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Roger Warren Evans
Roger Warren Evans
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item0041D 716, 717 12 May 2003Spinning the Economy
I am very impressed with this excellent cartoon of Alan Greenspan and George Bush (from Nicola in The Guardian) - as a piece of serious economic analysis.The modern economy is indeed a self-sustaining vortex of busy-ness, the complex interaction of trillions of individual deeds each day. Why are we all busy? Because we are all busy. Busy-ness is all. Business is all. Thoughts are not enough - they must be converted into deeds. And the best that anyone can do, by way of the "management" of any economy, is to generate that popular confidence in the future which carries everyone forward, psychologically - and induces each person to live and act positively and actively, each and every day. Governments can merely try to keep the plates spinning (often without knowing how they got to start spinning in the first place...). That is what bugs me, about economics . Like Charles Clarke, I studied classical economics at Cambridge as a second-subject (he was a mathematician, I was historian) but although I got to talk the talk, my studies did nothing to explain how a modern economy really worked. And having seen the havoc caused by our attempts to induce the birth of market economies in Russia and Easter Europe, I suspect that nobody yet really knows. We must simply keep the plates spinning, because the forward momentum generates further momentum. Intellectually, I rebel against that. There must be a core cocktail of factors which trigger economic activity, and the combination must be capable of replication.
Above all, I suspect that the critical factor is subjective, in the mind, the mere "confidence to trade". The willingness, on the part of the consumer, to get out and spend, in the knowledge that there will be more resources available next week, and that the plate will keep spinning. The real enemy of economic growth is simply pessimism, passivity, lack of confidence in the future. That is induced by anxieties, and anxieties are induced by uncertainties. "We have nothing to fear but fear itself". Pessimism is far more damaging than SARS, and far more difficult to counter.
19 May 2003 Supply Interdiction US attempts to interfere in Canadian politics, to prevent a sensible minor liberalisation of the drugs laws, will backfire. It is American evangelicals who were behind the first campaign in 1919, and they are still blocking liberal reform. We should adopt a strategy of supply interdiction, and challenge the Americans to follow. "Prohibition" was the scourge of American society in the 1920s, prohibiting the consumption of both alcohol and narcotics. The alcohol ban was reversed in 1933, after one of the most destructive social experiments in the short history of human civilisation. But narcotics prohibition remained in - then of far less social significance, now grown to become a vast engine of international oppression and injustice. Yet the US, now deploying huge military and paramilitary resources in pursuit of the "Drugs War", refused to budge an inch from the principles of 1920s prohibition. 
It is in our interests to find a compromise with the Americans. I
suggest that is to be found in the strategy of Supply Interdiction.
That would focus on the prohibition of narcotics
trading - trafficking, smuggling, dealing, banning all
production and distribution for reward, all forms of commercial
exploitation, other than for medical use. The attempt to stifle the
"demand side" of the equation would be abandoned, as having been
dramatically unsuccessful and profoundly destructive of civil order. There
would be no continuing breach of the European Convention of Human Rights, or
any other human rights legislation.
All the international forces arraigned against the denizens of the
commercial supply side would remain in place - Police, military, Customs,
border-controls.
What do you think? Drop me a line
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New
Factors such as these -
The consumption of drugs,
and their private production for personal
consumption or social supply (i.e. by gift, not sale) would
become legal, de-criminalised. Private domestic production is, after all, responsible for
half the cannabis smoked in the UK at the moment, as consumers avoid the
cost and risk of commercial drug-dealing - that would become legal, as
would any other form of domestic cultivation or production. Nor would any crime be committed by any person who simply
bought drugs for personal consumption: selling would remain a criminal
offence, but buying would not be. The dividing-line is an untidy one,
and difficult to argue as a matter of principle - but the search is for a
compromise, and compromises are never tidy. The case for full
liberalisation is set out at the