Once again The Complete Tit has screwed things up right royally.

Peter Mandelson, the European Union trade
commissioner, was accused yesterday of hurting low-income families by
imposing a new EU surcharge on children’s shoes imported from Asia in
an attempt to protect jobs in the ailing shoe industries of southern
Europe.

Under intense pressure from countries
including Italy, France and Spain, Mr Mandelson has drawn up plans for
anti-dumping tariffs on certain categories of leather shoes made in
China and Vietnam.

What might be the effect of this?

The tariffs will be added to the wholesale price of
shoes with leather uppers and man-made soles. In Britain, children’s
leather shoes are sold to retailers for between £5 and £10 a pair and
are typically sold on the high street for three or four times as much.

Peter
Lamble, the chairman and joint managing director of Start-Rite shoes,
said the EU plan would add £3 to the wholesale cost of each pair of
shoes from his company. Assuming that those costs were passed on to
customers, "you’re looking at £15 to £20 added to the cost of buying
shoes for a child each year", he said.

Let’s just take these numbers as true shall we? Yes, yes, we know they’re over the top, to make a political point, but then so will the other numbers we come across later from the other side.

How many children are there in the UK? 700,000 odd births (some very odd, ha,ha!) per year, children are children (at least their feet keep growing quickly, which is what causes the need for so many pairs) until they are 16. So, 11 million odd children (some very odd, tee hee!).

11 million times 20 quid is 220 million quid. Hhhmm, are we really sure that this is a good idea?

But wait! The UK is not the only country in the EU, not the only one covered by this new tax. We’re roughly 60 million out of 450 million, work out that portion of children, times by the number we first thought of and we get 1.6 billion quid a year! And what are we paying this money for?

Well, you see, there are, supposedly, 138,000 jobs at risk within the EU from this flood of cheap footwear. So we have the tax to save those jobs. All well and good you might think.

But, but, that’s damn near 12 grand a year being paid extra by consumers for each job saved!

How to break this gently….the workers making the low cost shoes that compete with these imports do not, in fact, get paid 12 k (18k euro roughly) a year. So, we are paying more to stop the imports than any possible gain to the workers: it would be cheaper to have the imports without the tariffs, put the workers on the dole (or, better, retraining schemes) and we, the people of Europe, would be better off.

Please note that this is true whatever the slant eyes are actually doing. If there is government subsidy in the cobblers dens of the perfumed east or not, this is still true. We would be better off by taking the cheap shoes and our workers going off to do something else.

(Oh, and for those who support the infant industry argument: The EU is, for all my cavilling about it, a reasonably uncorrupt place by world standards. Even so, this is the sort of bargain that protectionism brings for the consumer: getting screwed for the benefit of those groups with more power in the political structure.)

Now, there are some problems with this analysis. The numbers are very sketchy indeed, back of a fag packet stuff. It is also true that consumers won’t actually be paying anything like 1.6 billion in those duties. That’s the whole point actually, so that they don’t buy those cheap shoes (plus tariff) but buy the EU manufactured ones instead. But they will, by design, be paying 1.6 billion a year more to put shoes on the feet of their children. Yes, even though some shoes will still come in duty free: the price of those will rise just as much as the ones actually paying the duty for a restriction in supply will lead to a general price rise: companies always charge the maximum they can, remember?

So, those caveats aside, is this a good deal? As I said when this was first mooted:

Making it more expensive for the mothers of Europe to ensure that their
children are properly shod is not a great advance in human welfare.

and

Leave aside for a moment every economist’s suspicion of such tales
of dumping; on close examination they almost never turn out to be true.
Think, instead, of what is happening if it actually is true. The
taxpayers of Vietnam and China are being gouged by their governments.
This money is then — via the subsidy to manufacturers — being offered
to us, the shoe buyers of Europe. We get a pair of shoes plus whatever
the subsidy was to spend on whatever else it is we wish.

It is near insane that the peasant in the rice paddy be taxed
to make us Europeans even richer. But if our rulers actually looked out
for us, they wouldn’t slap a tariff on the shoes. No, the only rational
response to such an offer of free money is that (attributed to) Calvin
Coolidge. When offered his first pay cheque as US President he said to
the Treasury messenger who brought it: “Thank you. Please come again.”

The day will come (Inshallah!) when we actually have an economically competent government. One that recognises that it is the imports that make us rich, if free gifts are being offered we do not turn them down, we say thank you, that exports are just the boring shite we have to do to get the imports we want.

It’s just something of a pity that in order to get to that state of nirvana, to get a competent government, we’re obviously going to have to shoot the one we already have.