When the US was a young nation, it was greedy to learn and to grow. A good example is Benjamin Franklin a famous polymath who experimented with electricity amongst other things. Benjamin Franklin was an innovator, but he also engaged in piracy. Franklin, like others, republished the works of 18th century British authors without giving them any reward in exchange for copying their words. As early as 1808, the poet William Wordsworth complained about exploitation and argued for copyright to be extended. The most popular novelist of the Victorian era, Charles Dickens, lobbied Congress during his North American speaking tours, protesting that the copyright of British authors should be recognized in the US. His pleas fell on deaf ears. America needed the wealth of new ideas and lacked libraries. For Americans to benefit from education and entertainment, so the argument went, necessitated cutting costs, and that meant not rewarding the British authors who should be satisfied with the rewards received elsewhere. And was not the success of Dickens’ tours a real demonstration that piracy helped authors, rather than hindering them? The argument went on to assert that Dickens benefited most from the enhancement of his reputation gained by the wide circulation of his work. Whether Dickens thought so or not, the Americans had decided this was worth more than profiting from the sale of fewer books bearing his name. Does that sound familiar? It should, because we hear the same debate today. The difference is that the tables have turned and now the US, like the other countries that have hoarded intellectual wealth, is concerned that its valuable copyrights are exploited by the greedy, growing, countries of the developing world.

Whilst the struggle for copyright is sometimes seen as a battle between nations, it is also a battle of will within national borders. The emergence of a political movement in European countries, the Pirate Party movement, tells us something about the strength of feeling across an increasingly polarized debate. Businesses pursue stringent fines for P2P filesharers. Governments enforce stricter laws to protect copyright. Citizens respond by forming new political parties and canvassing for votes. There is a Pirate Party in the US too, though the nature of American democracy makes it very unlikely they will break through and raise the profile of copyright reform. The frontline of the US copyright debate is the courtroom, not the ballot box. In contrast, the very existence of electoral alternatives has enabled European parties to secure valuable attention in mainstream media. In only the first month since being launched, the Pirate Party UK has secured room for the debate about copyright reform in every quality British newspaper, on television and radio, and of course all over the internet. All of this is encouraging for a party that wants people to freely exchange their thoughts, and is a signal that even in rich countries, many see the appeal of less stringent copyright.

The counterargument to copyright reform is that there will be losers. The losers are supposed to be those who create, or the losers will be all of us. The conclusion is that either the creators receive lesser rewards for their work, and so they will be poorer, or the creators will simply create less and will do other jobs instead, leaving us all poorer. But Dickens did not stop writing because of American exploitation of his words. If anything, he was inspired by it - inspired to respond via Martin Chuzzlewit. The same internet that enables instantaneous and mass duplication of copyright works has transformed many other markets. The internet enables middlemen to be stripped out of supply and distribution, and the benefits are passed on to the consumer through lower costs. Take this to its logical limit and you do end up with an extreme - the same extreme as Benjamin Franklin not sharing the profits from the works he pirated. But far from ending creation, piracy simply changes the market dynamics. One source of revenue is closed, not all sources. Dickens made money by speaking. Musicians can make money from live performances or merchandise. The copyrighted content stops being a marketable product and instead becomes the fulcrum for a kind of marketing. This marketing is all the more powerful because it is spread from individual to individual, and cannot be manipulated by business interests. In other words, people promote the content they like, not the content they are told to like, and all studies show that we trust the recommendations of friends and ordinary folks far more than we trust celebrity endorsements and slick corporate promotion. The evidence is that this peer-to-peer advertising is effective in creating new revenues. This is a threat to the jobs of some middlemen, who are paid to influence the market, but is a boon to consumers and puts market power and intelligence back into the hands of the people who should be dictating what is popular and what is not. The significance of the advertising effect of free content is demonstrated by the observed correlation that the most prolific downloaders of pirated content also spend the most to legitimately buy content.

With a marketplace in rapid transition, it can be hard to identify all the factors that cause it to happen. The digital marketplace for copyrighted content does more than increase the potential to freely copy works that were originally created with profit in mind. It also reduces barriers to entry. It reduces them so far, that, at the extreme, the marketplace collapses. People just give and take freely. This has been observed already with open source software. We see it with the rise in so-called ‘user-generated content’ on sites like YouTube. ‘User-generated’ is a euphemism for ‘not to be taken seriously because it does not have a big budget’. Thanks to the democratizing effect of other technological improvements, married to the free distribution mechanism of the internet, then all it takes to create a popular song is to possess a guitar and a microphone, without the need for a marketing budget. Beneath the veil of piracy, the real factor that drives down prices is the proliferation of competition, from small business, from micro business, from hobbyists and people who create for the pleasure of friends.

