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And, as the saying goes, if you're going to ignore opportunity costs then whatever it is you're doing it's not economics:The festivities are open to everyone, thanks to the community-led, non-commercial efforts of the Carnival Village Trust (CVT), a registered charity, with funding from the Greater London Authority, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and Westminster Council. That funding of the Notting Hill Carnical is a cost. Obviously.Like other cultural events and community initiatives, however, the Carnival has increasingly faced difficulties securing funding. This is part of a broader crisis. The arts and culture sector contributes more than £125 billion to the UK economy and employs more than 2.4 million people, yet it has faced severe funding cuts, and public spending is far below that of Britain's European neighbors.All of that funding is a cost, obviously. At which point we want to know what are the benefits? Sure, a great party, that's a benefit. But among those things being counted:Performing in the bands, building the floats, designing the costumes, cooking the food, and contributing in other ways generates roughly £100 million in economic value.All of those are costs, not benefits. They are the effort that has to be put into having a damn good party. Those efforts could also be directed elsewhere - opportunity costs. It may well be that the party is worth those costs, that the other opportunities produce less value from those inputs. But we really must - because opportunity costs - insist upon counting inputs as costs, not benefits.One million working hours are devoted to designing and hand-making the 15,000 costumes on display and rehearsing the performances of more than 80 bands.One million working hours at minimum wage is what, £12 million? About? That's a cost of the carnival, not a benefit of it. Those million hours - worth that £12 million - could be devoted to weeding the parks, caring for the old, finally building a ferry for Scotland or lauding La Mazza. Any of which might have greater value - opportunity costs - than the grand party. They're a cost, not a benefit.The festival creates a hive of productivity thatLabour spent upon something unpriced, by definition, reduces labour productivity.The Notting Hill Carnival is a perfect example of why we need a new narrative for policymaking and economic development. The arts should be seen as a core governmental responsibility, with the long-term finance it requires viewed as an investment, not a cost.As ever we tend to think that before designing a new economics we should understand the old. Inputs into a process - labour, say - are a cost of that process, not a benefit.Actually, that's not even economics, is it? That's just basic accounting.Tim Worstall

This is, of course, amusing. A snail farm in an office building linked to a company that describes itself as the "Canceller of the Exchequer" is an attempted tax avoidance ploy, a council has said.Snai1 Primary Products 2023 Ltd has been keeping about 15 covered crates containing snails on the lower ground floor of 9 Dale Street, in Liverpool city centre, for the past year, according to the BBC.We'd all probably file that under nice try, never mind. But it's this which is the important part:City Council confirmed that Snai1 Primary Products has not made an application for the exemption of business rates and no official probe is underway.A spokesman for the council said: "The misuse of the agricultural exemption with the use of 'snail farms' in commercial premises is a business rates avoidance tactic that has been attempted in Liverpool."To date, no agricultural exemption has been awarded on commercial premises and the council's business rates team continues to monitor the situation closely and will not hesitate to take further action and challenge such tactics to protect public funds and maintain a fair and efficient tax system for all ratepayers."Tax avoidance isn't, actually, a thing. It is, even at its worst, an attempt but still not a thing. There is tax compliance, otherwise known as obeying tax law. There is tax evasion, otherwise known as not obeying tax law. That second is a criminal offence, obviously. Tax avoidance, however, is not a thing, not a state of being. It's an attempt, a process perhaps. Where tax law is less than clear it is possible for there to be differing explanations of it, results from those explanations. But such cases do get examined and we end up with a determination that the attempt resolves down to tax compliance or tax evasion.Think of the oft quoted Vodafone and £6 billion in Luxembourg and all that. Contrary to everything you've read in the likes of Private Eye this revolved around whether the Controlled Foreign Companies (CFC) rules applied to subsidiaries within the European Union or not. If the whole escapade had been done through Bermuda then all agreed tax would be due. If Luxembourg, well - and the end result was that it wasn't. Sure, the issue bounced up and down the courts for a bit but the Cadbury case made the final result clear and obvious. Not until those profits were moved back into the UK would they be taxable in the UK and when they were they were. Or the Boots complaints - no, interest on debt is a deductible expense for a company. Or so may other of the varied whinges we've heard over the years. It's possible for there to ba an attempt at tax avoidance, possible for there to be accusations of such. But all do finally collapse down to "This is legal" and therefore tax compliance or it's not and so tax is due. Tax avoidance simply isn't a thing it's, at worst, a process. Tax avoidance, unlike tax evasion, is not a criminal offence.Of course not. Avoidance is like an accusation of any other form of criminality. Something to be investigated, evidence to be gathered, but in any system which includes the rule of law is something that does - can, might - sometimes collapse down to "This is fully in order. Sir".Tim Worstall

