The Optimal Level of Bad Things is Generally Not Zero
Pollution is terrible. Practically everybody agrees on this. It’s causing climate change, driving the extinction of entire species, and is really bad for our health. We could stop it practically overnight. We simply close down all non-green energy sources and only use energy from renewable sources. Unfortunately, we do not have enough provision to do this yet and so it would see entire industries collapsing, firms going bankrupt, mass unemployment, and zero economic growth. Thankfully most people realise this and so we don’t do it. We recognise that the optimal level of pollution is not zero at this time.
Or take car crashes. Lots of people die as a result of being in a car crash or being hit by a car as a pedestrian. It’s also young people with their whole lives ahead of them who are most likely to die. Again, we could stop this overnight. All the government has to do is to change the speed limit to 5 miles per hour. You could get behind the wheel or step out into the road with no fear. Unfortunately the very massive trade off here would be everything grinding to a halt which would massively hamper productivity and make transporting anything much more difficult and so the price of goods would skyrocket. We’d also probably see an increase in stress related deaths and more people dying while waiting for an organ transplant. As such, we again recognise that the optimal level of deaths from car crashes is not zero.
I mention all this because today saw His Majesty The King deliver His Speech at the State Opening of Parliament. For my jealous US subscribers this essentially sets out the government’s legislative agenda for the new Parliament. It contained a commitment to enact Martyn’s Law which has been lobbied for by the mother of one of the people murdered in a terror attack in 2017. It will impose a duty on the owners and operators of public venues to put measures in place to reduce the likelihood of a terror attack taking place on the premises and to reduce the impact if one does take place. It will require staff to undertake training and fill out forms and it may require some venues to install new infrastructure.
Martyn’s Law is incredibly well intentioned and those involved in the campaign should be praised in their efforts to increase the safety of the public. However, the actual policy is a bad one and should be scrapped.
The proposals will increase costs for venue operators both in actually operating and implementing them and in the fact that they will use up resources such as staff time which could be used on other activities. This matters as it will really hurt the hospitality industry which took a real hammering during Covid and still hasn’t fully recovered. What is more, it will hit organisations in other sectors – many of which rely on time-stretched volunteers – and is one extra burden they will have to deal with.
Thankfully, terror attacks are incredibly rare in the UK. We obviously saw a spike in 2017 and we obviously cannot predict when or were the next attack will be. However, the Security Services seem to have done a relatively good job at keeping us safe and foiling these plots. What is more, although we don’t know when a terror attack will take place, we do have a good idea of where they would likely take place. They are likely to be on public transport, large public gatherings, and important and significant buildings or critical infrastructure. The local pub is almost certainly not on a list of potential targets. Therefore, requiring organisations to expend so much time and resources on something that is highly unlikely to happen is not a good policy.
Speaking in economic terms this may seem callous. However, I think most people accept this when it comes to civil liberties. After the 7/7 bombings the Blair government attempted to push through a lot of draconian legislation but thankfully much of this was tempered by the House of Lords. We could stop all terror attacks by granting the police and MI5 invasive new powers. We know that it’s men of a certain age who are more likely to commit offences so we could just simply lock them all up without trial (well we can’t as there are no prisons). Thankfully, we accept that this would be a huge infringement on human rights and so we don’t do it. We realise there is a trade off involved between security and human rights.
We are, of course, talking about human lives here. Life is precious and any untimely death is a tragedy, but we do make these trade offs all the time. Tragically, a number of people take their own lives each year by jumping onto the tracks on the railways and the tube. We could stop this, but the costs associated with doing so are too high. The NHS could procure new medicines which extend the lives of a number of patients with rare forms of cancer by a number of years. Unfortunately these treatments are expensive and that is money that could be spent on other patients or other public services and so we don’t do it. Public policy is all about choices and trade offs, many of which are unpalatable.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t be doing more to keep people safe but requiring business owners and volunteers to shoulder the burden is not the way. It is the State’s job to keep us safe and so requiring pub landlords and churchwardens to do so represents an abdication of the government’s most fundamental responsibility. The new government needs to ensure that it takes the threat from terrorism seriously by ensuring that MI5 and the police have the resources they need to keep the country safe.