Resetting the marketplace so that many can produce for many will diminish some business models. It also creates new ones. If you cannot profit by controlling a much-sought copy of one work, perhaps you can profit by using the work to attract people to other goods and services, or by embedding the work within another product. The music industry has recognized this, and now seeks to make more from new activities like selling t-shirts with lyrics written on them. This is innovation in the true sense - instead of just creating variations on an established theme, the goal is to develop genuinely new kinds of products.

Supply and demand suggests that the money saved on certain kinds of products just gets spent on others. This is the basis of the real value proposition for any economy. Either it remains stagnant, and tries to protect existing business models, or it is open to change and incubates new business models. Copyright was created for an old business model, and not a very good one at that. Technology has moved on from the time when printing presses were expensive and distribution of content was physical. Many of us may love Mickey Mouse, but perpetually extending Disney’s copyright stifles creation instead of encouraging it. Nobody wants to see some poor session musician struggling to fight poverty in his old age, but that is no reason to rewrite the contract he agreed when he first did some work. We would not go back to a plumber, fifty years after he does a job, and agree to pay him more than was originally stipulated for the original job, just because we feel sorry for him. Let charity be charity and business be business, without confusing the two. If we do confuse the two, we are likely to forget that expenditure on entertainment is discretionary, meaning that if more goes to Disney’s millionaire execs, or to some poor old session musician, less will go to anyone new who wants to break into the market.

Governments that try to preserve existing business models by defending copyright are missing the point. Creative people now have few barriers of entry to a huge potential market. Artists will simply short-circuit big businesses, by selling direct to the consumer in the same way that insurance brokers were frozen out by the rise in direct sales of insurance policies. Some will give work away just to get the foothold of recognition. Unhappy that your publisher does not promote your work? Then give it away and bet that the audience will see talent where the publisher does not. Giving his work away made Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho successful. At the same time, discretionary spend on entertainment and education will still be spent on education and entertainment. That means new markets open up as others close. If people can get recorded music for free, then they have more money to spend on live performances. Or if they want something to enjoy at home, consumers will shift their spending from music to other content like video games, and this research suggests that is just what people have been doing. Seen in that context, it makes perfect sense for music businesses to change tack; if they cannot sell direct to the consumer, sell to the people who make games instead. This is innovation, and it is good for customers, even if painful for those businesses that lack the imagination or agility to keep pace with change.

Nations that have been great innovators face a risk. They have built up intangible wealth that will tempt some to simply sit back and exploit, instead of creating anew. To do so would be the worst mistake possible for the economy of not only rich nations, but of the world. Innovation, experimentation, change - these are the ways to keep on creating world-beating formulas. Monopolies of ideas are profitable only for those that control them. That means monopolies should not be allowed to live on longer than fairly required to recoup the initial investment that was needed to turn the idea into a reality. Money spent on enforcing and maintaining those monopolies for longer than needed is money not spent on developing alternative products. New capabilities inevitably give rise to new markets and these are the real and pervasive threat to old monopolies. The iPod allowed people to listen to as much music as they like, wherever they like, but it also gave birth to podcasting and a new world of creative opportunity. Listening to a free podcast means less time to listen to an album of music that you pay for. Sales of volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica collapsed in the face of rivals sold on CD-ROMs, and Wikipedia begs the question of why anyone should pay for reference texts. News services are happy to reuse the amateur’s view of major events, in the form of bystander photographs and videos, tweets and commentary from blogs. Such amateur content squeezes the market for professionals, but that does not mean amateur content should be prohibited or limited, or that the reader or viewer would be better informed by content that only came from professional sources.

Rich countries, like the US, got ahead by creating new ideas, not by just by exploiting them. And every nation has been greedy enough to exploit the ideas of others - when it suited them. Now, more than ever, piracy and the dissolution of barriers to entry mean new ideas have to be imagined and delivered at ever greater speed. You can try to slow the progress of competitors, but if that is all you do, they will still overtake you soon enough. Nations rich in intellectual capital should avoid the temptation to pour more and more resources into protecting its current intellectual assets. Intellectual assets only retain value if rivals lack the imagination to make something better. In a world where ideas are spread ever more easily, the dominance of a good idea will be shorter and shorter. The cleverest nations should stick to what they do best - investing in creating the future. If that means encouraging the next generation of Benjamin Franklins, that can only be a good thing.

