The Role of the Citizen

The Role of the Citizen

International Law: Part 2 – The Role of the Citizen.

(It is the essential rôle of the citizen to require cases to be brought to the International Court; and to read, and publicise, the Court’s findings.)

Where does law get its legitimacy? Is it not, ultimately, from common consent?  A law is a statement proscribing or requiring an action but framed in such a way as to maximise the extent of agreement inside the polity that will be governed by that law.  There is little difference in this essential regard between laws inside a state and laws governing actions between states (or between citizens of one state and those of another), except that there is need of (i) a special court  to codify and apply [6]  International Law and (ii) a mechanism for finding and expressing the required consensus. Well, there is an International Court — the International Court of Justice established in the Hague in 1945 by the Charter of the United Nations. But is there a mechanism for finding and expressing the required consensus, without which the law is simply hot air?

It is illegal to kill people in all civilised states, except when the state is at war, whereupon it becomes accepted practice to kill enemy soldiers. (But not enemy civilians, nor random people, nor to use poisonous chemicals, nor cluster bombs, etc.) Why is it regarded as legal to kill enemy soldiers when a state is at war? Surely because society, and common sense, condones killing enemy soldiers (when they are the aggressors), on the grounds of self defence.   

Isabel Hull wrote an excellent article [1] in the London Review of Books (2018, vol. 40/8, pp. 25-6) reviewing the no-doubt equally inspiring book by Hathaway and Shapiro (2017) titled "The Internationalists and their plan to outlaw war" [2]. What a bold and brilliant plan; because states (it seemed, in 1918) could see no possibility of excluding war from their repertoire. But citizens did feel it was necessary to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable war. The four heroes of Hathaway and Shapiro’s book are: Levinson (1918), Shotwell (1924), Welles (1942) and Lauterpacht (1941). The first three, in the USA, successfully brought sharper definitions of legitimate and illegal wars into international pacts and declarations, and the last, in Britain, successfully argued the consequences of these declarations in making conquest by war illegal. 

The concept that territory changes hands only by consent, never by force, has become a centrepiece of modern international law.  Since 1945 there have been relatively few unprovoked acts of aggressive conquest: the invasion of East Timor by Indonesia in 1975 [3], the conquest of Kuwait by Iraq, and of Balkan neighbours by Serbia spring to mind, but were unsuccessful. Israeli expansion in 1967 was (perhaps) provoked, (though their subsequent movement of population into occupied territory [probably] breaks the Geneva Convention of 1949 [4]). And the Russian re-annexation of the Crimea in 2014 — was that by invitation of a suppressed population?  When is secession legal? When is the suppression of secession legal? (The confederate States of USA, East Timor, The Crimea, the Basques, Catalonia, Scotland?)

General ignorance, by the citizens of the world, seems to emerge as the main obstacle to the application of International Law, for each case has still to be decided by the bulk of the world’s citizens (being not themselves involved in the dispute). It is clearly impossible for more than a handful of skilled jurists in each country to command the facts and comprehend the principles at issue sufficiently to make a sensible assessment. So we need the International Court to consider each case and publish their findings. Currently, there seems little pressure from governments to bring cases to the International Court. Perhaps the sovereign powers tend to regard any intervention by the International Court as an infringement of their own sovereignty. And there seems to be little public pressure on the news media in civilized countries for information. So, it is the essential role of the citizen to require these cases to be brought to court. And to read, and publicise, the Court’s findings.

It has been argued that judgements by the Internation Court are futile if there is no mechanism for forcing the penalties that the Court may hand down [5]. I argue that this is no longer true. Ordinary people, you and I among them, are the people who must enforce consciousness of (and compliance with) the judgments of the International Court. Information transfer is now so swift and easy that a widely held judgement against a rogue country will have, in a short time, impact sufficient to influence law-breakers.

(This continues my investigation into the slow process by which we evolve International Law; a folk process; almost a religious process. For Part I see my previous post.)

References:

1.          London Review of Books (2018, vol. 40/8, pp. 25-6)

2.          Hathaway and Shapiro (2017) The Internationalists and their plan to outlaw war

3.         http://ejil.org/pdfs/12/4/1539.pdf

https://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/misc/634kfc.htm; Question 3.

