You know, I really don’t mind the SNP all that much. I mean, in the sense that they are better than Labour then I am pleased they won the election. And I think that, on the whole, they have done a very competent job in charge.

But what have they done since gaining power? ASwaS notes:

The first Act of the SNP Government was to abolish tolls in and out of Fife. The second Act has been to remove university fees. As a St Andrews graduate I feel like I am in a privileged subset of the population.

So there have been two acts, both of which I oppose. This is a bit paradoxical because I am a student living in Fife. Received wisdom has it that I’m supposed to be in favour of these policies. But only the myopic think this. People see the headlines — “free this” and “free that” — without thinking about the full consequences. The policies are unashamedly populist, but unsustainable. This makes the SNP demagogues in my book.

Both of these policies are completely counter productive to a Fife-based student. I have already covered free university education before, so I won’t bore you again. But I have been meaning to write about road tolls for a long while now. So here is why road tolls should not be scrapped.

Roads are a scarce resource. There are only so many roads that can be built with the resources we have (not least space). And it is well known that no matter how many roads you build, drivers will literally be queuing up to use them.

Roads are a particularly scarce resource if you are trying to leave Fife (and who would blame you?). Geographically isolated, Fife is a peninsula. The River Tay lies to the north, the North Sea to the east, and the Firth of Forth is on the south. On the west, the Ochil Hills act as fourth barrier to entering Fife. It is almost as though the Flying Spaghetti Monster was trying to tell us something about Fife.

Anyway, the point is that if you want to travel to Edinburgh from Fife by road you don’t have many options. Basically you can cross the ageing Forth Road Bridge and deal with some horrendous traffic jams. Or you can spend even more time (and use up more petrol) going via Kincardine.

So roads out of Fife are a very scarce resource. When a resource is scarce it has to be rationed somehow. Clearly, no everyone who would like to use the Forth Road Bridge, or indeed any road, would be able to use it because there simply isn’t enough of it to go around. There needs to be some way of finding out who needs to use the road the most.

There are two ways to do it. One way is to make people spend time. This is the way most roads work, and of course the Forth Road Bridge has recently become one of those roads. The other way is to make people spend money. Evil, evil money. Yes? No.

Evan Davis has explained why queuing does a really bad job at rationing a scarce resource. When you make people queue, you are making everyone spend a lot of time. Time is the scarcest resource of them all. You can’t bring back the past, and you can’t transfer your spare time to someone else who doesn’t have enough time. Once time is spent, it’s gone forever.

If, on the other hand, you use money, it might still be costly to you as a person. But at least the money doesn’t just disappear. It has simply changed hands. The money can be re-spent again. Now, society is better off than it would have been had everyone been made to queue.

So to use the Forth Road Bridge as an example, the government could choose to whack up the price of crossing. This money could then be used to build more hospitals, or even — shock horror — a second Forth road bridge or tunnel. Or they could use it to reduce taxes.

Instead, the SNP have chosen to make not only drivers crossing the bridge, but also society as a whole, pay through the nose just so that they can say that they have removed road tolls. It’s a pretty pyrrhic victory if you ask me.

A couple of months back Calum Cashley was sceptical that the removal of the tolls would lead to greater congestion. His argument was that as the charge was only £1, removing it would not make crossing the bridge much cheaper in the eyes of many. But if anything, this is an argument that the charge was not high enough in the first place!

Instead, the SNP have taken it in the opposite direction. Common sense dictates that it would increase congestion. And evidence suggests that it has — by half an hour every morning. The rush hour is now a rush hour and a half.

The situation starts to look even worse when you consider the environmental impact of this situation. If road tolls were in use then think of the carbon emissions that would be cut. Instead, the SNP have removed the one toll road left, meaning that even more drivers are just standing still on the road with their engines running and emitting carbon dioxide. And the SNP are supposed to be a green party!

So road tolls make sense from an economic and environmental point of view. Does that mean we should dive head first into a full-on road charging scheme? Possibly not.

I seem to remember that when Evan Davis wrote that post, it was on the back of a debate about the possibility of people being charged to use roads by the mile (or something similar). This involves having a little box in your car that enables you to be tracked wherever you go. It might be economically efficient, but there is a serious problem with civil liberties there.

Also, it is perhaps worth pointing out that queuing is probably not always the worse option. Even though people grumble about NHS waiting lists, it seems preferable to a charge-based system where doctors could make up your illnesses in order to extract more money from you.