No, he does:Animal farming ranks alongside fossil fuel production as one of the two most destructive industries on Earth. It's not just the vast greenhouse gas emissions and the water and air pollution it causes. Even more important is the amount of land it requires. Land use is a crucial environmental metric, because every hectare we occupy is a hectare that cannot support wild ecosystems.All of which holds for organic as opposed to industrial or chemical farming as well. Organic farming simply is more land hungry - the chemicals are substitutes for land, d'ye see? We require more land per tonne of wheat/corn/oats/peas/whatever under an organic system than we do an industrial. So, organic farming is Bad, M'Kay?The rest of the column is a complaint about how the meat and dairy industry (definitely overtones of Tom Holt in this) are trying to ban manufactured meat. Which is indeed bad, we agree. But the point here is that if you've allowed government to be interventionist enough that it gets to ban things on political (or protection of economic power) grounds then sometimes the bans will be of things you approve of. The only answer to this is to have a government that is not powerful enough, interventionist enough, to go around banning things upon political or economic power grounds. At which point the joint answer is obvious - minarchy and industrial agriculture. We do think it a tad odd that it's George Monbiot bringing us this news but then we suppose that sometimes facts just will out, even the most dedicated activist and propagandist does have to face reality sometimes.Tim Worstall

One obvious benefit would be that those who are interested in being anticapitalist, truly communal, could proceed off into their echochamber and leave the adults in peace. Thus we do support this idea from Clive Lewis MP:Excellent stuff. I've been thinking the exact same thing.However, I'd like @lisanandy at @DCMS to think about what a democratic, open source, transparent, public, bottom-up, cooperative based, social media platform looks like and see it kick-started by said dept asapThe way to do this is to download a copy of Mastodon (there are other alternatives) and start running an instance on the DCMS server. If you don't know how to do this then we'd suggest corralling any random 7 year old and get them to show you - our memories of VCRs suggest that this is the correct way to deal with any technical difficulties among those rich in years and experience.If only all political suggestions were this easy - and cheap - to deal with.Glad we could help here.Tim Worstall

Britain's biggest banks are facing a deadline to repay more than £100bn of pandemic-era loans, which experts say could benefit savers as banks and building societies compete for customers with attractive rates in a "messy" dash for cash.More than 70 lenders ranging from high street banks and building societies such as HSBC and Nationwide to digital and specialist lenders such as Starling Bank and Aldermore collectively borrowed £193bn from the Bank of England as part of an emergency programme rolled out in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.It's really not that long ago that the shrieking was that banks were not increasing deposit rates at the same speed they were increasing lending rates. This made their net interest margin blow out - evident in the accounts and profits - and something must be done. Varied calls were made from increased taxation to someone really must do something - set prices maybe.All of this when all along it was actually the government causing the problem.For while there is that Modern Monetary Theory insistence that banks don't lend out deposits that's not, actually, usefully true. For banks must have the deposits to finance such loans. And, if they're getting those deposits, nice and cheap, from the Bank of England therefore they don't need to up the price they offer to other depositors. Thus the increasing net interest margin. Because they were getting cheap money and thus didn't need to face full market forces. The absence of this market aberration will indeed increase the rates on offer to depositors. Good. And, of course, that this is happening is that very proof that the MMT contention is wrong. Because banks must finance a loan with deposits the effect is that banks do indeed lend out their deposit base. As we can see from deposit rates rising when cheap deposits disappear.Tim Worstall

