficient and fair if income-contingent debt service is built into the programme.

Finally, as regards “…not using tomorrow’s resources today..”, the only way to shift physical resources from tomorrow to today is by reducing investment and, in the limit, consuming capital. Investing in tertiary education, likely all investment, shifts resources from today to tomorrow, regardless of how it is financed. A closed economic system has to reduce current consumption (and possibly also early future consumption) temporarily in order to increase investment today and thus achieve higher future consumption in the longer run. By borrowing, it may be possible, in an open economic system, to avoid any absolute decline in consumption, today and tomorrow, provided the return on the investment is sufficient. Borrowing and then repaying principal and interest is a wonderful mechanism for achieving a more even, smooth consumption profile over the life cycle.

Assertion 5. “Most serious of all, we fail to notice where the resources are coming from: all the talk in the world about climate change and the depletion of the resources of the planet will be fruitless if we do not limit our appetite for eating up tomorrow’s bread and burning tomorrow’s oil today.” The Bishop may well be correct that were are depleting exhaustible natural resources too fast. However, excessive resource depletion and destruction of the environment have nothing to do with the culture of credit and debt. The former Soviet Union had very little credit and debt. Its financial system consisted of a single monobank that provided virtually no consumer credit. Its government debt was low. Other communist countries, like Romania, paid off all their public debt (at great cost to the population alive at the time). Yet despite being as far removed from the culture of credit and debt as one could get, the communist countries depleted scarce natural resources and vandalised the environment on a scale never seen before or since (except for China today).

Assertion 6. “The communities of faith – Jewish, Christian and Islamic - have a proud history of criticising the institutions of credit and debt”. Fortunately, that is not true now and never has been. There is a tradition in the Abrahamic faiths of periodic limited debt forgiveness. In the Old Testament, this takes the form of the Sabbatical year and the Jubilee year. A creditor could, following a borrower’s inability to service his debt, take possession of the debtor’s land and cultivate it in order to be paid. Sometimes the debtor had to sell his own and his family's labour to the creditor - a form of slavery known as bondage. Every 7th year was a sabbatical year in which the debt would be erased. The sabbatical also applied to the land itself, which was to be left fallow every 7th year. Every 7th Sabbatical, that is, every 49 years, was a Jubilee year. Debtors were released from both debt and bondage, and the land was restored to the debtor. The Sabbatical and Jubilee tradition limited the extent and duration of indebtedness. It did not do away with the institutions of debt, bondage (or other forms of slavery), or declare them ungodly.

There is also, in the Abrahamic tradition (and in even older traditions on the Indian subcontinent), a prohibition of interest, or usury – making money just by lending money. Today, only the literalist, fundamentalist followers of Judaism, Christianity and Islam consider the charging of interest to be sinful and ungodly per se. The best-financed and most vocal forms of Islam today come from the oil- and gas-rich theocracies of the Middle East (often taking the fundamentalist and literalist Wahabbite form of Islam found in and exported from Saudi Arabia). Today, therefore, the prohibition of interest (riba) is only an economically significant issue for Islamic finance. Sharia permits financial contracts, including securities, that involve the sharing of profit and loss. A stream of payments must be associated with an underlying real asset with risky returns or with an underlying risky productive activity. Collateral is also allowed.

From an economic point of view, interest (strictly the nominal interest factor), is just an intertemporal relative price - the price today of borrowing money. Prohibiting interest, or setting caps on interest rates to avoid ‘excessive’ interest rates is a constraint on exchange that limits intertemporal trade and therefore will tend to be inefficient and welfare-decreasing. It is true that in an economy where there also many other distortions in credit markets and insurance markets, and where the scope for targeted redistribution is limited by informational and administrative constraints, caps on interest rates can sometimes be rationalised as a second-best policy. However, I have yet to encounter a problem to which the prohibition of interest is the solution. The prohibition of interest, a constraint on voluntary exchange and on the right to determine the terms of a contract freely, makes no economic sense.

Religious fundamentalism and literalism, in economic and financial affairs as in all others, is obscurantism, based on a perverse mixture of fear and muddled thinking. Fortunately, the more enlightened Christianity that has evolved since Thomas Aquinas condemned usury, recognises the social value of the institutions of debt and credit and the welfare-enhancing potential of borrowing and lending. The Bishop is more than 700 years behind his church.

The explosion of wealth, much of it held in financial form, among oil- and gas-exporting nations, many of which adhere, at least notionally, to fundamentalist-literalist forms of Islam, has led to an explosion of financial engineering aimed at circumventing the Quranic ban on riba. Considerable ingenuity and vast amounts of resources are devoted to the construction of financial products that are economically equivalent to interest-bearing loans or interest-bearing bonds, but theologically equivalent to permissible Islamic risk-sharing instruments. The process of certifying financial products as Sharia-compliant is time-consuming and costly; those with the religious authority to provide the desired certification (typically Islamic scholar-jurists) often don’t understand finance. Financial experts tend not to be well-versed in Sharia law and its application to financial structures. Those with the power of certification can extract significant rents from the issuers and buyers of Sharia-compliant problems.

From an economic point of view, it is costly theological window-dressing, in the sense that no Sharia-compliant product I have ever studied passed the interest rate ‘duck test’[1]: if it looks like interest, compounds like interest, imposes on both parties to the contract obligations equivalent to those associated with interest, and – the bottom-line test – provides the parties to the contract with equivalent contingent payment streams, then it is interest, even if it is stamped “profit sharing”.