Nevertheless, the principle of road charging (if not the method as it currently stands) is perfectly sound. The tollbooth system on the Forth Road Bridge did not suffer from this civil liberties issue, so there was no good reason to abolish them. It was all the more farcical when the Scottish Government decided to pull them down at a cost of £2m, when they had only just been erected at a cost of £4m!

I reckon this could be the issue that brings down the curtain on the SNP’s honeymoon period. They seem to have messed up a bit when it comes to universities, on two different issues.

Firstly, the universities say they are disappointed in the amount of funding they will get. The universities asked for £168 million extra and said that a minimum of £40 million extra was required for levels of funding to remain the same in real terms. What they actually got was £30 million — a real terms cut.

I have never been to any universities except for Edinburgh, so I couldn’t say how it compares to other institutions around the world. But I can’t help but wonder if the continued public funding of universities in this manner is unsustainable.

There is already a perception that Edinburgh University is increasing the number of international students it enrols. International students are the only students they can make money out of, so Scottish students will begin to be squeezed out.

It already disadvantages us in at least one high-profile way. The move to semesterisation has been seen as an attempt to attract international students who want to be back home for Christmas — but had a range of negative consequences for other students (additionally, that document doesn’t mention the fact that sometimes there can be just a few days between your last lecture and your first exam in December).

If it is true that Scottish universities are facing a real terms cut in funding, then this trend will continue. Then Scottish students will be worse off.

The other place where the SNP is feeling the heat is over their ditched plans to “dump student debt”. If you were a student, it was difficult to avoid the SNP’s ‘debt monster’ character. A number of blogs were even decorated with graphics of the creature. It was clearly a key policy in attracting student votes. So it’s hardly a surprise that a lot of students feel a bit miffed now.

I can hardly blame the SNP for not implementing this policy, which in my view (speaking as someone with £7,000 and counting to pay back to the Student Loans Company) was stark raving bonkers. They shouldn’t have promised it in the first place.

Both of these areas link into the fact that students have it far too easy. Proponents of free higher education miss the point of higher education. A degree is supposed to be a signal to employers that you are talented. For this signal to work, a degree has to be costly to attain.

After all, if it was easy to get a degree, any old fool could get one. This would lead to the ‘devaluation’ of degrees that people so often talk about. The point of making a degree costly is to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were. If getting a degree pays off for someone who is not so smart, then degrees are no longer a useful indicator to employers and everyone is worse off as a result.

Of course, degrees are costly anyway. Not in a monetary sense, but in a time sense. Theoretically, examinations are (hopefully) hard enough to deter the not-so-smart from spending four years of their life studying, and the opportunity costs that entails (i.e. four years spent unable to work full time).

However, it doesn’t quite work like that. When people are growing up, nobody is told the truth about university. Parents always push you into going into university due to pride. They don’t want their several years and piles of money invested in a life to come to nothing. Schools are the same — if a lot of a school’s pupils go to university, it reflects well on a school’s reputation. Meanwhile, governments like to encourage people to go to university because it reflects well on their reputation and it helps keep a lid on unemployment figures.

For this reason, there are many students who are walking around like headless chickens, not knowing what to do next (I would include myself in this group). So many people are forced by societal pressure into going into university. A lot of people grow up knowing having been told by parents, schools and governments that they will go into university. These people simply don’t consider any other alternative. Then when they are about to graduate they are stumped.

The obsession with persuading young people to go to university has also led to the fetishisation of “student culture”. Thanks to this, those four years are not seen as a cost at all. They are seen as the best four years of your life. Four years spent getting drunk. The degree is seen as a nice bonus. Fair enough if people want to enjoy themselves — but this is at the expense of taxpayers’ money.

How do we know that degrees are not costly enough? Because some graduates — mostly male arts students (who? me?!) — end up earning less than people who do not go to university. (This is part of the reason why this issue angers me a bit. If I knew I had to pay, I would have been forced to think through my choices a bit more, and would probably have made a better decision.)

Before statists and socialists start moaning, let me point this out. If degrees are costly, this need not preclude poor people from getting one. For one thing, poor people are the very people who benefit the most from university education, so they have the biggest incentive to invest in it.

Also, I still think it would be unfair to make poor people pay upfront. I would not be averse to the introduction of university tuition fees as long as they did not involve up-front monetary costs. Instead, the money ought to be paid after graduation (or drop-out) in line with your ability to pay. This is how student loans work, so I don’t see how it couldn’t work with tuition fees.