Much chuntering about the problem with the electric vehicle market in the UK.Rachel Reeves has an electric car problem. On the one hand, the Chancellor is part of a Labour government that has pledged to turbocharge the switch to electric vehicles (EVs) in Britain. But on the other, she is racing to plug a £22bn black hole in the public finances ahead of October's Budget.Reeves herself has warned this will require painful choices – but with EV sales already slowing in the UK, experts now fear the Chancellor risks slamming on the brakes with a series of sharp tax rises. Whether or not EVs really are economic or not is rather clouded by the special tax treatment they get. They're going to start paying vehicle excise duty for example. And in the longer term there's that pay per mile (in itself a good idea) tax system a'comin'. EVs will be paying the same as ICEs under that - they must, because the government's point would be to regain the revenues from fuel duty - and thus EVs are going to lose their artificial price advantage. At which point adoption is rather going to slow, no? There's no real way out of this either. EVs cost vastly more to buy, suffer horrendous depreciation rates and yes, cheaper fuel and lower taxes. Once the tax situation changes they might well not be cheaper. So, err? Well, there is an obvious idea:To repeat, the current conversation insists that cheap EVs must be achieved for climate change reasons. China's taxpayers have spent $100 billion on getting to cheap EVs that we can now enjoy - and also save the climate. But we can't have those cheap EVs and save the climate…We just import the cheap Chinese EVs and so save the climate. The people who would lose from this are the local - our own domestic - capitalists who can only make expensive EVs. Oh dear, that is a pity then. Ricardo for the win again.Tim Worstall

That there seems to be an awful lot of dithering in markets can be seen - is seen by some - as an example of their faults. Why not replace that havering with the thwack of firm planning. One decision taken once and all that waste gets removed from the system.The comeback to that is, well, yeees, but which decision?Morrisons "went a bit too far" with self-checkouts, its chief executive has admitted, as the supermarket chain cuts back on the technology across a tranche of its stores.Rami Baitiéh, chief executive of Morrisons, said that it is "reviewing the balance between self-checkouts and manned tills" and removing some from stores after installing too many.He said: "Morrisons went a bit too far with the self-checkout. This had the advantage of driving some productivity. However, some shoppers dislike it, mainly when they have a full trolley."So we've this new technology. Computing has reached the stage that we can, with greater or lesser success, remove paid labour from the checkout process and replace it with customer - and unpaid - labour at the self-checkout. Well, could be a good idea, might not be. As with most technological advances we're likely to find out that some is good, more could be better or worse and all and only worse. So, how do we find out that optimal position? Folk have to try it. Different folk have to try different amounts of it too. So that we can see the real life and real time reaction of consumers. No, planning doesn't work. For of course every single one of these varied companies has done all that planning. They've surveyed and asked and prodded and thought and come up with what research and planning says is the optimal solution. Absolutely every single one of those plans has been wrong - no business plan ever does survive first contact with the market.The one single central plan would not have had that experimentation, that trial by error and we never would haver and mither to the optimal solution. Which is, of course, that reason for using markets. Haver, mither and dither are not inefficiencies of markets they're the point. Because only by fiddling about a bit do we actually find out what those difficult things, human beings, actually find the best solution. We also can't stop doing this because technology changes, perhaps only by some insubstantial in any one day, all the time. Therefore we are continually trying to find the correct mix and thus must continually fiddle about. Sure Morrisons is ripping out some self-checkout lines. That's the whole damn point of using markets, to find out that they should.Tim Worstall

As an arrow flighting towards the centre of the target politics gives us wholly and entirely the wrong economic answer:Angela Rayner has vowed to get benefit claimants out of "expensive private rented accommodation" after analysis found that landlords will be paid a record £13bn in housing benefit this year.The amount of taxpayer money spent on supporting private tenants has surged by 30pc since the pandemic began, rising from £9.9bn in 2019-20 to £12.1bn in 2022-23. The Housing Secretary has promised to deliver "the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation" as official forecasts predict benefits spending on private tenants will hit £12.8bn this year.The push will be to provide more social, housing association and "affordable" housing. Instead of just paying the cash to prviate landlords. Which is entirely and wholly the wrong thing to be doing - for disguising the bill doesn't make that bill go away. British housing is too expensive for many Britons to be able to afford reasonable quantities and qualities of it. That's our central starting point. As solutions we have those two ideas. One is to build more of those "affordable" houses on the government tenpence. The other is to provide the cash to tenants to pay to their landlords.But the cost of housing being too expensive is still there either way. The capital used to build those affordable houses - also the land - could be used in other ways. That's an opportunity cost and if we're not to include opportunity costs then whatever it is we're doing it's not economics. Further, those "affordable" houses could be rented out at market rent. The gap between affordable and market is a cost of those affordable houses. An opportunity cost again.The correct answer is to entirely abolish all indirectly subsidised forms of housing and only subsidise through those direct - and visible - cash payments. Yes, we'll all shriek in horror as the housing benefits bill rips up through tens of billions a year toward the century. Which is exactly the point of the exercise. This is a cost that we have to carry - whichever system we use to deal with it - of the nationalised planning system's refusal to allow people to build houses Britons wish to live in, where Britons wish to live, in Britain.The cost of affordable housing is the same as subsidising housing benefit. Better to have all those costs where we can see them so that we finally bite the bullet - driven by shock at the size of the bill - and blow up the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors. Proper blow up - kablooie.Hiding the bill doesn't make costs go away but seeing the full bill might well mean we get to grips with the real problem.Tim Worstall