Vampires make for the sexiest monsters. Go to a Halloween party, and half the women will be dressed as vampires. In contrast, expect only one bride of Frankenstein and absolutely no female werewolves. Vampires look good, stand straight, dress well, and have impeccable manners, except when chomping on your jugular without waiting to be invited. But what would life be like if there were real vampires?

To begin with, we need to establish some ground rules for what vampires can and cannot do. There have been so many riffs on the vampire theme that almost every vampire taboo has been broken at some stage. In the movie version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula they even had Gary Oldman’s Transylvanian Count walking around in the daylight, wearing shades and proclaiming himself to be ‘low-powered’ under the sun, like some peculiar inverse of a solar cell. Let us stick to the classic description of photophobic vampires, where bright sunlight would cause the vampire to shrivel and die in seconds. That means a vampire would still be perfectly safe when basked in candlelight or whilst enjoying a typically overcast British beach holiday. Vampires were probably behind the introduction and imposition of those energy-saving lightbulbs that pretend to be as bright as a traditional bulb when measured by every scientific device except your eyes. Garlic, in contrast, should not be an impediment to the modern vampire. Let us assume the vampire has an acute sense of smell, and dislikes a pungent aroma, but otherwise enjoys a decent ragu sauce or portion of garlic bread as much as the next man. A stake through the heart should still be fatal for vampires, just as it is for everybody else. Decapitation should also be an effective way of killing a vampire. Other than that, let us give the vampire a strong constitution and the ability to withstand a much more severe beating than humans. Even so, in the case of a severe injury, losing a lot of blood would be fatal for ordinary people, and it follows that vampires should find this even more life-threatening. Vampires would hence carry bandages, tourniquets and elastoplasts with them at all times. They would also be wary of nosebleeds, leading them to bulk buy those convenient pocket packs of paper tissues.

On the plus side, let us grant the vampire several important advantages. For a start, they get all their nourishment through sucking on the crimson lifeliquid, meaning vampires can do without food or even water. The energy in blood is absorbed within the vampire’s circulatory system, rendering all those digestive organs superfluous, and partly explaining the vampire’s prolonged life and resistance to physical attack. It also helps to explain why there are no fat vampires. We will not assume that vampires can live forever, but rather conclude they always seem to come to a violent end, making it hard to judge if they can die of old age. That is only fitting, because vampires treasure elegance, sophistication, and their independence most of all, so it would be quite a disappointment for a vampire to end up demented and drooling in an old vampire’s home. Vampires would also have some special powers, but nothing too difficult to explain. Vampires can have the speed of Usain Bolt. Vampires can have the agility of Bruce Lee. And Vampires can have the strength and stamina of a heavily-pregnant mother of four doing her weekly shop at Tesco’s and simultaneously wrestling the sweets out of the hands of her kids whilst loading her trolley with the 4-pint milk carton and a 12-pack of loo roll. Vampires can also have the hypnotic skills of Derren Brown and be accomplished deceivers like Peter Mandelson. But no turning into bats and flying around. Bats have brains the size of peanuts, so even if a vampire was clever enough to turn into a bat he would only end up too stupid to turn himself back again. To get around at nighttime, when the roads are less congested anyway, vampires would either drive or hail themselves a cab.

Now that we have determined what a vampire can and cannot do, let us examine what might happen if they were real. For a start, we know that vampirism spreads like an STD, except the vampire need go no further than a lovebite. This spares the vampire the need to pull down his or her knickers and hide in some bushes when enjoying a conquest in the open air. Given how fast typical STDs spread, the easy transmission of vampirism might lead to a pandemic in less time than it takes to say “so what was the big deal with swine flu?” We all know that vampires are inherently sexy, and like to go out at night, so even a mediocre vampire should partake in one good necking every evening. The number of vampires should double on a daily basis. Starting with just one vampire, it would take barely a month for half the world’s population to be turned into nosferatus. The vampires would spread far too quickly for the average government agency to respond. A large-scale and systematic response would be further impeded because intelligent vampires would initially target those bloodsuckers that run government and big business.