Besides, any pretence that free higher education helps poor people would soon be shattered if you spent five minutes on a university campus. Students are overwhelmingly middle class anyway. Instead of helping the poor, public funding of university education hinders the poor. It takes working people’s tax money and ploughs it into the pockets of middle class Tarquin and his Classics degree.

This is not necessarily to say that I am completely opposed to any state involvement in higher education. I would understand if there were a clear need to provide an incentive for people to attend university (although surely the prospect of a highly-paid job ought to be enough incentive). But today, 52% of 18–30 year olds either have a higher education qualification or are currently studying for one. There is hardly a shortage of graduates, or people wanting to graduate.

According to the CBI, one in eight absences are by people faking illness. This apparently costs the British economy £1.6bn. The implication is that this is a bad, bad thing. But is it?

I read an article yesterday on The Washington Post’s website. The article got a lot of attention. It was an interesting experiment. An excellent, world-famous violinist — Joshua Bell — posed as a busker at a busy Washington DC metro station.

Of course, normally people would attend a Joshua Bell concert knowing that they were going to see one of the best violinists in the world. In this instance, he is performing in the same environment as a humble busker. Outside Bell’s normal environment, did the commuters notice his talent?

Of course they didn’t. Most of them walked past. Some left spare change. A few stayed around to witness his excellent playing. That probably doesn’t happen to most buskers. But the point stands that the vast majority walked straight past one of the best musicians in the world. A musician that many people would pay good money to watch was being totally ignored at a free, impromptu performance.

The article goes on to ask just why people ignored him. I think we all know the answers. The busy commuters had to get on with their business, and just didn’t have the time or inclination to appreciate the beauty. The article made me quite sad. I wasn’t sad because so many people walked past Joshua Bell. I was sad because I know that I would have walked straight past him as well.

The question to ask is, what is the biggest priority in your life? If earning money is your number one goal that is good for you. But I think you are stupid. In another little coincidence, while I was revising for my exams I read this in one of my economics textbooks, Microeconomic Theory by Walter Nicholson.

Unless the individual is a rather Scrooge-type of person, wealth in its own right gives no direct utility. Rather, it is only when wealth is spent on consumption goods that any utility results.

Yet yesterday I watched a video of lots of people who were fully focussed on accumulating wealth rather than actually enjoying themselves. Could any of them not have spared a second to work out if the busker was worth paying attention to? Could they not have afforded to be five minutes late for work and take time out to enjoy the performance?

Every day I become a bit more disillusioned with the idea that I need to make lots of money. I am conscious of the fact that if I get a job that pays a lot of money, I will probably only end up becoming stressed and having no spare time in which to spend any — never mind all — of my money.

There is a suspicion lurking in the back of my head that people who have moderate to low incomes simply enjoy their life more, while high flyers become stressed out climbing ladders that only have more ladders at the top of them. If this is the case, then the people who are faking illness have the right idea. Bollocks to lots of money. They just want to take some time out to enjoy themselves and relax.

The CBI might be right that fake sickies cost the economy £1.6bn. But they are probably wrong in implying that this is a bad thing. The question to ask is, how much is taking a day off worth to a worker? Probably quite a lot. We all like to enjoy ourselves, and we all experience those days where we just can’t be bothered. The decision we face is between climbing a (metaphorical) mountain or having a lie-in. Easy choice for many.

Personally, I do not pull sickies. Partly this is because I like having a routine. Partly it’s because I know about all of the bitching that goes on behind people’s backs when they phone in sick. Partly it’s because I am a very poor liar. Partly it’s because I feel a bit guilty for all those years when I didn’t have a job (I got my first proper job when I was 20, although I hasten to add that I have always been in full time education, so never technically unemployed).

But in a way I admire those who pull sickies for just doing whatever the hell they want. Often I think I was right to sit on my arse for all those years when I didn’t have a job. After all, the current situation sees me losing almost all of my spare time, and barely spending a penny of the money that I have earned.

So people pulling a sickie might cost the economy £1.6bn. But it probably gains people more than that in enjoyment. The utility derived from these people taking a sneaky day off could well be higher than the utility that would be derived from the £1.6bn that is lost from the economy. Indeed, one of the major lessons of economics is that if it wasn’t, people simply wouldn’t take those days off.

In that post I wrote about blogging a couple of weeks ago I said that I’d never gone out and investigated anything in my life. Well I’ve turned over a new leaf because that all changed today. To investigate the effects of the smoking ban I went to the pub. Of course, I could have gone to the pub on Sunday, but I couldn’t even be arsed to do that.

