Fusion Power: Polywell gets USD2m funding

Via Samizdata, CountingCats and Power and Control.

It is a small amount of money, granted, but sometimes fantastic engineering can be done with small amounts of money. Keeps it under the radar, gives focus, keeps the bureaucrats away, who are more interested in the delivery of progress reports than progress itself. This was one reason the US Navy kept their funding low and thus low profile.

Background: The Polywell fusion project, initiated by the late Dr Bussard, has the potential to create working ship and shore fusion power generators. In the Deuterium fuel model, it will produce practically no neutron, gamma or beta radiation - the stuff that crashes into your cells and kills you. It can be switched off almost instantaneously, with no long cool down or prospect of a China Syndrome or Chernobyl-style accident. If it scales properly, we can see the end of the Oil economy...and the "renewables" economy, too, for that matter, so no more ugly wind farms, no more food production taken to grab biofuel subsidies and no need for dams across the Severn that will disrupt the habitat. Most of all no more patronising control-freaks who in truth want us all to regress to living in mud huts on the Danube.

Alex Salmond attempts to sweep tax under the carpet

Alex Salmond, leader of the SNP is playing find the lady, or in this case find the tax, with his plan to switch from Council Tax to a Local Income Tax (LIT).

What this will do is threefold

1. It will consolidate the burden upon the working and middle classes and allow the rich to reduce their exposure. It might have the benefit of relieving those who are not poor enough to get support for Council Tax today, but the money must come from somewhere, so I doubt it. The poor who get relief from Council Tax will either pay LIT, so their costs go UP or they are to keep getting refunds or relief. If the lower income brackets are unaffected while the top can bypass it, logically it means that the 3% will hit the middle and upper middle hardest. As usual*.

2. It will be a blunt instrument, finally centralising revenue collection and distribution at Hollyrood, for each geography will have a disparity between income tax collected and cost of provision. I suspect areas with many wealthy residents will need less social housing, less police, less damage to council property, lower social services and lower benefits payments per head. How the horse-trading will occur is not clear. If anything it might result in calling a spade a spade and realising that the vast majority of council spending is controlled and dictated by the centre anyway. Alex Salmond might inadvertently be doing the right thing.

3. The true cost will be obscured and local accountability for same will be broken. A flat 3% income tax will finally turn local council fiscal accountability from the residents to Hollyrood. Local people will not be able to use their vote in local elections to influence spending while at the same time it will be "lost" in the income tax system, drawn out slowly like blood by a bloodsucking parasite you do not see in plain view. Some might say this is a good thing, as locals who pay nothing will not be voting in those who promise to spend ever greater sums of other peoples' money on them. However, I do not think this problem will be solved, it will just be placed in another bucket of slops along with a raft of new problems that this proposal creates.

At least this will bring the whole issue of local authority financing back into the arena. Approximately 80% of local spending is financed centrally. He who pays the piper should call the tune. Either collect more locally and have local control and accountability OR collect it centrally and RUN it centrally, without any funding passing through the sticky fingers at a local level - the prime example of this would be Education.

Alex Salmond has not so much upset the applecart as kicked over a full bucket of night soil. The mess will be for all to see, the stink unavoidable, yet it might mean we get a chance to sort out the plumbing once and for all, though I doubt it.



* Can someone explain to me how a middle class person consumes more street lighting, parks or road sweeping? There is a good chance that they do not consume as much educational resources as a group, for some pay twice yet consume once outside the state system.

Telegraph Points the Finger in the Wrong Direction

An interesting article in The Telegraph asking who runs the country, putting blame on 'plutocrats' and the freedoms of the financial markets to distract from the real problem: The size of the Government.

Our present government is taxing, borrowing** and spending. We should have been butchering our National Debt during this last decade of "sustained growth" and "fiscal prudence" but instead it has grown and continues to grow - fiscal prune juice might be a better description considering the incontinence we have seen.

All this relies on increased consumer spending and this is fuelled in no small part by consumer debt.

If Rule of Law is maintained and the Government is not the arbiter on so much expenditure and regulation - which favours the large and/or incumbent - then the "rich and powerful" have less traction and must continue to operate in such a way as to meet the needs of their customers in the open market.

The best way to reduce what the State does is to reduce the funds with which it operates. The only sure fire way to stop the Government spending is to reduce its income. Lower taxes mean smaller budgets. Smaller budgets means lower spending, i.e. politicians and departments with less to spend. Politicians with less to spend means less money to be "lobbied" from them, to put it politely. Less money "lobbied" means less opportunity for corruption. Less corruption increases the chances of wise spending decisions, or at least only daft decisions, not corrupt decisions.

Big business unable to get special concessions or deals from the State have to appeal to private companies and individuals. New entrants have more of a chance. Arrogant incumbents will be always under threat from disruptive technologies that typically arrive via new players. It keeps things healthier. It keeps the monopoly and cartel at bay.

The very reasons, motivations and talents that make a company successful will, if unchecked by market forces, draw that company towards a position of dominance, cartel or monopoly. The State, by definition, creates a monopoly of provision in the areas it operates. This is either an explicit monopoly via legislation or a de facto monopoly by tax compulsion-provision or tax subsidy, preventing competition from being viable in all but tiny niches. The State and private enterprise are a dangerous mix and should be kept apart as much as possible - private companies too closely linked to the State will connive with it to create State commissioned tax subsidised or legislated monopolies run by the private organisations. Anyone say PFI at the back?