This is not to advocate for one policy or another, rather to insist that one or the other has to be the policy. Senior advisers to Labour have warned that, with police solving just 5.5 per cent of all crimes, a third of the rate of seven years ago, offenders have become "emboldened" by the low chances of being caught, convicted and jailed.OK, via Gary Becker we get the insistence that prison - or any other punishment - operates by mathematics. It's the severity of the punishment times the odds of it actually being suffered which is the incentive. Or disincentive perhaps. So, if the chance of even being found - let alone punished - is only one in twenty then whatever the punishment is there's not much disincentive there. Or, given the way mathematics works in order to provide a disincentive those punishments imposed, when rarely they are, need to be substantial.Ministers should scrap Conservative plans to build new mega-jails and pour £4bn into the prevention of crime and rehabilitation instead, the former chief inspector of prisons has said.Which is arguing entirely the other way around.We've also got the recent events around incipient riots. Several year sentences being handed down without delay. And, of course, that 5 years for the JSO laddie who was up before the beak on his eleventh offence. Apparently significant sentences do in fact work. Or so the claim is.Our own preference is probably to resolve the maths in favour of certainty of punishment allied with the punishment itself being light enough to act as an efficient disincentive only. Note the probably there. But we still do insist that there actually has to be a policy. Either light-ish punishments applied with certainty or terrifying ones in a lottery. For those are the only two choices that work.Which to choose could be a matter of taste, as our probably is, or it could be a more practical matter. Which is easier, building more prisons or reforming the police so that they're efficient? #Tim Worstall

Just to pick a specific instance of something incorrect oft said:Up and up goes the national debt, but still there seems to be no shortage of investor appetite for UK gilts. This is not true. The Household Analogy holds for governments just as it does for households.There's a very distinct shortage of investor appetite for UK gilts. This is also trivially easy to prove. Just using very round numbers the outstanding issues are some £2.7 trillion. For which there is such little appetite that the Bank of England has had to invent money to buy £700 billion of them (about the current QE stock). So, the current market won't even absorb 25% of what is already in existence. That's not evidence of no shortage of investor appetite.If the BoE were to try to sell that 25%, that £700 billion, it would drive prices down and yields up. Indeed, we all expect the BoE to try to sell some portion at least of that QE gilts stock in order to drive prices down and yields up at some point. So, OK, at current prices then there's a shortage of investor appetite for gilts. But then that's always true, isn't it? We don't have shortages of things, we have shortages at a price. At current prices there's a shortage of investor appetite - about £700 billion's worth in fact. QE is QED.Which is why the household analogy does work. Sure, sure, governments can just print and all that. But they still face price limitations on credit just like anyone and everyone else - even households.Tim Worstall

Chesterton's Fence is the idea that before tearing down a fence it's worth working out why it was built. For only if you know why it was can you work out whether the reason for it is still valid - or not. The Reverse Chesterton's is to ask why something doesn't exist before deciding to create it. It may be - may - that there's a good reason it doesn't exist. So to this idea of food deserts. Places where there just aren't the shops with the good, fresh, food that we should all be righteously eating.Over the past decade, state and federal governments have invested millions of dollars in creating grocery stores in food deserts — defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as any low-income urban neighborhoods without a grocery store within a mile, and any rural communities without one within 10 miles. These programs continue to expand.But the Reverse Chesterton's was never grappled with properly. Vague claims that profit seeking grocery chains just wouldn't do it therefore….Many stores that receive subsidies shutter their doors soon after opening or fail to open at all. Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica examined 24 stores across 18 states, each of them either newly established, preparing to open or less than five years old when they received funding through the federal USDA Healthy Food Financing Initiative in 2020 and 2021. As of June, five of these stores had already ceased operations; another six have yet to open, citing a variety of challenges including difficulties finding a suitable location and limited access to capital.Illinois' record is similarly disappointing. In 2018, Illinois officials highlighted the opening of six grocery stores that had received startup funds over several years from a $13.5 million grocery initiative of former Gov. Pat Quinn's. Four of them have closed.Not enough attention was paid to why profit seeking companies wouldn't open stores. For the answer is that profit is the value added to the resources needed to open a store. These stores continually make losses - they're not adding value. Which is why the profit seeking companies wouldn't and didn't open them.The reason the stores didn't exist, the reason they go bust when they do, is that there's no good reason to have food stores in such places. Asking the right questions before doing something - why is it that planners never do bother to do that? Tim Worstall