Take a car loan as an example. Under Islamic banking a conventional car loan is reproduced by the bank buying the car from the dealer, selling the vehicle at a higher-than-market price to the buyer of the car (with the buyer often paying in instalments), and with the bank retaining ownership of the vehicle until the car (i.e. the loan) is paid in full. This is functionally equivalent to a car loan with interest where the car is the collateral for the loan. An Islamic mortgage loan would have the bank buying the property from the seller and reselling it at a profit to the buyer, allowing the buyer to pay the purchase price in instalments. In order to protect itself against default, the bank asks for the property as collateral until the ‘purchase price’ (loan) is paid in full. The property is registered to the name of the buyer from the start of the transaction.

In sum: debt and credit are good. Borrowing and lending are good. Abuses and misuses are certainly possible. They ought to be addressed through legislation and regulation if the benefit from so doing exceeds the cost of the intervention. Ranting against the culture of debt and credit from a position of matching moral authority and ignorance is not good.

The Bishop’s column is unmitigated twaddle. It is a disgrace that such manifestly uninformed nonsense is put out on a ‘Faith page’. One of God’s great gifts to humanity was the brain. It behoves us to use it.

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[1] If a bird looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's probably a duck.

The company we keep

The merits of an argument or the truth of a proposition are independent of the motives and the moral character of the person making the argument or advancing the proposition. Still there are times when I go back to the intellectual drawing board for further scrutiny of fact and logic simply because of the source of the support or opposition that I encounter when I advance a particular argument. The most telling example was a comment on a blog on racism and freedom of speech I received from a KKK member in the US, who wrote he quite agreed with me on freedom of speech, but took a line different from me on racism. Another example was the letter I received in response to a blog by Anne Sibert and myself on the National Health Service , first published in the Daily Telegraph - arguing for its abolition and replacement by a continental European-style comprehensive and mandatory insurance mechanism. The author informed me that we made "...no mention that the NHS has been weakened and weighed down by the enormous number of immigrants entering this country since its formation,...". Perhaps I should have sent him the following answer: I know exactly what you are talking about. Immigrants - they're everywhere. I even got four of them living in my own home: my son (from Peru), my daughter (from Bolivia), my wife (from the USA) and myself (from the Netherlands). Sometimes being judged by the uninvited company you keep can be rather embarrassing. Still, just because Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot probably would have agreed with me, most of the time, that two plus two equal four, is no reason for abandoning that bit of arithmetic. So we hold our noses and proceed.

Put the NHS out of its misery

Joint post by Willem H. Buiter and Anne C. Sibert. This post was published earlier in the Daily Telegraph, on September 3, 2007, as "City comment: Put the NHS out of its misery and allow competition".

Does any reader of this column still believe the once conventional wisdom about UK healthcare? That is, that healthcare in the UK is among the best in the world, first, because provision is fair and good care is accessible to all and, second, because it offers good value for money.

Unfortunately, neither of these assertions is correct. Among the rich industrial countries, only the United States has a healthcare system that is less fair and less accessible, and (at least as judged by admittedly imperfect quantitative health indicators) offers poorer value for money than the UK. The bureaucratic monster that is the NHS has few incentives to encourage efficient use of resources; it is dominated by producer interests and used as a political football by national party politics. Patients have very limited choice of providers and virtually no recourse if they are unhappy with their quality of care.

Healthcare should be available to all, regardless of ability to pay. However, the principles on which the NHS is based, universal healthcare financed entirely out of tax revenues and free provision at the point of delivery, no longer make sense. Research and development has created effective, but expensive, treatments that are not affordable for all - and this makes free universal access at the point of delivery impossible.

Currently, what determines your quality of care in the NHS is your education, intelligence and connections. While the "aristocracy of pull" (in Ayn Rand's wonderful words) receive their cancer treatment in the Royal Marsden, the inarticulate and less-well-connected may never see an oncologist. We need to find more fair and more efficient ways of allocating healthcare. Rationing by queuing works for taxis - it is fair and efficient. But, when your place in the health queue is determined by unaccountable bureaucrats, luck and pull, it is inefficient and unfair.

The NHS is the sacred cow of UK politics. Being perceived as hostile to its principles is the kiss of death for a politician. Better, therefore, to have unelected academics point out that the emperor has no clothes and to propose alternatives.

The NHS must go. It should be replaced with a system that guarantees good quality healthcare to all, but one which is - at least to a much greater degree - financed through payments for service. A system of mandatory health insurance of the kind found in the Netherlands would provide an attractive alternative, but there are good systems all over the Continent that might serve as examples.

In the spirit of the Dutch system, we propose that a committee of experts should determine the benchmark standard of healthcare. The government should then design a default health insurance plan that meets this benchmark. This plan, as well as plans that offer additional care, can be offered in a competitive market by regulated insurance companies that negotiate fees for services with healthcare providers. Everyone must have a health insurance plan that is at least as good as the default plan. The government should pay the premia for people who cannot afford them; individuals with the income and desire to purchase coverage that exceeds the standards of the benchmark plan may do so. Health insurance should not be tied to employment (through tax or other incentives) - one of the singular weaknesses of the US system.

Insuring people with known pre-existing conditions at a reasonable, affordable rate is often not commercially viable. There are two solutions to this. First, those who would be uninsurable in a purely private insurance market could be guaranteed the default insurance package, with the government providing excess payments to the insurance companies to make this financially viable. Second, those with pre-existing conditions could be put in an "assigned risk pool" at a capped premium, the way bad drivers currently are in many US states for car insurance. Insurance companies could be forced to sell a certain percentage of their plans to people in the assigned risk pool. As this would increase the price of the default plan, in this solution, the less risky subsidise the risky.