5.         Ranyard West (1945) Psychology and World Order, Penguin Books, Harmonsworth, UK.
6.          I am grateful to Ignacio Gomez-Palacio for a correction.

(For comments, and corrections, please write directly to me at:

Cawstein@gmail.com)

Nationalism: the greatest enemy to happiness today

International Law: Part 1 – Nationalism

     "Wherein", asks C.E.M. Joad in 1939, "is to be found the greatest enemy to the happiness of contemporary man?" In poverty? In pain? In the wickedness of the human heart? Possibly and perhaps. But these have oppressed men in all times; they were not distinctive of 1939. Twentieth century man (Joad suggested) suffered more from the unchecked power of the Nation State, than from pain, poverty, or personal brutality.

      "The Nation State regards itself as the sole arbiter of right and wrong, claiming to be both judge and jury in its own cause, acknowledges no law to govern is relations with other States and no morality in restraint of its designs upon its neighbours. Over the lives and liberties of its citizens it exercises an absolute control. It requires of them a willingness to kill other human beings whom they have never seen, whenever it deems the mass slaughter of the members of some other State to be desirable, and conceives that its welfare may be promoted by exacting from them the most horrible sacrifices, in order that they may harm the citizens of its alleged enemy.....

     "It tramples upon the liberties of individuals in order to establish its independence. While proclaiming its determination to be free, it deprives its citizens of their freedom......

     "The State is an anachronism. With its trade restrictions and tariffs, its customs and quotas, it sets up barriers between itself and its neighbours and seeks to the best of its ability to impede the manifest drive of our civilization towards unity. ...(driven by)...the abolition of distance.....It is only 150 years ago that it took a man as long to travel from York to London as it now takes him to fly from London to New York. The future holds in store advances no less remarkable than those of the past......... Today we can fly in the air; tomorrow we shall fly in the stratosphere." (Joad writing, we should remember, in 1939).

     I admire Joad's clarity, and vision. So much he got right! Yet the shrinking of distance that has seen a man walk on the moon, and that has sent this week a rocket to land on Mars (!!), has not yet welded Europe into a Federal State, nor abolished the concept of protective tariffs. At least this seems to be the case in the slower-moving parts of the Anglo Saxon world, like Derbyshire and Detroit. 

(This is the beginning of an investigation into the slow process by which we evolve International Law; a folk process; almost a religious process. )

Syria may have used toxic chemicals against civilians

    Ian Blackford (MP, SNP) spoke on the Radio 4 Today programme (14th April 2018 at 08:45 hrs) against the idea of bombing Syria as a rebuke for its possible (or probable) use of chemical weapons against civilians. 

    His emerged as one of the most considered and constructive voices to speak in public on the subject over the last few days. From repeated interruptions by the presenter, it was hard to hear what he was trying to say, but it sounded as though he thought Britain's actions should be:

[1]  within International law;

[2]  tending to strengthen the authority of international institutions such as the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and the United Nations (UN), rather than to undermining them;

[3]  part of a clear strategic plan, such as isolating rogue states;

[4]  seen as having a clear trajectory other than merely bombs, and more bombs.

I think the same. In the event, I think our actions were none of those.

Government Spending

The Benefits of Government Spending

     In July 2016 I showed [1], in a very simple and straightforward way, how raising taxes and spending the money thus raised can cause an immediate increase in GDP, while at the same time allowing increased expenditure on infrastructure. My simple model (detailed in Table 2 below, and in [1]) shows how money is recycled; one man’s spending is another man’s income, and so on repeatedly, towards a limit. My analysis has not been widely heeded by the media, and maybe it should be restated. It also raises a number of issues that I did not discuss, such as: who should spend our money — the citizen or the state, and is VAT better than income tax?  I extend the analysis and the discussion here.

     In Table 1 below, I start with an notional GDP of 100 (arbitrary units) and using the estimates discussed earlier (and listed in Table 2) for amount spent on raw materials, infrastructure, luxury goods, taken in tax, or wasted, I come up with different percentages of GDP recycled depending on the tax regime (and my assumptions on how the tax is spent – see Table 2). The recycled GDP will itself split as before, and some of it will itself be recycled. But this is not an infinite regression; there is a mathematical limit given by the formula 1/(1-x), where x is the fraction recycled (e.g. 0.556). We see that recycling adds considerably to the final GDP, and more so in the high-tax regimes.        

