More Democracy

Greed seems to be an inevitable part of human nature - survival of the fittest. Even when the greediest people are those whose survival is least at risk.

Democracy takes the edge off that greed. Ancient lords took what they wanted and left the poorest to starve. Now the rich must at least make sure that enough of the rest of us have enough to keep us quiet so that they can get richer in peace.

Up to now we have elected representatives to Parliament with delegated authority to make decisions on our behalf because it would have been grossly impractical to hold referenda (referendums?) several times a month. Unfortunately too many elected representatives abuse their position for personal advantage. And allegiance to political parties takes precedence over the wishes of the people who elect them.

Voting to elect people to Parliament and Local Government should continue in the normal way because people need to have confidence in it.

However (even though politicans won't like it)technology is now good enough for many issues to be decided by electronic referenda instead of by Government. Every TV channel routinely holds nationwide votes to find the winners of trivial competitions. With only minor adjustments similar technology could be used for referenda on any number of issues.

I wonder how people would vote if Government allowed them to decide the top rate of tax for people earning over £300,000 a year or with over £3 million in assets? Or if they were allowed to decide the maximum bonus for bankers?

There is no techincal or economic reason why this can't be done. The only obstacle is the vested interests of those whose wealth and influence might be undermined.

Greed

I enjoy Private Eye. Most issues have one or two items that make me laugh out loud.

But at its heart Private Eye is about the dismal side of human nature. Story after story after story tells how people with wealth and/or influence feather their own or their "friends" nests.

There are many millionaires who would still be rich after giving away enough each year to support 10, 100 or 1000 families in comfort. Yet they call for the abolition of the 50% tax rate; complain about people on welfare and complain about EU laws that prevent them from making their staff work longer hours.

Greed seems to be an inevitable part of human nature - survival of the fittest.

Just as killing is the nature of lions.

Speculation

How have we got ourselves into this pickle where a few get-rich-quick speculators buying or selling a currency, Government bonds or company shares can make nations shudder?

It is simply frightening to think that people who have no concern whatever for the consequences of their actions or the welfare of others can disrupt businesses and economies just to make themselves rich.

It is beyond comprehension why people who live in democracies allow this to happen. (It is easy to understand the anger of people in Greece)

How can a business or a country suddenly (like overnight or over a few weeks) go from being able to meet its commitments to being unable to do so?

Of course this sometimes happens when a delibierate attempt at fraud is found out - and a fraudster deserves what he gets.

But for the most part it occurs because some shyster, who has no role in the management of the business, thinks he can make a profit for himself by buying bonds or shares and selling them a few weeks later, or even a few seconds later. The money he pays for the shares never gets into the business as investment funds - it just circulates among shareholders with a bit being chipped of each time by the brokers. Then the said shyster gets worried that the shares he bought a few days ago might not appreciate in price quickly enough so he wants to sell them in a rush - or maybe he wants the cash to invest in something else. The net effect is that the other shysters see that cheap shares are available and they also become worried - so the share price tumbles and the whole world worries.

But none of this has been caused by, or has any impact on the business which is happily making and selling widgets just as it did several weeks ago before the shysters appeared on the scene.

EITHER the world stops getting in a panic when shysters do what shysters do

OR Governments (acting for the vast majority of voters) legislate to prevent shares, bonds etc from being sold within, say, 24 months from the date they were bought - so that the madness of short term speculation is stopped.

• And equally, if you sell shares or bonds you can't buy more of the same for 24 months either.

• Or perhaps the only person you can buy from or sell to is the company or government that issued them - and they have no obligation to buy or sell and then only at their face value so that the reward comes from company dividends or interest payments and not from capital gains.

• Or, if they are (say) 5 year bonds you simply have to keep them for the 5 years.

• And you can't sell anything you don't already own.

Of course the tiny tiny fraction of the population with a vested interest in the status quo will find all sorts of reasons why you can't interfere with the market like this. They are all well educated and very articulate - and very good at pulling strings behind the scenes.

But we could easily do it if we wanted to.

