“Taser” is a trade name for any of a range of stun guns used by law enforcement officers and soldiers to inflict non-lethal force. Now, a CBS report says the United Nations has described Tasers as a form of torture, after several deaths have been attributed to their use.

The UN has completely lost the plot, here, both on the facts and on PR.

First, torture is an interrogation technique in which pain or suffering is inflicted on a subject to persuade them to disclose information. It doesn’t extract very convincing confessions, but can force subjects to disclose other information, which may prove useful and may save lives. Either way, torture isn’t very useful at all if the subject dies. Killing is not the point of torture.

Second, Tasers are intended to subdue suspects, not kill them, nor to extract information. They are intended to incapacitate a subject. This is not torture, either in intent or effect. It does, however, make Tasers a useful alternative to guns, which deliver lethal force and imperil innocent bystanders. It also makes them useful as a weapon in situations where force is required, but lethal force is not justifiable. Of course, that Tasers sometimes turn out to be lethal is rather problematic. Of course, this problem must be addressed sooner rather than later, either by limiting their use to situations in which lethal force would normally be authorised, or by fixing them so the risk of killing a subject is much lower.

However, a simplistic label of “torture”, and a simplistic call for a ban on Tasers will leave law enforcement little choice but to revert to billy-clubs and guns as their only options. Is a beating with a billy-club really more palatable than a disabling electric shock, when administered to a suspect who resists arrest? Isn’t that “torture” too? And as for guns, some reports suggest that they’re even more lethal than Tasers.

Most importantly, however, rashly throwing about the word “torture”, without any apparent thought, dangerously devalues the term. With such shrill activism, fit only for the tabloid press, the UN is crying wolf. If it gets so hysterical on this issue, why would it attract serious attention when one day it raises the alarm over real torture? Is it any wonder so few people take the UN seriously these days?

This is tragic, in a side-splitting sort of way:

Zimbabwe’s latest inflation figures had been delayed because there were not enough goods in the shops to measure price increases, the state statistical department said yesterday.

It’s instructive for various reasons. The most obvious is that price controls, which Zimbabwe imposed to curb consumer price inflation, cause shortages. Eventually, those shortages become critical, as they have done now. Pity it’s the Zimbabwean people who pay the price for their government’s failure to grasp Economics 101, but it’s hardly surprising.

The other point to make is that the consumer price index that is usually held up as a measure of inflation is, in fact, nothing of the sort. It measures a possible effect of inflation, perhaps, but it does not measure inflation itself. Inflation is not a general increase in price levels. Inflation is an increase in money supply.

For an illustration, consider this chart, which measures US money supply against the value of the US dollar:

As the value of a dollar decreases, consumer prices will, of course, tend to increase too, but that increase is not in itself inflation. An Austrian School monetarist, Frank Shostak, has this to say by way of defining inflation:

The subject matter of inflation is the debasement of money. For instance, historically inflation originated when a ruler would force the citizens to give him all the gold coins under the pretext that a new gold coin was going to replace the old one. In the process, the king would falsify the content of the gold coins by mixing it with some other metal and return to the citizens diluted gold coins. On account of the dilution of the gold coins, the ruler could now mint a greater amount of coins for his own use. (He could now divert real resources to himself). In short, what was now passing as a pure gold coin was in fact a diluted gold coin. The expansion in the diluted coins that masquerade as pure gold coins is what inflation is all about. As a result of inflation, the ruler could engage in an exchange of nothing for something.

Under the gold standard, the technique of abusing the medium of the exchange became much more advanced through the issuance of paper money unbacked by gold. Inflation therefore means here an increase in the amount of paper receipts that are not backed by gold yet masquerade as true representatives of money proper, gold. Again the holder of unbacked money can now engage in an exchange of nothing for something.

In the modern world the money proper is no longer gold but rather paper money hence inflation in this case is purely the increase in the stock of paper money. Please note we don’t say as monetarists are saying (sic) that the increase in the money supply causes inflation. What we are saying is that inflation is the increase in the money supply.

Note that inflationary monetary policy remains, today, a way for governments to “inflate away debt”. But more pertinently for Zimbabwe, this shows that inflation can be measured simply by checking the records of the central bank: how much money did it print last month, as an annualised percentage of money in circulation? That’s inflation.

Measuring inflation does not require shelves full of consumer goods of which prices can be determined. Why would such a measurement be meaningful if prices are capped by government anyway? More pertinently, why would such a measure be meaningful if the shelves are empty in the first place?