Anyway, I’ve never quite been able to make my mind up about this smoking ban. For purely selfish reasons, of course, I couldn’t wait for this smoking ban to go ahead. Too often it simply isn’t worth going out if you’re going to spend the rest of the day stinking of smoke. I will probably end up going down the pub more — I’ve already accepted one invitation that I probably wouldn’t have prior to Sunday. So instead of being on the fags I’ll be on the booze.

I’m pretty sure most people are in favour of the ban. I saw Jack McConnell on the television the other day going on about how young people in particular are heavily in favour of the ban. For once, I think he’s right. Maybe it’s just because I mainly associate with student lefties, but I can only think of one person who I’ve met in the flesh who was against the ban.

As a generation, we youngsters have had it hammered home to us pretty relentlessly. And not just by the government. Smoking family friends and relatives warn you never to start. Meanwhile, parents would disown you if you did. We know, we know: smoking will make you die horribly and slowly and those people who make you breathe in their second-hand smoke are absolute bastards.

There is just a feeling of inevitability about it all. The tide is very much against the smoking industry, and nobody is even attempting to turn the tide back in the other direction any more. Smoking in adverts is gone, smoking adverts themselves are gone, smoking in public places and workplaces is gone. And most people (particularly young people) seem pretty ambivalent about it. A friend told me he was half-expecting to see people smoking five at a time, but when I was out on Saturday I didn’t see any evidence of last-minute pre-ban defiance. It all felt very normal, in fact, as if the collective response was just, “Yeah, smoking ends tomorrow. Big deal.”

Given all this, though, I’m surprised the government even needs to step in. If there’s such a high demand for smoke-free environments, why aren’t employers and pub managers prohibiting smoking themselves? I heard that smoke-free pubs existed prior to the ban, but I certainly wouldn’t have been able to tell you where. I’d be amazed if there were any in Kirkcaldy, although I heard that there were three in Edinburgh (still not a lot though when you consider how many pubs there must be in Edinburgh).

I guess businessmen are just really risk-averse and are afraid to be the first to make that kind of decision. Just look at how all the broadsheets have turned to tabloid one-by-one. They’ve been banging on for as long as I can remember about how going tabloid will increase the number of readers because broadsheets are bloody ridiculous and give everybody a sore back. Yet none of the broadsheets made the switch, until a couple of years ago when The Independent had no other choice than to take a risk. Surprise surprise, more people began to read the Indy and then almost everybody else followed suit soon afterwards. See? It wasn’t so hard after all.

Anyway, back to the pub. There was the predicted huddle of smokers standing at the doorway, despite the fact that it was absolutely pissing it down today, but only at one of the four times I found myself passing through the door. It wasn’t the most pleasent tunnel I’ve ever been through, but it was a hell of a lot better than contending with a foggy pub for the entire duration of your visit.

Was the smoke cloaking other smells for all those years? The jury is out. It didn’t feel weird when I first walked in — everybody did turn round and stare at me and the pub did still smell like a pub. I reckoned the new carpet played a part in that smell, though some said it just smelled like stale beer. At our particular corner it smelled of old man and old man urine. Nice. I might have marginally preferred the smoke in that instance. But back home, and you wouldn’t have known I was in a pub because my clothes didn’t stink of smoke, so that is a major plus point.

All-in-all, I have personally enjoyed the new improved smoke-free Scotland. But I think the ban has gone too far. For instance, The Devil’s Kitchen has had a couple of posts detailing how our favourite television characters will no longer be able to light up. And according to The Sunday Times, “Even a request to permit herbal cigarettes has been rejected.” Isn’t that going a bit too far?

Will Howells also wrote about the regulations that businesses now face. There I wrote a comment about my experience at the train station.

…when I used the toilet at Waverley Station recently it was clear that somebody had just been smoking in it. It’s like high school or something. My clothes stank for the rest of the day.

I wonder if the smoking ban is merely going to lead people to smoke in public places secretly rather than stop smoking in public places altogether…

Maybe I’m missing something really obvious here, but I would have preferred a licensing system. If you have to have a license to sell alcohol, why not have a licensing system to give people the choice of both smoking and non-smoking pubs?

One last thing about my trip to the pub. I thought I was given a counterfeit fiver in my change. But then I realised that it was a Jack Nicklaus fiver! I’m surprised any of these are still in circulation.

When David Farrer wrote about them when they were first issued they were going at £102+. They mostly still seem to be going for more than £5. Although if I were to use this note to pay for something it would only be worth a fiver. And it made up £5 of my change. If I think about this much more my head will probably detatch itself and walk off Beachy Head.