The price of milk

BBC's Countryfile was commenting on the low price farmers get for milk and how they need a huge dairy herd to make a profit. I think it said that farmers get 26p per litre for their milk and their total costs are about 28p. Not surprisingly a representative from a milk processing company blamed the low price paid by supermarkets. And, of course, the supermarkets say they are looking after their customers.

But would we really care if our milk cost 5p more per litre? Would we even notice?

There may well be grounds for a separate debate about the size of supermarket profits, but, in reality the cost of milk is irrelevant to them provided each supermarket chain is paying about the same as its competitors. If the cost price of milk went up by 5p a litre the supermarkets would just raise their retail price by 5p (or 6p). And the supermarkets don't care how much milk people buy. If milk sales go down they will just put another product in that shelf space.

So it seems most likely that the low profits farmers get from milk are their own fault for selling their milk too cheaply - each one down-bidding the next. I've never understood why they don't club together to create a selling power to match the supermarkets' buying power.

Who benefits from building enormous mechanized dairy farms? Not the cows, not the farmers and not the consumers of milk. The suppliers of the mechanization equipment and the bankers that finance it are the main beneficiaries. OK, for a time the mechanized farmer may benefit because he can sell his milk a fraction cheaper than his non-mechanized farmer neighbour. But in a short time the market, in the guise of an even bigger mechanized farmer, will squeeze the profit out of the smaller mechanized farmer also.

And if some smart-aleck suggests that a farmers' "cartel" would be illegal under competition law isn't it time to ask ourselves who that law was meant to protect? Do we want competition law to put farmers out of business?

Indeed what would be wrong with minimum prices for farm products just as we have a minimum price for labour!

Fish

One of those cookery guys on the radio a few days ago said something like "there are lots of spider crabs in the sea and we should be eating them"

Well ... why????

It's not right for us intelligent, and supposedly civilized, humans to eat wild creatures on a commercial scale.

I had the same thought when looking at the huge arrays of fish in the markets in Brixton.

I have no objection to a person feeding his family with fish that he catches himself (or herself). And I have no objection to eating the meat from farmed creatures. There are plenty of lakes and bays where fish could be farmed. Just as farming has increased the world population of cattle and sheep so it would with fish.

Leave all wild creatures to live their own lives and stop catching them on a commercial scale.

And don't say that we can't stop because we need to protect the livelihood of fishermen. It would be trivially easy for Governments to compensate fishermen if they wanted to. Look how easily they compensated bankers.

International Transparency

Membership of the United Nations should be conditional on "foreign" journalists (TV, radio and print media) having quasi-diplomatic status with the same journalistic freedoms that they enjoy in the country where they are accredited. That would make it pretty difficult for Governments to abuse their people in secret.

It may seem a bit unreasonable to faciliate all of the activities of tabloid journalists and paparazzi but the problem with trying to come up with a set of "United Nations" rules for journalism is that the liberal governments might be just as interested in applying restrictions which they would happily "blame" on the UN - "We'd love to be more open, but we are not allowed".

The recent revelations about Andrew Marr shows that even journalists are not above a bit of secrecy when they can get away with it.

Saving Time

We are obsessed with efficiency and saving time. "Hurry up", "Don't waste time".

We have vacuum cleaners instead of brooms, cars instead of bicycles, computers instead of slide rules, faster computers, faster trains, faster broadband ...

Why?

Long long ago we spent all our time meeting our needs for survival - just like wild birds and animals still do.

Now we can meet our needs for survival with a small fraction of our time - as far as I can see agriculture comprises about 1% of the UK economy.

If we have 99% of our time free from essentials - or even 89% - why do we need to save even more time?

What are we saving time for? What do we do with the time we save? For some strange reason we save time so we can do more, not less!

The reality is that we spend our "saved" time making and doing things so we can buy stuff that other people are making and doing in their "saved" time so they can buy the stuff we make and do.

The only part of the system that actually matters is the small bit that provides the essentials.

We hope that the people who provide the essentials continue to want the unnnecessary stuff that the rest of us make and do. Because if ever the providers of the essentials decided they didn't need to buy any more of our stuff (new cars, new tractors, new phones, new computers, new films, new music, new loans) and therefore did not need to produce and sell their stuff (food and drink) the rest of us would starve.