Having turned half the world into their brothers and sisters, the vampires would then face a dilemma. If they continued their ravenous ways, they would consume the remainder of their blood supply within a matter of days. Blood banks would be drained of their assets faster than Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. The few anaemics and hemophiliacs left unmolested would have insufficient time to reproduce and restock the human race. As a consequence, vampires everywhere would face starvation and there would be a mass extinction. To avoid this, the vampires running government would decide to make peace with the remaining half of the human populous. Public service announcements and education films would extol the virtues of living in societies which are perfectly balanced, with one half working during the day, and the other half working at night. The housing crisis would be solved in an instant, with dayworkers and nightwalkers sharing their homes and even using the same beds whilst the other is out earning a living. Business efficiency would skyrocket, and congestion decrease, thanks to the introduction of two separate 9-to-5 shifts for humans (9am to 5pm) and vampires (9pm to 5am).

The need for plentiful supplies of human being juice will still cause some tension between vampires and their corpuscular benefactors. However, with democracies evenly balanced between humans and nosferatus, and with most politicians having been turned in the early days of vampire expansion, governments would focus their energies on finding a viable compromise. These politicians would be especially persuasive thanks to their hybrid of Derren Brown and Peter Mandelson skills. They would introduce wide-ranging reforms to prevent human numbers being further diminished. The direct feeding of vampire-on-human would be banned in public and only permitted in private if the human had previously given their written consent. Celebrities and doctors would join campaigns aiming to make necksucking as taboo as smoking, whilst promoting the health benefits of only drinking blood that had been checked for disease and shown to have an adequate iron content. Voluntary blood donation would be massively boosted through giving generous payments for every pint. Despite the enormous cost, the economy would remain balanced thanks to the increased productivity of the faster, stronger vampires and because the halved human population would mean traditional food production could also be halved. The keen vision and superhuman strength of vampires would lead to a boom in mining, and would also deliver the additional benefit of a vast increase in underground accommodation for those needing shelter from the sun.

To deliver a fair society, The Equality and Human Rights Commission would be rebranded and asked to address vampire rights as well. Their first act will be to ban all films starring Christopher Lee as Count Dracula. International money will fund the construction of a large theme park and science exhibition in Transylvania, with the aim of promoting peace and understanding between humans and vampires. Vampires will steadily overcome institutionalized prejudice, and will inspire confidence in humans by guarding the streets at night and delivering a previously unimaginable fall in crime and violent disorder. In exchange, humans will look out for their vampire neighbours by ensuring they always keep a couple of full blood bags hanging in the fridge in case of emergencies, and a spare coffin made up in the basement for any vampires unlucky to be caught out after daybreak. Humans and vampires will live in such peace and tranquility that they will wonder why they ever mistrusted each other. Putting aside their differences vampires and humans will combine forces for a common goal: the systematic genocide of the werewolves!

Stage and television magician Derren Brown is something of an enigma. That is not to say his ‘magic’ or his stage persona is enigmatic. It is enigmatic, but there is no such thing as magic. Enigma is the path taken by the con artist that wants to entertain. There is only trickery and the presentational flair to make the perfectly possible seem like an aberration of nature’s laws. Brown is good at both. He is talented at sleight of hand. He is talented at manipulating individuals and using suggestion. He has the storytelling skill to gild a simple illusion with half an hour of anticipation. Magicians like Brown are inevitably enigmatic by necessity, if their illusions are to be entertaining. But the enigma of Brown runs deeper than showmanship. Brown sometimes does things that are far from necessary. In particular, he has a wonderful talent for exposing sham, when he wants to. At other times, he is the opposite. He can wrap up the most straightforward of tricks with pseudo-scientific codswallop. So what is Brown: president of debunkers or crown prince of bunkum?

As the opening illusion for his new television series, Brown correctly ‘predicted’ the numbers to be drawn by the National Lottery. I say he ‘predicted’ the numbers because, of course, he did no such thing. He just implied he had predicted the numbers in advance, waited until the numbers were drawn, then used some simple deception to reveal a previously hidden ‘prediction’ which perfectly corresponded to the lottery draw. All of that is fair enough. It is yet another variation on a very old theme: “think of a number, don’t tell me, I’ll write it down… what number did you think of?, look at the number I wrote on the paper… wow!!” What made the trick slightly different was that Brown promised to reveal how he did the trick. The disappointment was that, in the follow-up show, he did no such thing. No secret was revealed. He just talked nonsense and showed some other tricks that had nothing to do with his original illusion.