I do not think this point has been often made in the literature generally available to the public: that raising the level of taxation can increase GDP.

Table 1.  Initial GDP set at 100 arbitrary units. With recycling it swells to > 220

Income tax rate (p/£)	20	30	20	30
VAT tax rate (p/£)	20	20	30	30
Percentage of GDP recycled (=x)	55.6	57.4	56.4	58.1
Total Additional GDP at limit (i.e. 1/(1-x))	225.2	234.7	229.4	238.7
Total final GDP including initial injection	325.2	334.7	329.4	338.7
Percentage of GDP spent on Raw Materials	36.0	31.5	34.0	29.7
Percentage of GDP spent on Infrastructure	5.6	7.4	6.4	8.1
Percentage of GDP wasted	2.8	3.7	3.2	4.1
Percentage of GDP spent by citizens	72.0	63.0	68.0	59.5
Percentage of GDP spent on VAT-able goods	32.0	28.0	28.0	24.5
Percentage of GDP spent on VAT-free goods	40.0	35.0	40.0	35.0
Percentage of GDP collected in tax	28.0	37.0	32.0	40.5

There are a number of other points that can be illustrated with this simple model besides that just made about the importance of recycling GDP.  

Crucial to the effect of GDP recycling lies the question of what the government does with the taxes it collects. In the model here, it is assumed that some is spent on infrastructure, and it will be noted that higher taxes allow a proportionally higher annual spend on infrastructure (and waste). But a much larger fraction of government income is assumed to be spent on salaries (nurses, police, teachers, etc.), and on benefits (which I have treated as GDP, for it will be spent as such). To keep the modelling simple I have assumed the same split of government resources in each tax regime; so higher grovernment revenue pours more money into the pockets of millions of people. Hence the positive effect on GDP. If the model allowed foreign trade, and people spent their money on foreign cars, the spent money would not recycle as our GDP; it would figure in the economy of the car-makers.

You might wonder why this route of “Tax and Spend” has not recommended itself to governments before now. But of course, taxes take money out of the pockets of the wage-earners. Spending power is particularly hit for what I have called “voluntary spending” or “VAT-able spending”; essentials are slightly protected. Few politicians care to campaign for votes with a proposal to raise taxes, even if that is the sensible thing to do.

Table 2.  Variables used in the model and values assumed in calculations. Only the GDP (i.e. the ‘wages’) is recycled. The model assumes no foreign trade. ‘Waste’ refers to submarines and paperclips. If any reader has accurate data on these issues they can insert their own figures here, and write to me.

Variable	Symbol	Value assumed	Units
Input GDP for round 1	a	100	Arbitrary, e.g. B£
‘Average’ income tax rate	b	20 or 30	Pence/£
‘Average’ VAT rate	c	20 or 30	Pence/£
Portion of net income spent VAT-free	d	0.5
Part of VAT-free -> wages	e	0.5
Part of VAT-free -> raw material	1-e	0.5
After VAT, part -> wages (i.e. GDP)	f	0.5
After VAT, part -> raw material	1-f	0.5
Fraction of total tax on wages	g	0.5
Fraction of total tax on benefits	h	0.2
Fraction total tax on infrastructure	i	0.2
Fraction of total tax on waste	1-(g+h+i)	0.1

There was a theory, promulgated by some macro-economists, that lowering taxes will leave more money in the hands of the spending public, who will spend it and boost GDP. But will they spend it? And what will they spend it on? It is paternalistic to suppose that the government will spend more wisely than the citizen; paternalistic and perhaps also over-optimistic. Our governments since the credit squeeze of 2007 have shown no great wisdom in leading the way towards economic recovery. They have beggared the health service, given tax cuts to those on super-tax rates, and flooded the banks with fake money, ostensibly to cause inflation. On the present model we can see why tax cuts can fail to simulate the economy, when accompanied by spending cuts.

References

[1] http://occidentis.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/tax-and-spend.html