Somehow I already suspected I would be. I will attempt to bear my disappointment as best I can.

Ejh – yes that is the ultra-free-market idea. The not-quite-ultra-free-market idea is to deal with pollution problems by either taxing the activity or a cap-and-trade. I don’t know the free-market reasoning is for differentiating between urban renewal and greenfields sights, judging by comments here I understand that the reasoning is that if it’s failed then it’s free-market by definition.

Roger – as for a link between corruption and lax regulation, if that is the point you are referring to, may I refer you to the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom (http://www.heritage.org/Index/), and Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. Now we can’t do a direct comparison between the Index of Economic Freedom and the Corruptions Perception Index as the Economic Freedom Index incldues the corruption perceptions index, thus creating a bit of a multicollinearity problem, but luckily the Heritage Foundation publishes a breakdown of their index. If I compare Financial Freedom to the 2007 Corruption Index (where the higher the score the less the corruption, with Denmark, Finland and NZ tying for the least corrupt countries in the world) I get a correlation of 65%. If I do the same comparisons but with the Investment Freedom Index I get a correlation of 71%. The correlation is not perfect, Ireland and the USA are 17th and 20th in the world respectively in perceived lack of corruption, despite having financial freedom index ratings of 90 and 80 respectively, and the same for investment freedom index). And correlation does not show causation. It may be that a lack of corruption causes limited financial and investment regulation, it may be that some third factor causes both. But a lack of correlation does imply a lack of causation. If limited regulation causes corruption I would expect to see the less regulated countries being the more corrupt ones. (I repeat, I am not claiming here that a lack of regulation causes a lack of corruption, I suspect that the two are both caused by the interactions of other factors in society but I don’t have any proof.)

I didn’t bother discussing this before as Freshly Squeezed Cynic said that if I didn’t share their worldview, then they were doubtful that any discussion would be fruitful, the detail that Freshly Squeezed Cynic didn’t bother actually supplying any supporting evidence for their view made me inclined to agree that it would be a waste of time trying to change their mind, and I am trying to cut down on the length of the comments I write.

You don’t say…

May I introduce you to my local Fine Gael councillor.

Here’s some of his handiwork, as featured in the Irish Times before Christmas. The IT failed to mention his dual role as property developer and county councillor.

Sad to say, most of the article is also true. Irish voters have been remarkably supine, particularly in the case of Bertie Ahern. Ahern followed (after a short interval) Charles J. Haughey, a man found (after he retired) to be living of the large monetary contributions of various businessmen with “no favours asked or given” (!).

There was also Ray Burke, another top Fianna Failer, who went to jail for accepting bribes. Ahern was thick-as-thieves with Haughey and Burke, yet even when it was obvious he was just as bad as they were, he still garnered votes and was probably the most personally popular Taoiseach since 1921. I am not sure of the general perception of him now that he has been shown up as a snake-oil salesman. There is even a fantasy “things would be ok if Bertie was still in charge” element in many newspapers.

You may guess that the country is still in a sort of denial, and industrial strife cannot be far off.

Story: Ahern, who is now on the international “elder statesman” conference was flying out to an exotic destination when he met a group of constituents at Dublin Airport. Being a man with the common touch, Bertie’s gambit was “Howr’ye, lads! Heading over to the Big Apple for bit of shoppin’?”. The reply “Bertie, we f**king emigratin’!”

Well, okay – Fine Gaelers don’t especially have a historical liking for builders (though some councillors have been working on that). But you guys do rather seem to like your big financial movers and shakers…

Aw, c’mon. I gather that glibertarianism has been pounded to dust numerous times in the illustrious history of CT. But some of us are relative newcomers, and others just can’t get enough of the spectacle.

As for your other objections TW - you seem to have ignored them. Granting for a second that the tax laws you reference are bad – they are evidence that, of course, tax capture happens. Which is why Friedman’s notion that government fiscal intervention should be through tax policy only has worked out so badly.

(Incidentally, it’s far from the only reason why the construction sector is notoriously corrupt, though at the same time it’s far from the least important reason.)

I am afraid that your request is queued up behind an outstanding request from numerous Trotskyists of my acquaintance, for an explanation of how a totalitarian state capitalist imperialist Soviet society fits in with a traditional Marxist-Leninist analysis of the development of proletarian consciousness, and they’ve been waiting since 1989 so you might be out of luck.

Except when a government turns out to have been giving tax benefits for property development and making distinctions between “urban renewal” and “greenfields developement”. At which point governments giving out tax breaks suddenly becomes evidence of the failure of free market policies.
“We are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia.”

DSquared: Tracey, this “our ideology has never truly been tried! We were against those corrupt types all along!” thing was pretty much destruction-tested by the Trotskyists.
I await with bated breath your explanation of how giving out tax breaks to property developers, and making a distinction between greenfields and urban renewal (which I presume was happening for a legal reason) fits in with a traditional Austrian-style economic analysis of the pretence of knowledge, or a public-choice critique of government planning, or the standard neo-classical ECON 101 assumptions. Or perhaps you are thinking of some other variant of free market economic policy? Would you do me the honour of telling me which one?

It’s a common feature of US land-use decisions that the more regulation there is, the more certain it is that all the important developers have strong political ties. It seems that in Ireland, the same was the case—politically-connected developers were able to build structures others couldn’t, in locations others couldn’t, and this was profitable for both politicians and politically-connected developers.

I’m entirely uncertain where, in this fact-pattern, one finds evidence that more regulation would help.

Are all the Ó hAilpíns bar one not back already?