The current worry de jour over artificial intelligance is that it hallucinates. This is the process whereby an AI (or an LLM to be more accurate) trains on the output of other AIs (or LLMs). Given that there's no logic or fact check on the output of the earlier models then the input into the later wanders somewhat from reality. Therefore, however clever the workings of the model itself we get GIGO -garbage in and garbage out. What is less appreciated is that government works the same way. We have, for example, an entire political class that has forgotten its own definition of poverty. Which is living in a household on less than 60% of median household income, adjusted for household size (which can be measured before or after housing costs). This is a measure of inequality, not poverty. Of course, it's entirely possible to worry about inequality, not that we here do very much. But it is something different from poverty. The difference between having two pairs of trainers like the lad next door and having no shoes like no one in the country sort of difference.But because of the insistence on not recalling the definition in use we've half the political class insisting we must solve child poverty - something we've already solved, many decades back. There is still that child income inequality, if that's something we want to worry about, but that is a different thing.Or, today's example: But the city that birthed Greggs has now gone to war on unhealthy food, bringing in an ambitious ban on new takeaway and fast food openings in a desperate bid to combat soaring obesity rates.It follows complaints that fast food chains and takeaways have effectively colonised poorer areas of the city, creating so-called "food swamps" where access to healthy, nutritious meals is nearly impossible, driving generations of children and families into ill-health.New takeaways have been outlawed in any ward where more than 10pc of children aged 10 to 11 are obese. Starkly, that leaves all but two. It follows a similar move in neighbouring Gateshead, which has banned new takeaways since 2015.The first problem is the lack of thinking in this iteration of the model. The complaint is that there are lots of fast food shops. OK, so that means that it's a low margin business - lots of competition does that, destroys profit margins. Now, why would a low margin business cluster in the low rent areas of the city? Anyone? Bueller? Ah, good, so that's obvious after 30 seconds of thought. OK, if a local councillor, perhaps 5 minutes thought.But it's worse than this. Consider their measure in use there, that counting of child obesity. As Chris Snowdon has been shouting for many a year the numbers are an entire fabrication. The input into this model is an entirely made up - and wrong - output from an earlier incorrect model. This isn't going to work you know.As with the worries over AI and LLMs. If the input to this iteration of the model is going to be the incorrect output of the last then government is going to end up hallucinating. We end up being GOSPLAN'd as pointed out elsewhere:For exactly the same reason too - there's no looking out the window at reality going on to error check the inputs to the next set of output generation. Which is exactly what happened at GOSPLAN of course. The Five Year Plan said that tractor production would rise 50%. As the Five Year Plan was over-fulfilled - as they always were - then that meant that there were more than 50% more tractors. Therefore Kazakhstan could all be planted with wheat despite everyone in Kazakhstan awaiting a horse let alone a tractor. The Plan then insists that as all Kazakhstan is now planted with wheat there is enough bread for all and so the system collapses - for no one did count the tractors nor even ask the wife about the queue at the bread shop.Now of course GOSPLAN was extreme and we're not - aha, aha, aha - doing anything so damn stupid. Except, of course, we are.At which point the only interesting question is how do we get them to stop doing this? Our own answer tends to simply having less government so that there's less for them to go mad about.Tim Worstall

