CFP and capatory are slightly differently, but even in the fisheries policy area, Norway follows and actually decides to exceed most fisheries regulation legislation, that sort of thing, in terms of the kind of environmental element to them. The very last note that's escaped me, don't worry. Okay, thank you for that. Just to wrap this up, Claudia Beamish. Thank you, convener. I'd like to turn our minds back very briefly, please, to any real sort of top-line comments on enforcement arrangements, which I appreciate are difficult, because we're not really at all clear what the common framework arrangements will be, but if there are any initial comments that the committee can make, the panel can make, particularly on monitoring arrangements, prosecuting rights and court structures, any comments at all, and if you've already said something just in terms of time, we've noted it, but if anyone wants to comment further, please. We would favour the introduction of environmental courts in Scotland as one of the ways to address the governance gap and provide perhaps the necessary motivation for people to keep to the law. On the monitoring and reporting side, there can be a variety of solutions. Already, and it's important to highlight, we do have UK-wide coordination on some aspects of monitoring and reporting when it's important for scientific and practical purposes, so that the functions of the JNCC. What we probably need to do is assess the types of functions that we will be missing out from leaving the EU, assess which ones we want to maintain in Scotland and across the UK, and then come at an agreement of what would be most practical, better for the environment, and make sense from a wider impact assessment point of view. Presumably, Johnnie Haul and Andrew Midgley, you'd want to see that environment court work more timeously than the land court, which you would both have experience of. I would prefer not to see it have to work very often. This is a very serious point in that our agencies, SNH and SEPA, particularly SEPA, have adopted a very different role, certainly with farmers and land managers over the last three, four, five years. I think that it's been very effective and very positive. It's not been about enforcement and the rule book when there's been breaches and compliance issues, but more about education and advice, so we're taking farmers and land managers out of that confused, non-compliance state rather than criminal state and getting them into that better place, and therefore they're delivering on a whole raft of environmental requirements. I see any legal system as being required, but it should be there as a last resort. The focus and attention should be on good advice and effective strategies to allow remedies to be put in place before we actually start to take people through a court system, which doesn't benefit the environment. Let's try to educate and seek out good practice and best practice, and that's how we should start to gear our environmental measures within future agricultural policy and so on. Just to clarify, I don't think there's any disagreement there, of course. Courts would be the last resort, and what we're talking about is a different accountability bodies that would allow greater awareness of regulatory responsibilities before you resort to that. Indeed, the EU system does exactly that. I think that this is the kind of aspect that we'd want to replicate, but just to highlight that, at the moment, Scotland is not compliant with the Arhys convention in terms of the limitations that it imposes on judicial review, so environmental courts are a solution to an existing issue, but we'll also go some way to helping at the governance aspect, as well as the governance gap. Isabel Mercer. Daphne just touched on it, but linking that to your earlier point about judicial review, an environmental court or environmental commission, one of the key elements is that it would offer merits-based reviews and access to independent expert environmental judges and specialists, which would be key. One final question from John Scott. Thank you, and I declare your interest as a member of NFUS. Can I just ask if anyone can speculate? One of the themes that's developed here is that the Scottish Government needs to come forward with its own plan because we're lagging behind. We have our own unique landscapes, our unique environment, our unique agriculture, and our unique needs. Others have come forward with a plan. NFUS has a plan, Scottish land and estates have a plan, others have plans. Can anyone tell us what they think that the logjam is with the Scottish Government and why they're not coming forward with a plan in the close discussions that you've had with Scottish Government officials, apparently, all of you? Robin Parker. I think that another thing that is causing the impasse and it's the elephant in the room, and I can't believe it, I'm the first person to mention it, but it's the withdrawal bill, and why I think it's understandable that that has created an impasse is because what it says about the development of common frameworks I think is quite important. I'm trying to explain that comment. The issue with how I've heard, I think, as ministers coming to the finance committee and UK Government ministers coming to the finance committee have said with the withdrawal bill that some of the thinking behind it in terms of you take those EU common frameworks effectively, and as I kind of understood it in the way they were describing it, you kind of carral them at the UK level, and they maintain UK competencies until a common framework is developed and agreed between the different Governments and stuff, and then you work out what lies in each place, which sounds fine as long as that's a happy process where everyone agrees and stuff. I think that the legitimate concern is what happens if things aren't agreed and then that thing is carraled away at UK level, whereas if the alternative, where this Parliament seems to be headed, is that the common frameworks go back to the devolved level, and then we work together to create common frameworks to build them up in that way. The regrettable thing here is that that is inevitably—I think the issue is that