The Strategic Taskforce on Alcohol issued its report yesterday, and what a joy it is! Once again, the Department of National Amnesia is back in action, interfering, meddling, and getting things wrong as it always does, and once again forgetting what it's doing even as it does it, writes Kevin Myers.
Who can forget - aside from the DNA itself, which does so effortlessly - DNA's many great triumphs? For example, the Bacon attempts to control rents by keeping "speculative" money out of the property market? Bacon declared that investment in property was driving rents up. So a special anti-investment tax was levied on all capital investment in residential property, with the entirely predictable consequence that investment into flats for rent promptly dried up, the number of rental properties coming on to the market diminished, and rents soared.
Now, I passed economics in UCD in my first year by the smallest margin since it was the Catholic University and John Henry was still strutting the flagstones. When I attempted to do economics for my second year, several of the staff took over the GPO in protest - an action which was soon hijacked by Patrick Pearse, with consequences that are talked about to this day. In other words, I have less understanding of economics than that tribe in the Amazon who count one, two, many.
Yet at the time of Bacon, this column correctly forecast the outcome of this ludicrous intervention in the market. So if I could do it, how come all those far brighter civil servants failed to do so? Why? Because they belong to the Department of National Amnesia, where all lessons acquired in mankind's 100,000-year tenure on this planet are sedulously forgotten, where they probably wear animal skins, speak Ugh and keep warm by rubbing two under-secretaries together.
The Department's latest proposal (courtesy of the taskforce) is to freeze the number of alcohol outlets in Ireland. Here is the advice from UCD's dumbest ever economics student. Invest in alcohol outlets now. Our population is growing hugely both in numbers and prosperity. One of the few lessons I remember from those delirious 9 a.m. economics lectures is that in a market in which demand is rising, the value of a commodity will increase if there is no elasticity in supply.
In other words, prices - and therefore profits - rise when supply is fixed, but demand is increasing.
It's basic stuff, which everyone else in the world knows, except in the Department of Amnesia. The DNA, moreover, seems to be especially active in alcohol matters. Its restaurant-licensing act was a masterpiece of unenforceable Ugh gibberish, designed to protect the value of pub licences, which were already unnaturally high because. . .why? Well, you know the answer to that: because the Government limited their supply.
Because of this lunatic restriction, pub licences themselves became incredibly valuable, and entire residential areas came into existence without sufficient outlets to sell alcohol. Tallaght, with a population the size of Limerick, had just two pubs, plus very wealthy pub-owners. This is the effect of limiting the number of outlets: it makes a very few very rich.
Governments similarly protected the interests of that other curiously powerful group, taxi-drivers, especially in Dublin, the most corrupted transport market in Europe. The State created a monopoly over transport, but withdrew its services before midnight. Dublin Corporation restricted the issue of taxi-plates to a fixed number, even when the population and the prosperity of the capital were rising dramatically.
So what happened to the value of taxi-plates? Restricted supply, rising demand - go on, tell me what happened. Have you worked it out? You have? Well done! Yes, the value of the plates soared. So instead of just being a means to make money, they became themselves incredibly valuable objects. When the practical means to economic ends become the ends themselves, this is proof that you have a dysfunctional and corrupted market. The social consequences of protecting the value of these relatively few plates, held by a small number of powerful individuals who sub-let them out, was that there were few taxis in Dublin and thousands of people had to walk home each night.
Maybe someone has calculated the numbers of women sexually assaulted because of this, and the far greater number of men who were given a hammering. Under the Freedom of Information Act I should direct this question to the Department of National Amnesia, but of course, it doesn't know what taxis are, never mind understand the concept or the consequence of limiting their number in Dublin.
Now how is it possible that civil servants from the Department of National Amnesia behave the way they do? After all, these people all had double firsts from the Harvard School of Whatever; but the moment they entered the DNA, their brains were extracted by a vacuum pump, after which they were introduced to the works canteen, a mammoth-carcase. They know nothing about Adam Smith, not least because the bible (and its founding father) is about 97,000 years away from being written, and horses haven't even been invented yet, never mind the lad who makes shoes for them.
They'll sit round in their pelts, gnawing on a mammoth femur, as they enthusiastically agree in Ugh, yes what a good idea it will be to restrict the number of outlets selling alcohol (whatever that is, ugh).
So yes, we have a chronic alcohol problem. We all know that. We will not solve it by being stupid - but being stupid is normally our first shot at solving anything. Ah. Here comes the DNA again.