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting front-page story recently about Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. This project isn’t about laptops, you understand — it’s about education. But mostly, it’s about laptops. Building little green-and-white machines called “XO” that look like toys, to be sold for $100 to kids in poor countries. Problem is, the XO isn’t turning out to be very popular. So who do we blame? Microsoft, of course! And Intel!

With a subheadline one might expect from a newspaper that engages in left-wing editorialising, rather than hard business reporting, the Wall Street Journal agrees with him: “How a Computer for the Poor Got Stomped by Tech Giants”.

How, you may ask? Well, by supplying computers for the poor themselves. This, you see, is a bad thing. It appears to be less about computers for the poor than it is about who gets to wear the halo. Can’t have corporate profiteers nick Nick’s halo, now can we?

Mr. Negroponte’s ambitious plan has been derailed, in part, by the power of his idea. For-profit companies threatened by the projected $100 price tag set off at a sprint to develop their own dirt-cheap machines, plunging Mr. Negroponte into unexpected competition against well-known brands such as Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system.

Negroponte does say he thinks it’s a good idea for people to sell cheap laptops:

“I’m not good at selling laptops,” Mr. Negroponte has told colleagues. “I’m good at selling ideas.”

“From my point of view, if the world were to have 30 million” laptops made by competitors “in the hands of children at the end of next year, that to me would be a great success,” he said in a recent interview. “My goal is not selling laptops. OLPC is not in the laptop business. It’s in the education business.”

Good thing too, because as the article makes clear, Negroponte’s laptop actually costs $188, and prospective customers are balking, turning to alternatives such as Intel’s Classmate, which doesn’t cost much more, is backed by a large company, and comes with Microsoft Windows. Other companies are also eyeing the huge untapped markets in the developing world.

“The Intel machine is a lot better than the OLPC,” says Mohamed Bani, who chairs Libya’s technical advisory committee but doesn’t have the final say on buying laptops. “I don’t want my country to be a junkyard for these machines.” Libya has decided buy at least 150,000 Intel Classmates. The future of the One Laptop program there is now uncertain.

… Nigeria, for example, so far has failed to honor a pledge by its former president to purchase one million laptops. That’s partly because they no longer cost $100 apiece, says Tomi Davies, a Nigerian-born technology entrepreneur who helped Mr. Negroponte set up talks with Nigerian officials.

… The higher price also has made the laptop vulnerable to competition from sellers of more traditional, Windows-based machines. For many education ministries, “it’s a no-brainer you go with Microsoft,” says Mr. Davies.

But that doesn’t stop him from complaining about the competition from alternatives such as Intel’s Classmate laptop:

Mr. Negroponte says he communicated this month with Intel’s chief executive, Paul Otellini, and demanded that Intel stop selling the Classmate. Intel, which says there is room in the market for many machines, has refused, according to a spokeswoman.

… “We can’t compete,” complains Ayo Kusamotu, One Laptop’s attorney in Nigeria. “The minute we started getting some traction, they [Intel] intensified their effort.” Nigeria recently agreed to purchase 17,000 Intel Classmates.

In May, Mr. Negroponte appeared on CBS’s “60 Minutes” and blasted Intel, suggesting it was trying to drive his nonprofit out of business. Intel’s Mr. Barrett called that idea “crazy.” Two months later, Intel announced it was joining One Laptop’s board. The agreement included a “nondisparagement” clause, under which Intel and One Laptop promised not to criticize each other, according to Mr. Negroponte.

He claims, disingenuously, that the competition actually raises prices by not permitting his projects to achieve the anticipated economies of scale. What I’m seeing is that even his higher price point of $188 is sufficient to drive the prices charged by other producers down.

I’d think, if the purpose of the OLPC project is not to sell laptops, but to promote education, Negroponte would be delighted that so many private companies have picked up on his idea and realised that they can, indeed, provide cheap computers to developing-country customers. After all, a non-profit surely exists to serve a public purpose, not to compete against the private sector.

He may well dispute the arguments by customers about why the competing machines are better, and he may well have a point. I’d recommend open source software for educational computers myself. If he’s unable to deliver on his promises, when private companies can, the market is no longer failing. If he’s unable to convince prospective buyers, on price, performance or features, bitching in the press about competition strikes me as a desparate act to retain control of the market. Why try to shut up companies that are merely trying to promote their own products, unless you don’t think your own product can win on merit? Such tactics are hardly consistent with the supposedly altruistic motives of a non-profit organisation.

He’d gain a lot more respect from me if he’d stopped at declaring victory: “See? I told you it could be done!” But sadly, his slip is showing, and he just has to go on to reinforce the canard that non-profits are good and for-profits are bad. All he does is show that academics and non-profits are pathologically prejudiced against the power of free enterprise. Even when the empirical evidence in the market contradicts them.