different people have been able to put forward their vision and their perspective and argue their case sort of thing. That's not the problem, that's not the thing that's missing. The problem is the coming together and negotiating and developing those together. It's in the previous session. I think it's not exactly trust that I'm picking on, I think it's the developing together. The issue is how we manage our shared resources together, so you've got your starting point, different visions, but where does that end up with, because there are differences in those visions? The process and the itty bitty of working out and having disagreements and stuff is important. What I think I'm saying is that the withdrawal bill has stopped that process from really starting in earnest because we're back at fundamental constitutional issues. The urge is that those need to be figured out so that we can get into the meet all of us—stakeholders, parliamentarians, Governments—of negotiating the meet. I think that some of the academics explicitly mentioned the issues with clause 11 in their submissions. Perhaps what we can look forward to is once relevant amendments are submitted in the House of Lords in terms of how we resolve the differences of opinion between Scottish Government and Scottish Parliament as well and the UK Government. I think that once perhaps that issue is resolved, we'll be able to move forward in a much more constructive manner. Where the powers line, all of that, do flavour and colour any discussions that we're having on UK frameworks or common frameworks and the relevant governance bodies. It's not just the Scottish Government that's got concerns, but the Welsh as well. Andrew Midge, did you want to come in briefly? It's just to touch on the issue about the relationships between Governments that have interplay on the way, on the extent to which the Scottish Government has gone forward. It brings up the word that you raised there, which is trust. I get the sense that the Scottish Government hears some of the pronouncements from Westminster and then has to spend a huge amount of time trying to work out what it actually means and then work behind the scenes to get the detail that would enable them to formulate a position. While the Scottish Government isn't necessarily, you know, it doesn't look and appear to be as far ahead in its thinking, there are things that sort of sort of mitigate some of that. There is some sort of reticence to develop the thinking until we know more about the shape of where things might be going and again there's a degree of logic to that, but it's not necessarily stopping defer and the worry is that they're going to shape that conversation if we're not at that table. Can I thank all of you for your time this morning, I think that's been an incredibly useful contribution. We're going to move on to the next item in the agenda. I'm going to suspend briefly to allow the panel to leave. Thank you. Welcome back. We now move to agenda item 3, which is subordinate legislation. Specifically, the electricity works environmental impact assessment Scotland amendment regulations 2017, SSI 2017 forward slash 451. Further details on this negative instrument can be found in paper 3. I ask members if they wish to make any comments on this instrument. Mark Ruskell. Yes, thanks convener. I wouldn't want to significantly delay the statutory instrument passing through Parliament, but I do believe that there are a number of questions and a degree of clarity that's required about this change, particularly in terms of how a significant adverse effect is dealt with in the environmental assessment process. I understand that the minister has indicated his intention to answer questions from the committee and to come before this committee, so I would look to you to see what options there are for us to get more clarity as to what the statutory instrument is intended for, how the process actually works and what we're actually talking about in relation to changes to offshore wind farm consents that may be considered under this simplified regulatory process that's being proposed. Anyone else? Richard Lyle? Yes, I noticed that it's actually four large-scale offshore wind farm projects that have received consent in 2014. October faced serious delays due to the judicial review. Paul Wheelhouse said in his letter that he wants to make it clear that he regrets in the set to the breach of 28-day rule, which ordinarily gives time for the committee to consider the instrument. He acknowledges this far from my ideal. Maybe it's a case that, as my colleagues suggest, Mark Ruskell, we asked the minister along to have a discussion at some point, but I support the instrument. It's worth saying for the record that the minister proactively wrote to the committee to make that offer if he wanted to avail ourselves of the opportunity. Finlay Carson, do you want to say something? No? Claudia Beamish? I would support what Mark Ruskell has said. I think that, in the interests of sustainable development in our marine environment, it would be helpful if the minister could come before the committee, as he has indeed offered, because it's an issue of the balance and appropriateness of environmental protection and the analysis of that, coupled with our climate change targets and how we take those forward in terms of offshore wind. I think that it's a very important issue, and there is public interest in this, so I think that it would be helpful for the minister to come before us. I don't want to delay any instrument there. The sense that I get from the committees that we want to write to the minister and invite him to come along and answer the valid questions that are being raised here today, but that we don't wish to make any recommendations in relation to the instrument at this stage. Is that the case? We agree on that. Thank you for that. At the next meeting of the committee on 30 January, we would expect to consider oral evidence from the Scottish Association for Marine Science on its report on the environmental impact of salmon farming. As agreed earlier, we'll now move into private session. I ask that the public gallery be clear as the public part of the meeting is closed.