It is fair that those who have the means to pay for their healthcare should do so. It is efficient some of the payment should be "at the point of delivery". The argument that healthcare should be free at the point of delivery because it is essential for life and human dignity is silly. Food is essential for life and human dignity but we do not expect supermarkets to hand it out for free. Thus, in a sensible healthcare system, individuals should pay for their healthcare both through insurance premia and through (co-) payments for services, eg 20pc of the cost of most services up to some maximum amount each year.

A universal mandatory insurance scheme requires competition among insurance providers to produce reasonably efficient outcomes. But, some inefficiency is inevitable when the suppliers of the services (the healthcare providers) know much more about the services than the consumers (the patients). Having a public or not-for-profit health insurance provider alongside the private providers might be useful for cost control. There is also an efficiency argument for preventive health services to be funded publicly and offered free at the point of delivery; this includes inoculations and vaccinations, dental check-ups for children, eye tests for everybody and a range of other services.

During the past five years, just under two additional percentage points of GDP have been spent on improving the NHS. This has been poor value for money, with most of the additional resources going into the pay packets of the incumbent providers and with little apparent improvement in accessibility and care. The provision of medical care need not be done by the public sector. It may be more efficiently done by the for-profit private sector, or by non-profit NGOs and similar organisations with charitable status. Let them all compete on a level playing field and may the best provider gain market share.

Finally, we would depoliticise the oversight and regulation of healthcare. The amount spent on healthcare by the state must remain a political decision. The allocation of public funds could be delegated to a group of non-elected experts, appointed by the Secretary of State for Health and accountable to Parliament. A few months ago, Jim O'Neill proposed the creation of an education policy committee, along the lines of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, to minimise the influence of party politics on educational policy. The case for a health policy committee to oversee and set priorities for public spending on health care seems equally convincing.

Legal cloud lifted from Linux kernel

United States District Court Judge Dale Kimball has issued a 102-page ruling on the summary judgment motions in SCO v. Novell. The bottom line is that the court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights and that SCO is obligated to recognize Novell's waiver of SCO's claims against IBM and Sequent This means that the biggest legal cloud hanging over Linux, the Free/Open Source kernel of the GNU-Linux operating system has been lifted. SCO had alleged that IBM had included, without SCO’s authorisation, some code from the Unix operating system in the donations and contributions IMB had made to the Linux kernel. SCO considered itself to be the copyright owner for UNIX and UnixWare and had sued IBM. Novell then claimed to be the Copyright owner for UNIX and UnixWare, and suits and countersuits also flew between Novell and SCO. The ruling by Judge Kimball settles the Copyright ownership issue (subject to appeal, of course). It remains an open issue (that is, an unproven contention) whether any Copyrighted UNIX or Unixware code was contributed to Linux by IBM. I consider this to be an important legal victor for Free & Open Source Software (FOSS). The basic infrastructure of the internet and of the myriad other interlocking networks should be based on open standards, open protocols and open operating systems. For one company, Microsoft in this case, to control the dominant operating system and many key application programs, and to try to impose proprietary standards for documents and communications is a serious threat to liberty. We should not forget that Microsoft is a convicted abusive monopolist in the US courts, and that it has achieved comparable ‘status’ in the EU at the hands of the Competition Commissioner. To permit the Internet and other key communication systems and protocols to be based on proprietary standards and formats, and to be run on closed, proprietary operating systems would, in my view, be as ludicrous as permitting the letter ‘e’ to be copyrighted. Three cheers for Judge Kimball!

Trouble in the home of Tolerance

Two news bulletins from the Low Countries:

First, Ehsan Jami, a Dutch local authority councilor for the Labour party, of Iranian origin, announced a few months ago that he was creating a Committee for Ex-Muslims. Since then has been beaten up by islamist thugs and has received dozens of threatening phone calls. His life has been threatened, Islamic prayers have been screamed down his phone line as well as many an 'Allahu Akbar.'

Second, Geert Wilders, Chair of the Dutch party PVV (Partij voor de Vrijheid - Party for Liberty) wants to have the Quran banned in the Netherlands. His reasons are that the Quran calls for the death of those guilty of apostasy, blasphemy, homosexuality and pre-marital or extra-marital sex, condones slavery, supports the subordination of women, and asserts the superiority of Islam over any other religion and accordingly assigns greater rights to Muslims than to non-Muslims.

There are times that losing my Dutch passport because I voluntarily took on another nationality is distinctly less bothersome. The day I read these two news items was one of those days.

Mr Wilders and the thugs that beat up and persecute Ehsan Jami deserve each other. It is clearly of the utmost importance that those who treasury liberty and an open society be aware of just what they are up against when confronted with Islamic fundamentalism and islamist fanatics.

Apostasy in Islam (the rejection of Islam in word or deed by a person who has been a Muslim) is, according to Sharia law, punishable by death. All five major schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree that a sane male apostate must be executed. The fatwahs targeting Salman Rushdie were therefore fully consistent with the prevailing interpretations of Sharia law. A female apostate should be put to death, according to some schools, or imprisoned, according to others. Whether this contrasting treatment of the female and the male is good news or bad news, I leave as an exercise for the reader. (For that matter, proseletyzing targeted at Muslims is likewise forbidden by Sharia law; punishments vary according to the legal and cultural traditions but can include death for the would-be missionaries.)

Blasphemy, according to Sharia law, is also punishable by death or exile: "... execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the Hereafter;”[Surah Al-Maidah 5:33]). The assassination of the Dutch cineast Theo van Gogh by an islamist fanatic was justfified on the grounds of van Gogh's blasphemous work, including his film Submission.

The Islamic view of apostasy is clearly incompatible with western views of human rights and religious freedom. No compromise is possible. People must have the right to change their religion as often as they change their underwear. To observe any religion or none is a fundamental human right. End of story.