Brown claimed to have predicted the lottery numbers using a combination of automatic writing and the wisdom of crowds. The prediction was not revealed until after the draw, because Brown was not allowed to. Two straightforward observations should be made. To begin with, the National Lottery cannot stop people from predicting the National Lottery and telling everyone their prediction. Let me give you an example. 8, 10, 22, 27, 30, 39. That is my prediction for the next National Lottery. If it turns out wrong, then roll it over to the next lottery and keep on doing so until eventually it turns out right. Now everybody knows my prediction, the National Lottery’s secret police force should be banging on my door, desperately trying to shut me up, though even they do not know what the results will be… and hence should have nothing to fear from my tomfoolery. Wiser people in the audience would also have noticed Brown was not daft enough to tell the particular ‘crowd’ of gullible people their collective prediction. He added up their numbers, divided by the number of people involved, but did not share the ‘prediction’. For all we know, he added up their numbers, divided by the number of people involved, subtracted twelve and multiplied by the number he first thought of, before throwing his irrelevant arithmetic in the bin. The important part of the trick was not to reveal the prediction prior to the actual lottery draw, even to the people making the so-called prediction.

All of this is fine enough, but Brown publicized himself by saying he would reveal how he performed a trick, and then did not reveal how he performed a trick. What a very tedious lie, neither magical nor enigmatic. You might as well applaud makers washing powder that claims to clean clothes whiter than white, but actually leaves them grey.

Perhaps realizing how much of a risk he was taking, Brown even gave a comical, and equally irrelevant, spiel about how he did NOT do the trick. He did NOT do the trick by having an insider rig the National Lottery. Presumably the denial was meant to deceive those people who had seen through his ‘wisdom of the crowds’ codswallop into thinking the ‘wink, wink, nudge, nudge’ denial was the real revelation. But it was not a revelation either. It was perfectly accurate denial in that Brown is obviously not the ringleader of a conspiracy to rig the National Lottery. Any insider willing to rig the National Lottery, and ruin their career in the process, would expect a much bigger payout than could be offered by Brown’s television production budget. On top of that, if any person seriously implied that the lottery could be tainted, then Camelot, the business that runs the lottery, would sue that person to the point of extinction. Brown is telling the truth when he says he did NOT rig the lottery draw. It is also true that the moon is NOT made of cheese, that the streets of London are NOT paved with gold, and that I am NOT a monkey’s uncle.

Brown augmented his program by showing the ‘wisdom of crowds’ doing a reasonable job of guessing earlier lottery draws. In each example, the likely explanations of how the trick was performed are mundane, and have nothing to do with the final illusion. Based on previous tricks, Brown could have simply performed the stunt with multiple groups, and only shown the results that came out well, or he would have planted one or two assistants into the group, and had them do some mental arithmetic and submit numbers that would alter the group’s totals and hence decide the result. My guess is he used the latter technique. A similar trick in one of his stage shows involved audience members - probably including Brown’s helpers - writing ‘random’ numbers that would total to give a predetermined answer.

Brown said he would reveal how the trick was performed, but he did not do that. The most common explanation for how the trick was performed involves TV camera trickery. That seems very plausible, given the trick was performed in front of a camera crew but not an audience. Why else would Brown, stage magician, be scared of performing in front of a live audience? What clinches it for me is that, in the early shorts, the leftmost ball appears to be on level with the other balls. Just before the prediction is ‘revealed’, this same ball is distinctly higher than the others. Somehow, it is now squeezed between the side of the stand and next ball to it, leaving a little gap underneath it. How did that happen? Was there a minor earth tremor, or a very major quantum fluctuation? It is more likely that somebody, hidden by a split-screen camera trick, was in a bit of a rush to change the balls during the seconds between the lottery announcement and Brown turning them around to show the ‘prediction’. The balls had to be placed tightly within a stand so there would be no clue from their having rolled around. Unfortunately for Brown these balls were a little too tightly packed in this particular stand, causing the leftmost one to stand proud and reveal how the trick was performed. The real trick was in creating the illusion of a handheld camera filming the entire event, by cleverly swapping between a shot of a real handheld camera and one that had been placed on a stand and programmed to perform predetermined motorized movements that mimic the shakes and judders of a human cameraman. Why do this? Because then you could film a precise match between both halves of the split screen, whilst using the shakes and twitches to help hide the transitions where the splitscreen is in use.