The Appalachian Advantage plan is the simpler, better way to get the phone you actually want instead of paying hundreds of dollars up front.  It's called the Appalachian Advantage available at Appalachian Wireless. On Friday, November 11th, the Kentucky Blood Center is hosting a blood drive at the Appalachian Wireless headquarters in Ival. There will be blood buses in the parking lot taking donations from both employees and volunteers. Appalachian Wireless is proud to sponsor the event and give to those who need it. So Appalachian Wireless is partnering with the Kentucky Blood Center to have the blood mobile out front here at the Appalachian Wireless main office building. It is open to the public. They're going to be here from 1.30 until 3.45 tomorrow on Veterans Day, November 11th. So they're going to be set up for a couple hours out here. We've got lots of employees that have been giving for many, many years and we've been doing this for over 10 years here to have host blood drives on campus, to try to help the community as much as possible. We're a very community focused business and always trying to give back to the community that's given us so much. During the holiday season, the need for blood is higher as more accidents are likely. Anyone is welcome to donate during the event. So the holidays always increases the demand or the need for it and the need since COVID they've told us is definitely still there because maybe not as many people are donating since COVID has changed the world quite frankly. So the need is still always there. So if you could come out and again it is open to the public as well. So if you drive by the Appalachian Wireless main office building here be sure to stop by and try to give the gift of life in a sense. The bus is actually set up here. You'll see it parked in the main parking lot here the Appalachian main office building here at Ival and it's just off 23 so it's very visible to the public as they're driving by. If you're going between Preston's and Burger Park you'll definitely see it out there. So it's there as an encouragement to show people you know hey they're out there doing this great need for the public and Appalachian Wireless is very happy to be a part of it. Reporting for Mountain Top News, I'm Nick Collum.