Blasphemy laws still survive in various forms in some western countries, although the penalties fall short of what Sharia law demands. All blasphemy laws should be relegated to the scrap heap of history, together with any lèse majesté laws that may survive.

Homosexuality is a sin according to Islam; according to fundamentalist Islam, it is punishable by death. Extra-marital and pre-marital sex can be punishable by imprisonment, corporal punishment or death. This intolerant barbarism is not acceptable and must be fought. Of course, the same intolerant views can be found in the Christian bible and in the Hebrew Scriptures.

It is true that the Quran condones slavery and supports and mandates the subordination of women. So do the Bible and the Hebrew Scriptures. A very clear statement of the common roots of female subordination in Judaism, Christianity and Islam by the Egyptian feminist Dr. Nawal Saadawi (1990) : "the most restrictive elements towards women can be found first in Judaism in the Old Testament then in Christianity and then in the Quran",..., "all religions are patriarchal because they stem from patriarchal societies" and "veiling of women is not a specifically Islamic practice but an ancient cultural heritage with analogies in sister religions".

It is not the Quran, or the Bible or the Hebrew Scriptures that are dangerous and should be banned. The danger comes from a fundamentalist, literalist reading of selected passages of these bewildering, complex and contradictory writings. Most modern Christians and Jews (and many modern Muslims) recognise that the time and place of their holy books' creation deeply influenced, constrained and at times distorted the manner in which these books' authors or chroniclers expressed themselves. The message needs to be constantly adapted and adjusted to remain relevant to changing times and circumstances, and indeed to remain true. Believers also tend to subscribe to the view that there is a deep core of the divine message that is unvarying - permanent. But that essence need not even be expressed in any of the exact words or phrases found in the holy books.

Fundamentalism is a curse, no matter which religion it infects. Fortunately, Christian fundamentalism and Judaic fundamentalism are less of a political force today than they used to be in days gone by. They are not completely irrelevant, unfortunately. Christian fundamentalism has poisoned the Republican Party in the US and polarised US political life at home and abroad since the days of Reagan. Jewish fundamentalism has a destructive influence quite disproportionate to its small numbers in the state of Israel.

No doubt Islam will evolve, given enough time, towards a less fundamentalist interpretation of the faith and its core writings - the Quran and the Hadith. God gave the same brains to Muslims, Christians and Jews; it just so happened that Islam emerged more than six centuries after Christianity and some 29 centuries after Judaism; one might therefore expect Islam to still need a few more centuries to work out some of the teething problems of becoming a religion fit for an emancipated, educated humanity. Actually, six centuries ago, Christianity was in its Ferdinand and Isabella phase - something much closer in spirit, practice and level of violence to the role of religion held by today's islamist fanatics, and inferior in most ways to the enlightened Islam of El Andalus and the Ottoman Empire. The scientific, scholarly, indeed secular approach to sacred texts like the Quran was pioneered in the 12th century by the great Arab philosopher - physician - mathematician - scientist Ibn Rushd, known as Averroes. It's been a long road downhill from Ibn Rushd, and even today it is hard to see the shoots of an intellectual, cultural and enlightened religious revival in the Islamic world. The struggle against fanaticism, intolerance, fear, hate, the worship of suicide, the glorification of mass-murder and the underlying cult of nihilism, death and destruction has only just begun. I doubt even my teenage children will live to see the end of it, even if they achieve their Biblical entitlement of three score and ten. But banning the Quran? What a stupid, destructive, trust-destroying publicity stunt to even suggest it. Why not ban the Bible as well. And the Gita. And Harry Potter.

Tintin: racism vs. freedom of speech

Mr. Mbutu Mondondo Bienvenu is not extending his bienvenu to ‘Tintin in Africa’/’Tintin in the Congo’, a strip cartoon story written as a serial in a periodical in 1930 and first published as a book in 1931. He is quoted as saying "I want to put an end to sales of this cartoon book in shops, both for children and for adults. It's racist and it is filled with colonial-era propaganda”. Mr. Bienvenu, a Congolese student from the Democratic Republic of Congo, has launched legal action in Belgium to have ‘Tintin in the Congo’ declared racist and removed from bookstores.

Is the book racist? It shows black Africans as stereotypical 1930s-style black characters and whites as their colonial masters. When I read it as a boy in Belgium in the late 1950s, I had to sneak it past my parents, who disapproved of cartoon books in general (books should have words, not pictures) and to Tintin in Africa in Africa specifically, because they considered it racist (even then!). So yes, the book is racist.

Should it be banned from bookstores because it is racist? Certainly not. Making the expression of racist opinions illegal is an unacceptable infringement of free speech.

Mr. Mondondo would certainly have been within his rights if he had decided to demonstrate peacefully outside bookstores stocking the offending ‘Tintin’ volume. He could have written letters to the editor calling for readers not to buy the book, he could have blogged about it, and could have tried to organise a consumer boycott of the book in any number of legitimate ways. To appeal to the law to have the book banned is both lazy and wrong.

In a world teeming with excuses for infringing on the right to say what you think, when you think it and where you think it, the inalienable right to freedom of expression must be reasserted and defended ceaselessly. Lest someone tries to be cute about this, I will recognise up front the usual exceptions: (1) it should not be legal to shout ‘house’ in a crowded fire; (2) speech directly inciting or encouraging acts of physical violence towards persons or groups, or acts of destruction towards the property of such persons or groups is not protected; (3) libel and slander should be illegal, but with a serious burden of proof on the offended party; (4) deliberately misleading advertising is not protected free speech (but again with a serious burden of proof caveat). However, 'fighting words' are protected free speech. Not being provoked by them is part of being a grown-up.