Instead of making any real revelations about his latest trick, Brown talked about a hitherto unknown ‘deep maths’ and encouraged the audience to believe in superstitious nonsense. He was a whisker away from endorsing a latter-day variation of numerology. If he had to fill another ten minutes of airtime, he may have started talking about the innate clairvoyant powers we all possess, and all sorts of other balderdash. Compare Brown’s deception in this show to some of the performances he has given previously. In the past, Brown has used a masterful combination of truthfulness and powers of suggestion to undermine nonsense whilst generating results that both entertain and startle. Brown has persuaded people he can talk to the dead, by picking up on hints and reactions from the audience. In doing so, he prefaced his act with an explanation that he has no special powers. Instead of listening to the dead, Brown said he was reading the audience, but many in the audience rejected this truth and preferred a supernatural explanation for what occurred. In another show, Brown convinced people there was foolproof system for gambling, only to later reveal that he had bet every possible option and only highlighted the examples where he won. For example, he showed how to toss a coin so you get ten heads in a row. To do it, you just toss a coin repeatedly until you get a lucky sequence of ten heads. No mystery, only probability. In Brown’s case, it took nine hours of filming before he produced the desired sequence on film. In The Heist Brown showed how a skilled manipulator can pick the most suggestible people from a group, then train and educate them to behave differently and respond to subconscious stimuli. The end result was that three out of four ordinary people performed a hold-up which they believed was real at the time. Though disturbing on one level, the results are well known to any student of human nature. Whether the Milgram Experiment, suicide bombers or the Manson family, there is a litany of demonstrations about how ‘ordinary’ people can be influenced to do the most terrible of crimes. In all of these shows, Brown has revealed himself a talented enough storyteller to not need to lie in order to entertain. Or rather, he can let the audience in on how the lie works, and intrigue and amaze even more as a result. It may not be magic, but is much more impressive.

Alastair Darling, the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer suggested something laudable, and unusual, and despicable, yesterday. He suggested that legislators should not pass laws that are unenforceable. That is laudable, because we can all agree that a law that cannot be enforced is merely oppressive, and serves no good purpose. It is unusual because legislators rarely concern themselves with enforcement. They often pass laws which could never be properly enforced, simply to make it seem like they are taking action and appeasing the public. And it is despicable because he used the argument to justify not taking action in a situation where action clearly is possible: restricting financial rewards that people receive for the work they do. Darling is a mainstay of a UK government that has had no problem whatsoever with interfering with how much financial reward people receive from work. It has done it time and again, for reasons that vary from pretty reasonable to pretty terrible. Examples include mandatory minimum wages, increased income taxes and laws to prevent discrimination in pay. So this government has no problem trying to determine how much people should earn, and seeking to enforce it. Enforcing a rule that says someone should not be paid too little is just the mirror of enforcing a rule that says someone should not be paid too much. It you survey and inspect and find people paid too little, you can survey and inspect and find people paid too much. Yet Alastair Darling defends inaction based on the supposition that there is now a super-elite, who cannot be controlled by the government in the way that government controls the rest of society. If you want to join this super-elite who sit above the law, do not become a terrorist, or a cop or an even an MP. Terrorists and cops and MPs all get subjected to laws they do not like, at least sometimes. Darling has clarified the legal status of some in our society: to sit above the law, in a place where law cannot reach you or curb your dangerous and selfish actions, you should become a city banker.

In short, Darling argues that laws to cap bonuses for bankers are unenforceable because of two factors. The first is that bankers are clever, and powerful, and resourceful, and they will work around any law to find a way out of it. Of course they will try, but the fact that people try to work around laws does not mean the government gives up trying to pass laws. There are a myriad of laws relating to tax, and a myriad of schemes to work around them, and yet recognizing that people have the incentive to work around those laws has never been a reason for governments to give up on taxing people. In the UK, powers are misused to spy on people for petty offences. Powers supposedly introduced to prevent terrorism have mostly been used to stop people putting their bins out at the wrong time. However, Darling seems inexplicably squeamish about using similarly strongarm tactics to police bankers, even though reckless gambling within the world’s financial system is of more harm to society than disposing of household waste in an inconsiderate manner. Have recent events not shown that bankers can do more damage to our society than any terrorist could ever hope to? If we can live in a society that spies on people to enforce laws about bins, I see no reason to then protect the freedoms of city bankers intent on evading any law designed to prevent excessive bonuses.