The State is a lousy buyer. It buys in a way that risks seriously rolling the taxpayer. It is in its DNA. It has to do as little as possible.

Lower taxes, eliminate income tax, shrink the State, pull out of direct commissioning and provision of health and education. Reduce bureaucracy and needless regulation whilst enforcing Rule of Law consistently.

Britain can be a home of plutocrats, but as long as they are kept on their toes by the markets and the customers within making free, independent decisions based upon their own personal and unique circumstances in an environment where Rule of Law is upheld, it will afford few opportunities for plutocrats to misbehave. I still think they will have a great time making lots of money and their customers also getting access to innovative, ever cheaper, more reliable and better made products.

Regulate heavily or being a form of merchantilism and you will strangle new entrants and lose the openness, transparency, innovation and vibrancy that they bring.


* I suspect many in the middle classes feel that way, frankly, because of the disgraceful way they are treated by the government.

** and not forgetting the pan-generational mortgaging of the future called PFI.

NeueArbeit bildet Scheiße

Iain Dale does a very good post on the New Labour donor-by-proxy situation.

Is there no end to their utter contempt for the law, common decency, the electorate or our society?

As I have said before, New Labour have had their "moral compass" demagnetised long before they entered govenment in 1997.

I really do think that this increases the chances of a Labour split between the more honourable kind and the Political Classes that infest most parties these days. Gordon Brown will be caught between two stools, but as he is half-arsed he will end up on the floor. When the split happens, watch for musical chairs in the entire centre groud.

p.s. Iain also reveals (hat tipping Guido) that Harridan Harriet Harmann has also received money via intermediaries...and she is/was supposed to be responsible for our Constitution. It is more than enough to make you weep.

Rolling Stock Leasing

We hear that the Government is going to buy rolling stock to lease to rail companies.

We already have a cartel small number of leasing companies providing rolling stock to the time limited monopolies operators.

So, the government invests OUR cash up front to buy rolling stock instead of the private sector leasing companies. I am certain that the leasing companies will squeal like stuck pigs if the government stock gets leased before their own inventory. Thus, the leasing companies are likely to get pretty close to 100% utilisation on their investment. Nice.

The government will pay up front and has a chance of being left with surplus stock - it is almost like UNDERWRITING the rail leasing companies losses for underutilised stock without the rail leasing companies ever having to pay a bean up front.

It is another example of Sociofascistic behavour. The government gets indirect control over the leasing companies - i.e. "do what we say or your fat profits are at risk", the leasing companies get their fat profits and the taxpayer is well and truly stuffed AGAIN.

UPDATE 2007-30-23: The BBC Story here. Hat tip: Not Proud Of Britain (But would like to be)

Party Funding

I posted this over at Roger's Manifesto last year. A cap on spending, union normalisation and no more taxpayers money. My views are pretty much unchanged.

The (Unwitting?) Assault on Charities

The government is currently trying to "engage" with the voluntary sector. More and more of the larger charities are providing public services funded by public money. This is a great danger, in my view.

However, only 26% of charities that deliver public services agree that they are free to make decisions without pressure to conform to the wishes of funders. This is a natural response, as who pays the piper, calls the tune.

It may be natural but it is not necessarily a good thing.

Surely, if the State enlists ever more voluntary organisations in this way, providing more funding and, naturally, wishing to have influence, then the "third sector" increasingly becomes controlled by the State and subject to its dogma, objectives and agenda. The charities will naturally bend towards the money, like a plant seeking sunlight. If only the reality were similarly without strings.

Charities that have to pander to the whim of the State cease to be able to innovate as freely or provide alternative, lateral solutons in the way that they traditionally have. They will almost certainly think twice about providing services, performing studies and especially speaking out against State dogma. We cannot trust the State not to lean on the charities to cease operations and activities which may expose their wrongheadedness.

Charities and the nation will lose out.

I think it is no use criticising the behaviour of the State once it begins funding charities or to criticise the Charities who yield, as this is a logical manifestation of what is a dysfunctional arragement. One that has country at large robbed of innovation, responsiveness and efficiency.

This does not excuse the State, however. They need to back off and allow charities to do their work.

Now, I am no friend of the oleagenous David Miliband, but stupid he is not. If he were, that might excuse him.

To think that greater State involvement would not harm, limit, encumber, distort, corrupt and shackle the voluntary sector would require innocence, no, ignorance and a level of imbecility and stupidity. Miliband cannot use that as an excuse.
So, Miliband either:

secretly knows the effect upon the sector, but will not admit it even to himself - his Sociofascistic reptile brain keeping the dark secret and motivation hidden from his higher thought processes.

or:

that he really does know the eventual consequences of these activities and he is just trying, quite successfully I might add, to fool the public at large.

Seeing as I refuse to accept that he is stupid and remembering that intelligence is no guarantee of wisdom or integrity, that leaves Miliband as being either a conscious or unconscious hijacker of our civil society.

If the State wants better funding for Charities, it should stop taxing people into oblivion and allow them to make their own choices. I know it is hard for political animals, central office wonks and their pet rocks to understand, but people who earn their own living tend to have pretty good judgement on what to spend their money on.