However, equating verbal insults with physical violence just does not wash. Clearly, children (all those under age) should be legally protected against extreme verbal abuse and verbal assault. As regards communications between independent adults, limits on what is permissible are set by good manners and social norms, not by the law. If the adults are in an inherently unequal relationship (superior-subordinate in an employment relationship, for instance), other constraints on permissible language may of course apply. In private settings, and in societies with elective membership, clubs and associations, people can be expelled or ostracized for having views unacceptable to the group. In the public domain, no such constraints should apply. It is not the responsibility of the state to enforce good manners.

The key distinction is between the private and the public spheres. I reserve the right to boot out of my home anyone making racist comments or indeed any other comments that offend me deeply. But in the public domain - in publications, on soapboxes located on street corners, in the print and electronic media, in blogs and elsewhere - these views have a right to be uttered, repulsive and repugnant as they are. You fight offensive and hurtful views in a variety of ways. Sometimes ignoring them is effective. This is unlikely to be the right approach with racism. Racism must be exposed, criticised, refuted, rejected publicly, made to look like what it is: stupid and/or evil bigotry and prejudice. But do not ban the expression of racist views. It is effective and it is wrong because it restricts that most precious and fragile of freedoms: the freedom to speak your mind, regardless of whether others agree with your views or are horrified and upset by them.

Freedom of speech and of expression must be defended even when the speech that is defended is loathsome and repugnant. We measure our commitment to freedom of speech by the degree to which racist, sexist and ageist statements get the same treatment as Methodist statements.

This defense of people’s right to speak and write the indefensible, extends also to the great taboos of modern history, including the Holocaust.

Holocaust denial is a crime in Austria and Germany and there are proposals afoot for making it a crime across the EU. It is a sick irony that the two democratic successor states of Nazi Germany, the German Federal Republic and Austria, both responded, when confronted with the expression of views they deemed unacceptable, by using the same instrument - criminalisation of the expression of these views - that would have been the reflex choice of the Nazi regime, and indeed of totalitarian regimes throughout history.

I consider anyone who denies the historical reality of the Holocaust to be either insane, terminally ignorant and stupid or deeply evil – or some combination of these three. President Ahmedinejad of Iran is but the latest in a long line of pathetic, twisted and evil souls who choose to use Holocaust denial as a rallying call for the anti-Jewish barbarians all over the world. But the response to an outrageous, ugly, deeply offensive and horribly hurtful view or opinion, including Holocaust denial, is not to make the expression of that view or opinion a crime. It is to stand up and shout out a refutation of these views. The notion that history can be legislated and that the correct version of history can be enforced in a court of law would have come naturally to the Nazis and to Stalin or Mao. It has no place in a free society.

There is no fundamental human right not to be offended. Those countries that have criminalised the expression of certain views and opinions merely because they are deemed incorrect, deeply offensive and hurtful should rethink this unacceptable encroachment on freedom of expression.

Anti-Jewish bigotry and prejudice in British academe anno 2007

The unspeakables are at it again: the University and College Union (a trade union of higher education academic and academic-related staff) is proposing to boycott contact and exchanges with Israeli educators and academic institutions. The reason given is that the Israeli government is acting beastly towards the Palestinians and that Israeli educators and academic institutions are financed by the Israeli state and are therefore agents of the Israeli government, and complicit in this execrable behaviour.

To be fair, the University and College Union is also calling for a boycott of all contact and exchanges with the following

• Educators and academic institutions from the People’s Republic of China, because of the suppression of the Tibetan nation and the Uigur ethnic minority, and because of the Chinese government’s responsibility for the Tiananmen Square massacre.
• Educators and academic institutions from the Islamic Republic of Iran, for its persecution of the Bahai and its oppression of women.
• Educators and academic institutions from the Russian Federation, because of its genocide in Chechnya.
• Educators and academic institutions from the Sudan, because of its government’s complicity in the genocide in the Darfur region, and its earlier attempts to crush the Christian and Animist African population in the South of the Sudan.
• Educators and academic institutions from Myanmar, because of its government’s brutal suppression of ethnic minorities, its continued used of forced labour and its most unkind treatment of a great lady, Aung San Suu Kyi.
• Educators and academic institutions from Turkey, because of its government’s refusal to acknowledge responsibility for the Armenian genocide/massacre/regrettable incident.
• Educators and academic institutions from Zimbabwe, because of its government’s suppression of the Matabele and its ruthless suppression of any form of dissent.
• Educators and academic institutions from Saudi Arabia, because of that countries denial of religious rights to adherents of faiths other than Islam, and because of its oppression of women.
• Educators and academic institutions from Vietnam, because of its government’s systematic oppression of non-Vietnamese ethnic minorities, including the hill tribes.

Of course, the Jew-haters of the University and College Union have not called for any such boycotts, except for the one against educators and academic institutions from Israel. I wonder why? What are the likely drivers of this curiously selective exercise of moral indignation?

I believe that the Palestinians are indeed the step-children of the 20^th century - victims of ignorance, fear and brutality perpetrated against them by Israel, the Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and the other Arab, Middle-Eastern and Gulf countries. They have been and continue to be used opportunistically and ruthlessly by all and sundry, during the Cold War and during the so-called war on terror. They are exploited and victimised by the jihadists and their paymasters and by the Christian fundamentalists that have egged on the Bush administration for these past 7 years. But what, in the name of Sarah and Hagar, has this got to do with calling for a boycott of educators and academic institutions from Israel? Or perhaps this proposal of the UCU is just the latest example of the cynical abuse of the plight of the Palestinians by third parties - this time by an association of non-entities trying to vent its anti-Jewish spleen and get some free publicity and lumpen-street-cred in the process?