Darling’s second explanation for the unenforceability of a banker’s bonus cap is that bankers are mobile chappies, and will simply move around to the country with the least restrictive laws. That is true, so any action needs to be global. It needs to be global just like the UK government is acting forcefully for global consensus about tax evasion. It needs to be global just like the UK government is acting forcefully for global consensus about money laundering. If the UK government can be proactive in these spheres, why does it assume global consensus is impossible for bankers’ remuneration? They ride the same international streams of money as the people who evade taxes, or the people who launder ill-gotten gains. Let us imagine the next private conversation Darling has with Charles Anarché, the tinpot dictator of a (fictional) place known as Libretaxville:

Darling: (furious) This is outrageous! You hide money launderers and you hide tax evaders? And all to profit from the money they bring to your ridiculous little country. You’re destroying the hope of international consensus and international policing of crimes that hurt all of humanity! How can you do such a thing? How can you be so selfish?

Anarché: (pleading) I want to change the law, I really do. But I cannot. If I change the law, then all the money launderers and tax evaders will move to Taxfreistadt, the place ruled by my cousin, Denzil De Catastrophe.

Darling: I don’t see how you can even want such people in your country.

Anarché: Come, come. We want them because they have money. My country is poor. We have very little industry. Our wealth depends on this small number of rich people who live and work here.

Darling: But can’t you see, arguing that they would go somewhere else is just an excuse not to do anything? It is an excuse to keep on profiting by harbouring these people.

Anarché: Of course it is an excuse, and a very good excuse. If anyone should profit from having these people around, I should profit… I mean my country should profit from having them around. Any country that does not give safe haven to these cheats is just hurting themselves.

Darling: But the world would be so much fairer if all governments pulled in the same direction, and cooperated, instead of being held to ransom by petty little regimes like yours.

Anarché: And yours.

Darling: I beg your pardon?

Anarché: And yours. I am referring to bankers who decimate our economy because of the rewards they get for taking enormous risks. We are not a rich country who can borrow our way out of trouble, like you do in the UK. When the bankers lose, we lose. When people stop buying our exports, my people go without. Unlike the bankers, we do not have a huge pile of money and assets to cushion the fall. When our economy falls, my people hit the ground hard.

Darling: But you can’t stop bonuses for bankers on your own. You need international cooperation for that, and you will never get it.

Anarché: Exactly, Darling. Exactly.

What appalled me about Darling’s rationalization for inaction was that there are so very many laws that are unenforceable, and yet enforceability is rarely stated as a reason not to pass a new law. To demonstrate, here is my personal top five of unenforceable laws.

1. Data Protection

Somebody in government passes a law that says your personal data will be held securely, will not be held excessively, will be treated with respect blah blah. Of course, nobody actually polices this law. Everyone is supposed to abide by it, but the only way of being caught doing wrong is to do something so grossly stupid that either the victim finds out or there is a national scandal in the press. Hence even the government regularly breaks its own laws with its sloppy handling of citizen’s personal data. In short, the only major impact of data protection law has been the proliferation of legalese that people are supposed to read before they waive the wafer-thin rights granted by laws that are unenforceable anyway.

2. The Working Time Directive

This is my experience of the Working Time Directive, the European rule that is meant to protect workers from regularly working more than 48 hours a week.

Memo

You may be aware that under the Working Time Regulations average working hours should not exceed 48 per week over a reference period of 17 weeks. It is expected that few people will work in excess of these hours over the course of a year, but some staff may be expected to work in excess of these hours on a short-term basis when necessary. Express consent will be sought for any adjustment to your working hours should they exceed the limits contained in the new regulations.

The point of this memo is that if you work less than 48 hours on average, then there is no problem, and if you work more than the hours on average, you need to sign a piece of paper and give express consent that says you want to do that. Note the absence of a third option - to not work more than 48 hours on average. Imagine anybody trying to insist on their rights in a workplace where HR has this mentality. Then imagine people who want to be stuck in a dead-end job, with no prospects of promotion or pay rises, and every likelihood of being first on the list of any redundancies. Thank the UK government for making sure the Working Time Directive was unenforceable: they pushed hard for the ‘flexibility’ of allowing workers to ‘opt-out’. If no opt-out had been permitted, as other European countries wanted, then there would have been a chance to enforce it, but not when it is easier to simply bully workers into signing away their supposed rights.