So in the last part I talked about very basic price theory, that being how prices are formed through a good supplier's ability to satisfy the most demand and the equilibrium price. And this leads us nicely onto price mechanisms, namely how prices are signals sent out from the market to indicate supply and demand levels between buyers and sellers, and this is what's known as economic calculation. It's incredibly important to us because Ludwig von Mises really put the Austrian School on the map when he devised this process in his 1920 essay, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, which was absolutely the nail in the coffin for socialist economics. Precisely because without the property required to have a free market and free formation of prices, like you have in socialism, organising an economy requires a central planner to extract all of the consumer demand and then put the pieces in place to satisfy those demands. Simply put, that is impossible. The ECP as it's known is the fundamental reason why you shouldn't say socialism has failed every time it was tried. You should in fact say socialism will fail every time it's tried. But we're going to get back to the economic calculation problem after we explore economic calculation in a capitalist system, which in fact is not a problem at all, it's the shining grace of it. As we established previously prices always tend towards the market equilibrium as that is the point where the most producers and the most consumers of a good are satisfied. This is an act of immense cooperation between these two categories that sum up the entirety of economic action and it's important that you try to reconcile how massive that implication is. When you pick up a birthday card in a store and pay £3 for it, within that £3 is the price of cutting down a tree, transporting the tree, refining it into paper, transporting the paper, printing ink onto it, having it folded and packaged, transported to the warehouse, transported to the store, put on a shelf and then finding its way into your hands. In each stage of that process workers had to be paid, ties and oil had to be produced in this whole process themselves to then be changed on the trucks which also needed to be fuelled, ink has been produced and transported to the right place, chainsaws have to be made and maintained, and all of these processes have their own prices tending towards equilibrium through mutually beneficial agreements between buyers and sellers. The sign of any good economist is someone who can observe how many millions of microscopic inputs go into making a birthday card of all things, that each one of those inputs has an input process going into itself, thousands of people are involved, yet you just pick up the card and pay for it. Then you send it in the mail and this whole process starts again. Then when the recipient throws it in the bin and it has to be transported, processed, recycled, made back into paper and begin its new life in this ginormous merry-go-round once again. To sum all of that up, the economy is such a complicated machine that requires the brain powers of millions of people acting in tandem to fulfil their desires. Now imagine handing that massive thing over to the government that can't even keep track of its own nuclear missiles and expecting it to go well. Only organic and spontaneous action can facilitate this process and the actors need to have some skin in the game, namely their property. These processes all have the element of risk and reward in them as well, and if things go well, everyone is rewarded, even if one person makes a bad decision and makes a loss, everyone else has still gained by going to a competitor as clearly they had a more preferable choice. The role of the entrepreneur in this is to assess consumer demand and find areas to satisfy it greater than others. If people are paying a higher price than they'd consider reasonable for battery packs, someone could start making them in their shed and selling them on eBay at a price that undercuts larger manufacturers. If the quality is good, they could soon afford to invest in capital goods to speed up the process, increasing their revenue, expanding into a warehouse, employing workers and so on, until now they are an established firm too, constantly innovating in order to keep their prices low so that their market share isn't taken by some young upstart like they were not too long ago. The way to make money is to make people happy. If you want to be a millionaire, help a million people. In all facets of these processes, all the participating parties are benefiting as workers and entrepreneurs alike are fulfilling their desire to have an income and consumers are fulfilling their desires for goods at the best possible price. The best possible price can only be known when all of these factors are taken into account in forming prices organically by allowing all of these people the ability to choose their most preferred outcome that's possible for them. If a worker feels underpaid, they can look elsewhere and if a competing firm agrees with them, they will take them on for a higher wage as this firm will benefit from having higher skilled labor by providing higher quality goods and being able to make more revenue from that. If consumers feel cheated, they can put their money where their mouth is and go to someone else, now being better off than they were before. You should see from this explanation that with the labor theory of value already being disproven, any Marxist claim of capitalist exploitation of workers is just laughable. Capitalism only exists by making as many people as possible as well off as possible. It's very easy to point the finger and say, this person isn't earning enough money. When their wage is incorporated into the giant structure of trade that I outlined before, no single person can ever decide what price is the best, let alone what price is evil or not. The very nature of an economy is the thing that dooms the economic planner. The process of production and consumption must inherently be decentralized and unpetrified to allow competition to work and grant innovation, making all market participants better off each year. This is what gave us the hockey stick growth of wealth after the industrial revolution and is the only thing that can allow it to continue. And in the 20th