I will keep talking to, arguing with and exchanging views with any Israeli educator willing to talk, argue and exchange views. We call this academic freedom - a concept apparently unfamiliar to some would-be academic Gauleiters. Remember the old saying: those who can, do; those who cannot, teach? In academe it should be amended as follows: those who can, teach and do research; those who cannot, do academic administration; those who cannot even do that, run academic trade unions; and those who fail even there, try to arrange academic boycotts of Israel.

Legalising assisted suicide

I would like to thank the US social worker working with senior citizens and people with disabilities for the comment on my earlier post on this subject (link).

I agree that my proposal (1) to recognise the right of any adult of sound mind to take his/her own life and (2) to make it legal for others to assist in the suicide of someone who satisfies (1), carries with it the risk of abuse. While steps can be taken to minimize that risk, it cannot be eliminated altogether. But if “People with disabilities (and or terminal illness) who want to commit suicide are going to fit the criteria for clinical depression”, then they would not, under the guidelines I envisage, qualify for legal assisted suicide. I doubt, actually, whether someone who is reasonably depressed about his appalling medical prospects would easily be confused with someone suffering from clinical depression, but it clearly behoves us to tread very carefully here.

Yes, it would be some committee consisting of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, other health professionals and secular or religious experts on ethics, that would have to reach a view of whether the person wishing to end her life was of sound mind - any potentially conflicted party should be kept well away from the process. That’s a tough decision, but one that comes with the territory. Heroic modern medicine allows us to keep people alive well beyond what their bodies evolved for. We are paying the price for a disjuncture between what we can do medically and what we ought to do morally.

Against the risk of abuse of the right to die and of the legalisation of assisted suicide, we must put the existing certainty of the widespread abuse of those kept alive against their will. I have witnessed friends and relatives who begged to be allowed to die but were denied that right. People trussed up like Christmas turkeys with tubes, needles, sensors, monitors and other medical contraptions, with every vital organ supported by some engineering miracle, and with no realistic hope of a change for the better in their condition. I have seen too much torture in the houses of the dying to be willing to sit back and whisper supportive nothings about sharing your pain.

If we could really share in the suffering, that is, take for ourselves some of the pain and agony of those living a slow death, and in so doing diminish the pain and agony of those who are suffering, that would be a true alternative to what I propose. Unfortunately, that is not possible. According to my faith, Christ took away the sins of the world, but even He did not, through His suffering, take away the world’s, that is, our pain and suffering. We all have to bear our own pain and cannot volunteer to bear even the smallest part of another’s.

Sympathy, empathy and love are great blessings, but they don’t alleviate pain. It is therefore an abuse of language to speak of sharing someone else’s suffering or pain, because this choice of words implies that suffering or pain are what economists call ‘rival goods’ (or bads), that is, something of which there is less for you when I take more of it. ‘Sharing pain and suffering’ instead really means that the person in pain continues to suffer as he would have without the sharing, and that, in addition, the person sharing the pain now is miserable and depressed as well. Any psychological benefits of the sharing for the original person in pain are likely to be minor, if the original sufferer has empathy for those who wish to share his pain.

I believe that the caring professions, including psychologists, social workers, physicians, other medically qualified people like nurses, have a duty of care towards their clients/patients, but that this duty of care does not amount to keeping them alive at all cost, even against their will. The medical profession should work to reduce human suffering, not to prolong life regardless of the pain and suffering this inflicts on those whose lifespan is being stretched beyond endurance. For a Christian, the second commandment is to love your neighbour, not to torture your neighbour by keeping him alive well beyond his appointed time.

I hope to be in a position, when my time comes, to use my God-given intellect to find a way to avoid living past my sell-by date. I also believe that my sell-by date should be determined either by blind fate or by myself, not by a committee of utilitarian economists or by some other group of servants of the state.

Whatever Happened to the New American Era?

Last superpower standing In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. The USA was left as the world’s only superpower, dominant not only in the military and diplomatic domains, but also economically, politically and culturally. A New American Era (NAE) was supposed to begin. The first decade following the collapse of the USSR appeared to confirm that a new American hegemony had indeed started. Around the middle of the 1990s, the era of low productivity growth in the US, which had started with the oil crisis of 1973, transformed into an era of high productivity growth, driven by what became known as the New Economy (the application of information and communication technology (ICT) to a growing number of manufacturing and services products and processes). Nobel Laureate Robert Solow’s quip that “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics”, at last ceased to be true, at any rate in the US. The stock market found itself launched on a massive ‘hausse’.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was more than the defeat and disappearance of a rival power – events like that litter the history books and are of no great interest except for those living through them. The collapse of the Soviet Union represented the death of a political and economic system, and of the quasi-religious ideology associated with it. Communism and central planning in the former Soviet Union and in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, were defeated by, and made way, for market economics and pluralistic, democratic political systems. It was viewed by many in America as the triumph of the American Way over the forces of darkness.

Globalisation The triumph of capitalism over communism and of liberal pluralistic democracy over totalitarian one-party rule appeared a natural complement to the wider processes of globalisation that were transforming the global economic, political, social and cultural domains. During the 1990s, globalisation looked to many commentators, not only American, as though it was made for (and in the views of some even made by) the United States. By globalisation I mean the steady decline in importance of national boundaries and geographical distance as constraints on mobility. A new phase of this process began following the end of World War II and picked up speed and widened its scope relentlessly. People, goods and services, factors of production and their owners, financial capital, enterprises, technology, brand names, knowledge, ideas, culture, values and religious beliefs all move more easily across national frontiers than at any time since the beginning of World War I.

This process of globalisation affects virtually every nation or region in the world. The phenomenon is driven, first, by technological advances reducing the cost of transportation, mobility and communication, and second, by deliberate political decisions to reduce or even to eliminate man-made barriers to international mobility.