3. Taxes on Illegal Drugs

Illegal drugs are, well, illegal. People are not supposed to have them, buy them, sell them or take them. Yet some US states expect people to pay taxes on illegal drugs. For example, Tennessee’s Unauthorized Substances Tax requires anyone in possession of a certain quantity of contraband to buy a tax stamp and affix it to the drug. Not surprisingly, most people who break the law by having illegal drugs also break the law by not paying their taxes. Which is the point - to use tax as a back-door mechanism that allows the state to profit from illegal activities. This law is not so much unenforceable, as a way of legitimizing greedy governments that want to earn a profit every time a criminal is caught. They should be more concerned with the fact that by doing so, they also join the ranks of those profiting from the manufacture and supply of drugs. Legalize it or tax it, but doing both is morally indefensible.

4. War Crimes

It is an appealing idea that there is a pan-national law that sits above all, disembodied from any force or agency responsible for enforcing it. It is appealing, but a fiction. Laws have to be enforced by somebody, and invariably that somebody has power over the person on the receiving end of the punishment. That is why war crimes are by and large targeted at two kinds of offender: people on the losing side, of any rank; and people on the winning side, of low rank. The worst possible offender is neither a person of low rank nor a person on the losing side. The worst possible offender would be someone on the winning side in a position of high authority. They have authority, hence they can be the driving force behind the most large scale crimes. They were on the winning side, the side with the greater power to do more harm than the enemy, and hence the side with the potential to commit more crime. The greatest war criminals are unlikely to be discovered, never mind tried, never mind punished. Whilst it is good to see bad people punished for atrocities, we would be wise to keep in mind that punishment depends on power, and people in power are not subject to laws like everyone else, whether they are bankers or warmongers.

5. ‘Terrorist’ Hackers

Governments do not want bad people hacking its secure computers. Sensible solution: make sure the computers really are secure. Stupid solution: punish people you catch hacking your secure computers that turned out not to be so secure after all. If a government wants to punish any really serious hackers, people like organized criminals, terrorists and agents of foreign governments, they will find that all of them are working in places where they cannot, or will not be extradited from. That is because they are serious people, and either are hidden in lawless states or protected by enemy states. The only kind of terrorist who can be caught by a law like this is the kind that sits in a bedroom in an allied nation with an extradition treaty, looking for evidence of UFOs, because of the obsessive aspects of his personality. And that is why Gary McKinnon is the closest the US government will get to using unenforceable laws like this against a terrorist. This law is not about stopping terrorists, though it is about acting tough when ‘national security’ was shown to be anything but secure.

To summarize, let us clarify what governments think they can enforce. Governments think they can enforce laws to stop you being worked to death, but do not discourage your employer from using any and every legal means imaginable to encourage you to work yourself to death. Governments think they can enforce laws to generate tax revenues from criminal activities that they struggle to prevent, and do so without any sense of irony. Presumably they even budget for the revenues and would hence boast about the healthy state of their finances if crime went up. Governments think they can enforce laws to stop nasty terrorists hacking computers important to national security, so long as the nasty terrorists are actually lone individuals who live in a suburban house in a peaceful law-abiding nation. Governments think they can protect your personal data, by insisting that everybody using your personal data does only good things with it, without needing to make the most meagre attempt to police these laws. Remember that these were the same governments that could not adequately police their own data on their own computers and stop them from being hacked. These are also the same governments that regularly lose the personal data of millions of citizens as a consequence of penny-pinching, incompetence and carelessness. Governments even pretend to enforce laws against themselves, an idea as laughable as expecting Gordon Brown to punch himself in the face every time he makes a bad decision (although, at times, Brown looks so beaten you could almost imagine he does). Observe how hard the UK government tried to wriggle out of its own laws to hide the reprehensible but petty abuse of MP’s expenses. Now imagine how hard they would work to hide something really serious, like lies about wars.

Now we should summarize what governments supposedly cannot enforce. They cannot enforce laws that would discourage individuals from being rewarded for taking enormous risks which could lead to the destruction of the global economic system and hence plunge the world into ruin. That is enough to make you wonder why we need governments at all.