century, we saw the rejection of this process most notably of course in Russia and then China, as socialism gripped about half of the world. That would have been a frightening prospect unless you listened to Mises. Then you wouldn't have been surprised one bit when the Soviet Union collapsed and China took on just enough capitalism to not collapse and at the very last minute. The new trend for the reinvigorated socialists of our time who give out the meme real socialism has never been tried is to lord so-called market socialism, trying to take some of these aspects and apply it to their system. Except that was tried in Yugoslavia for a while until Tito realized not even that was working and put a stop to it. Then we had IRL Fortnite, fantastic track record for the market socialists. Because when all actors are not able to make organic choices on how things must cost, including the price of labor, you don't have a market at all, you're just lapping as one. If prices cannot be freely formed, then the market is obviously not free. And if the market is not free, then it is planned. And no single body of humans can plan the most intricate network humanity will ever see because it is the network of humanity, of infinite individual actors acting in accordance with each other. It should be blatantly obvious how trying to centralize all of this into one office with one head who talks to the supreme leader is only going to end in catastrophe. To perfectly illustrate this, let me give you some examples. A Soviet nail factory was given a quota to produce a given amount of nails. So they produced thousands and thousands of tiny nails so that they technically beat their quota but the nails were useless. Then the government changed the quota to be based on weight output. The factory started producing massive and unwieldy nails. When told to make male shoes, shoe factories would make ridiculous amounts of boys' shoes because you use less material than men's shoes so you can meet quotas much quicker. However, the most relevant example for us lies with a factory in Tambov that made capital goods for producing tires. The machines they were producing were outdated but they were adequate for the job. The government proposed that they switch to producing a new kind of technology and gave them a fixed sales plan, saying how many they should produce and how much they'll make for the year of 1968. However, when the factory took into account the government's prices for the following year in 1969, they found that they would make half of the revenue than if they just stuck to the old machines. With naturally formed prices, it's a sure bet that switching over to machines that are quicker for you to make and more efficient for the end users would be a very profitable move to make and through the mechanism of finding prices through satisfying wants, you and everyone else would be better off than doing it. But when the prices for the whole economy are arbitrarily chosen by a committee who holds no risk nor gives input into the market, of course the results are going to make as little sense as anything else the government does. This ridiculous top-down, centralized and thoroughly artificial system is literally the exact opposite of what an economy is supposed to be and it leaves little to the imagination for why socialist countries became destitute had to invade their neighbors to acquire wealth because they couldn't make it themselves and ultimately fail. Yaron Brooke has an example I love when explaining to young adults the necessity of a free market. He holds up his smartphone and asks the room if they all have one to which they say yes. He admires the beauty of it, its color, the design, shape, the computing power it has, the clarity of the screen, the many cameras and so on. Then he asks you to imagine what a smartphone would look like if the government made it and the room shudders. You know you can't count on the government to do anything half as well as an entrepreneur who has both something to gain and lose in the pursuit of satisfying your wants. A government has no risk or reward, you must take what you're given or else they'll put you in prison. Doesn't sound like a great deal. The fictional economic committee in charge of designing phones gets a marginal bonus for doing well and next to no punishment for doing badly.  None of them have to put their own money on the line as an investment and when the government starts making something they ban any competition and make themselves the monopoly. So yeah, if Apple was nationalized and monopolized you can so easily picture the iPhone 13 being a vomit inducing beige, being the size of a brick, having one camera, barely ever any signal and of course being bugged by the NSA to track every single thing you do. Now imagine the entire economy becoming nationalized like that, it's the stuff of nightmares. So to summarize economic calculation, you need the economy to be decentralized in order for actors to determine where resources are best allocated and this is done according to consumer demand. Prices are the signals for resource allocations, when demand increases for a good the price will rise, indicating increased resources are necessary, the profit motive will bring more resources in through entrepreneurs and then return the price to equilibrium. A central economy probably could have made an iPad in the 1950s if it brought every single one of the resources at its disposal together. Great, now you have an iPad but it costs the entire GDP of your country and now nobody has any water. Good job allocating those resources, probably should have left it to the market. A centralized body cannot have the economic rationale required to calculate prices and allocate resources to their most effective point. And market socialists aren't free market at all because they don't want a market for labor and especially credit, due to their magic sky fairy determining that an abstract labor theory of value meaning that none of the prices down the line from labor are organic so no prices are.   Yeah, good luck with that. Anyway people, thank you for watching this installment of Austrian economics basics. Next time around we're going to have the Austrian business cycle theory which takes some lessons learned here about economic calculation and applies them to money itself. Take it easy.