The first of these two driving forces is irreversible, barring a catastrophe on the scale of the fall of the Roman empire that causes major technical regress. Setbacks to the processes reducing the cost of transportation, mobility and communication can occur. An example is the global increase in the cost of air travel and in other costs of engaging in international trade resulting from the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US. The recent proposals for inspecting (and scanning) every container entering the US by sea is an example of negative productivity growth caused by the response to a terrorist threat.

The political forces driving the lowering of man-made obstacles to international trade and mobility cannot be taken for granted. They have been reversed in the past. They can be reversed again. Between 1870 and 1914, international trade in goods and services was as free as it is today. International lending and borrowing were also highly developed and subject to few official restrictions. The range of financial instruments traded internationally was of course much more restricted than it is today. However, mobility of people, including international migration, was less restricted during the Gold Standard days than it is today.

Pathological globalisation In 2000, the election of George Bush and Dick Cheney as President and Vice-President of the USA represented the high-point of American economic, political and cultural triumphalism. Its expression in foreign policy and international relations was a form of high-handed unilateralism not seen before in the annals of the country.

Then the worm turned. The horrors of 9/11 suddenly brought home to America the fact that globalisation meant that everything has become more mobile: the good, the bad and the ugly. For a country that had not been attacked at home by agents of foreign powers since 1812, the trauma and fear created by the events of 9/11 was quite without precedent, both for the leaders and for the people. Globalisation became increasingly seen, also in the USA, as a source of problems and threats rather than as an opportunity.

The events of 9/11 brought home to America the negative side of globalisation, what I have called elsewhere pathological globalisation. Some dimensions of pathological globalisation were, of course, already familiar to the American public and leadership.

• The international spread of contagious diseases affecting humans has accompanied the increased mobility of humans and animals. Historically, smallpox and measles have destroyed societies. Today, TB, HIV-AIDS, Ebola virus, Nile virus and flu virus can spread with alarming speed. So can BSE and foot and mouth disease.
• The threat of international contagion in financial markets, manias and panics, irrational euphoria and despondency is but a phone call, news flash or e-mail message away.
• Many conventional criminal activities (the drugs trade, money laundering, human trafficking, tax evasion) hare now organised on a global scale.
• Global warming, or global climate change in general, results from CO2E emissions anywhere affecting the climate everywhere.
• Threats to national or regional cultures, religions and identities whether posed by materialist consumerism or an aggressively proselitising Saudi-financed Wahhabi form of Islam, made more acute because of the global reach of the modern media, including the internet.

The events of 9/11 added international terrorism to this little shop of horrors - a global threat perpetrated by loose global networks of terrorists and those who support them.

All these pathological forms of globalisation can only be tackled effectively through global action, that is, through world-wide co-ordinated actions by governments, international organisations and civil society. Safety and security through withdrawal, exclusion or isolation is not an option. Neither is shouting “he who is not with me is against me” and charging ahead, guns blazing (literally or metaphorically) to confront enemies you don’t understand.

It was a double tragedy that the leadership of Bush and Cheney, fed by a mixture of ignorance about the world beyond the US, overconfidence alternating with irrational fear, arrogance and plain stupidity, came to guide and lead the most powerful nation in world at the very moment that creative, intelligent multilateralism was more necessary than ever.

Preview:

In future posts on this subject, I plan to discuss (not necessarily in this order), some of the reasons behind the swift decline of American power and influence. At the moment I plan posts on the following topics:

• Limits to what can achieved with military firepower.
• High-handed unilateralism and ignorance of the world beyond the 49 contiguous states.
• Economic weaknesses
• Lower productivity growth
• Rent-seeking vs. wealth-creating entrepreneurship: cronyism, corruption and myopia
• Oil and energy-dependence
• External indebtedness
• Tax distortions
• Weak economic institutions
• Monetary policy
• Financial sector regulation and supervision
• Distorted fiscal federalism
• Weak political institutions
• A nation run by and for lawyers
• Checks and balances or paralysis?
• Inequality of wealth and income and the erosion of representative democracy and the rule of law.

• The unholy alliance of Christian fundamentalism and market fundamentalism

• Loss of moral authority: Guantanamo Bay and extraordinary renditions

• The rise of Chindia and the rest of the Bricks and of the N11

When living is a fate worse than death; the case for voluntary euthanasia

Too many people I cared for have died before their time, killed by cars or cancer. Too many others have lived well beyond their time. With the progress of medicine and the widespread increase in longevity, the second category is likely to increase relative to the first. The issue is not, however, a new one. Job 42:17 reads: “So Job died, being old and full of days”. The Dutch version is rather more direct: Job dies “oud en der dagen zat.”, which is best translated as ‘old and over-filled with days’. The word ‘zat’ - related to ‘sated’ and ‘satisfied’ - has a strong connotation of too much of a good thing. In Afrikaans, the characterisation is ”old and ’lived out’” (‘afgeleefd’).

The three grandparents I got to know well all went through an absolutely dreadful final two years of life – all three were in their eighties when they died. When I say dreadful, I mean dreadful for them, and not just for those who loved them and witnessed their humiliating and undignified decline into pain, incontinence and incoherence laced with flashes of understanding, despair and horror at what was happening to them. The problem of living too long has now reached my parents’ generation. Some day (if I am lucky enough to live that long) it will be my problem too. Unlike my grandparents and my parents, I intend to be ready when that day arrives. Unfortunately, my proposed course of action would be illegal under the laws of most countries (the enlightened Netherlands are an exception), including the UK and the USA. Were I to require assistance to carry out my plan, the person(s) assisting me could be tried for manslaughter or murder.

Here is my position:

Suicide is a fundamental human right. Assisting someone to commit suicide should, subject to proper safeguards and oversight, be legal.