We do tend to think that this is a really bad idea. Weber has highlighted the case of shipping companies, which profited from a jump in the demand for goods, including medical supplies, during the pandemic. Can it be true that the only way to overcome a rise in shipping costs when the next crisis hits will be to increase the number of container ships, even though that will take years and no government is going to build them and park them in a port ready for an emergency?She reckons shipping costs added a full two percentage points to inflation between 2021 and 2022. Surely the solution is for governments to take a large slice of the profits and use it to subsidise prices?There was indeed a jump in shipping costs. 500%, 600%, that sort of level to get a container across the oceans. As the source itself, an IMF paper, says:The pandemic spike in shipping costs is more than a year behind us, and our research suggests that we should already have seen most of its inflationary impact by now. Our estimates, moreover, are symmetric, such that declines in shipping costs would tend to bring inflation down in the following year. The implication is for the big moderation in shipping costs in 2022 to contribute to a reversal of inflationary pressures.Things change, prices change, then things get back to normal as the effect of price changes work through the system. Sounds pretty good to us. In fact that looks like the price system working to us.At which point the suggestion is to cripple the price system by confiscating righteously earned profits and using them to subsidise. Which is, as we say, something we think is a really bad idea. If we've a system that works then why wouldn't we allow it to, well, umm, work?Those excess profits being why it does work of course. For the increase in shipping capacity comes not from people launching new ships - takes two to three years from ordering a new one to being able to sail it away. It comes from owners not scrapping old and inefficient ships. Things that are no longer profitable to sail or charter because it's being outcompeted by newer, larger, more efficient shipping stock. But which can indeed still run for another few years if only the price of shipping rises. Therefore it becomes the scrap yards that are empty as that old stock is run for a little longer thereby increasing shipping capacity and bringing shipping costs right back down again. This is such a well known feature of the market that even the European Union has noted it (last para, page 2).As ever, the cure for high prices is high prices. Yet the suggestion is that we should short circuit the very process that makes this work? As we say, a very bad idea indeed.Tim Worstall

There are, as all of us with ageing body parts know, times when things go wrong. There are those who suggest that if only we got all the clever people into government and had them handle it there would be fewer of those things that go wrong. They could be right of course:A ship due to be delivered to Scotland's state-controlled ferry operator will arrive months late, adding to a capacity crisis that threatens to cut off island communities.The MV Isle of Islay had been scheduled to arrive with CalMac in mid-October but will now be delivered at the end of the year amid a steel and labour shortage at the Turkish shipyard where it is being built.Contracting out to the private sector. Tsk, months late, the winter sailing schedule will be disrupted. Obviously, we should have a mission specific plan with strict conditionality in order to remedy matters. In fact everything should be run that way because, clearly, that private sector just cannot cope:The development comes as a fresh blow to the SNP as two other vessels being produced by a nationalised Scottish shipyard run six years behind schedule and £250m over budget.Ah, you mean that direct government involvement is worse? Possibly 24 times worse, the difference between 3 months and 6 years late? Well, we do live in a world of the second best, the task being to find the least bad method, the least bad solution. The least bad apparently not being mission specific government plans with strict conditionality.Odd that the idea's currently so popular really.Tim Worstall

Concerning plans to impose censorship upon the internet the claim is made that:However, critics have said the proposals expose "the sinister and authoritarian side" of Sir Keir's Labour Party, driving "a coach and horses" through the principle of free speech.The particular proposal is:The Telegraph understands that ministers are looking at introducing a duty on social media companies to restrict "legal but harmful" content.It could mean that firms are required to remove or suppress posts spreading fake news about asylum seekers or other topics such as self-harm, even if they do not meet the threshold for illegality.It is suppression of free speech. It is censorship. To merely say that it is is an understatement.A "legal but harmful" clause, requiring firms to take down or restrict the visibility of content deemed to be dangerous but not against the law, was included in the original Bill brought forward by the Tories in 2022.However, it was removed because of free-speech concerns, with critics warning it could allow a future Labour government to censor controversial material.Slippery slope arguments are sometimes to often logically invalid. The slope must exist rather than merely be claimed. But if government takes unto itself the power to determine what we may say - other than the usual restrictions upon incitement to immediate violence - then that slope really is there. For we will end up with it being illegal to question the tractor production statistics. The slope being that politics simply will exercise any such powers that it takes unto itself.It's entirely true that some exercises of free speech can be harmful. But not having the free speech is greatly more so, viciously more harmful.No, this is a terrible idea. Quite apart from anything else how can a government serve a population if the government doesn't know what the population is saying?Tim Worstall