It is clear to me that the right to commit suicide must be restricted to adults who are of sound mind and who are not suffering from treatable but untreated forms of clinical depression. Assisted suicide should, as it is in the Netherlands, be supervised and accompanied by qualified medical personnel, and be subject to clear guidelines and judicial oversight and accountability.

There are risks associated with assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia. The main risk is that voluntary euthanasia becomes euthanasia (‘good death’) in the eyes of the just the party or parties administering it rather than in the eyes of the person seeking to end his life. From that point, it is but a small step to involuntary euthanasia or murder. Getting the doctor to quadruple granny’s morphine dose to get at the inheritance in time for the summer holidays, is not part of the package. It is therefore essential that full, informed consent be given by the person wishing to end his life, without any external pressure. Only an adult of sound mind, not blighted by treatable but untreated clinical depression, can make the determination to end his life. This means that those in a coma should be kept on life support, unless they have left clear instructions, say in the form of a notarised living will, that they are not to be kept alive under such circumstances. It may be sensible to make it mandatory for all adults to have living wills covering these contingencies.

I believe that these views on suicide and assisted voluntary euthanasia are fully compatible not just with enlightened humanist ethics, but also with the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith I grew up in and confess to this day. I can see no conflict or tension between my views and the moral imperatives emanating from the two great commandments, quoted by Christ from the Books of Moses: “First, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your mind; and, second, you shall love your neighbour as yourself”.

We have no say in how and when we enter this world. We can have a say in how and when we leave it. That freedom - the right to choose and, if necessary, the right to die, and to choose the time and manner of our dying - is a gift of God – a precious gift.

Do Only Puritans and Prigs Disapprove of Gambling? According to Ralph Waldo Emerson,

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."

There may be hope for me yet. I spend a fair share of my waking hours arguing against encroachment by the state on the domain of choice of the sovereign individual. Yet my primaeval self undoubtedly cheered when Gordon Brown effectively canned plans for a super-casino in Manchester. I just don't like gambling, betting, games of pure chance, lotteries and anything else that smacks of a discretionary roll of the dice or turn of the roulette wheel. Games of chance, involving elements of strategic or exogenous uncertainty, or both, become less attractive to me the greater the role of luck relative to that of skill in determining the winner or the distribution of gains and losses. So lotteries are rock bottom in my list of entertainments while bridge is right up there with chess. Why is that? Probably a Puritan legacy overlaid on a priggish personality, but there are a few further rationalisations for a dislike for and disapproval of gambling. Gambling (now taken generically to include all man-made 'lotteries' that add to the net uncertainty in the world) is a regressive activity - it increases inequality without any efficiency gains other than the sheer fun and enjoyment gamblers derive from the activity - the thrills derived from the possibility of loss and the anticipation of possibly vast gain. Games of chance between small numbers of individuals are zero-sum games. Organised gambling, which requires real resources to organise and manage, is a negative-sum game (again ignoring the thrills, kicks and anticipation or imagination of otherwise unobtainable life styles). In the UK, instead of taxing the earnings from gambling the way all other profits are taxed (and allowing gambling losses to be offset against other income), both gambling winnings and losses escape the tax net altogether. Obviously, net tax revenues from including gambling winnings and losses in taxable income would be negative, but this piece of social engineering would reduce inequality without any deleterious side-effect on incentives. In addition, the financial sector in the UK has managed to structure many risky financial investments as activities that legally qualify as bets, so the profits from these activities also escape income tax. Formally, any risky investment can be restructured as a complex lottery or collection of bets, so the tax exemption of gambling winnings may well have serious implications for the asset income tax base. My very few trips to casinos have been of anthropological interest only. I have never gambled a dime or bet on anything. The sight of rows and rows of pathetic blue-haired wretches pulling one-armed bandits in some Las Vegas gambling den was enough to make me leave that soulless dump in a hurry and never come back. Whenever I see some dandruff-ridden drunk in a pub putting coins or tokens in a slot machine or fruit machine, I know that humanity is an evolutionary dead-end. Betting shops, the losers slouching in and out of them and the sleazy bookies - known as 'turf accountants' in the UK - put me in a time-warp to the 1930s. The posher the gambling or gaming venues, the more louche the clientele. In the most upmarket casinos, a disconcertingly large fraction of the male customers have the appearance and manners of prancing pimps and the majority of the (generally much younger) female customers tend to occupy the spectrum between posh totty and expensive tart. For reasons that I don't understand, organised gambling, even when it is legal, frequently attracts the attention of criminals - in the management of the establishments, in extortion rackets living off the business and as providers of illegal goods and services demanded by customers with more money than taste or sense. Gambling is addictive. It has ruined many lives. As a vice it is more like smoking - which really has no redeeming value - than like imbibing alcohol, which in moderation is both healthy and pleasant. I would not want to ban gambling, but like alcohol and tobacco, gambling should be taxed, possibly quite heavily. It should not be banned because vices should not be banned, even if they involve stupid, offensive and ugly behaviour, unless (1) they cause material harm to others and (2) a ban can be enforced at a reasonable cost with a reasonable degree of success. Gambling is not quite a victimless crime - the dependents of gambling addicts are indeed harmed by the addict's gambling, but the harm does not seem sufficient to warrant another intrusive intervention by an already over-bearing nanny state in our everyday lives. Making gambling illegal is also bound to be ineffective. It would no doubt lead to further criminalisation of the gambling and betting industry, similar to what we see in the USA. Still, Manchester can praise itself lucky not to be lumbered with the Titanic of British gambling. In all but the short run, the quality of life will be better in the area where this carbuncle would have been oozing its pus, had the gambling godfathers had their way.