Bangladeshi petrolheads – the affectionate name we English use for those who really love their road machines– are insisting that the country must allow motorbikes with engines larger than 165 cc engines.
This may or may not be a good idea.
The manufacturing industry is insisting that this should not be allowed – this also may or may not be a good idea.
What we need is some method of deciding between the two claims.
First we could examine the arguments actually being put forward.
Take the argument that bigger engines are more fun, for example. They most certainly are – I too had my petrolhead days.
Bigger engines also last longer, allow lower gearing, and so preserve gearboxes for longer.
The case against breaking the 165 cc barrier seems based on a concern that young men roaring, rather than zipping, around will frighten the farm animals.
Or, as is certainly true, result in the deaths of more young men.
Bikers are, in hospital emergency rooms, oft known as “kidney donors,” and it is absolutely true that when mandatory helmet laws came into effect in both the US and UK, the supply of fresh and healthy kidneys for transplant declined.
However, it's the argument put forward by the current motorbike manufacturers that really needs examination.
Their position being that they have invested to build to the current 165 cc legal restriction, and therefore, the restriction should stay so they can continue to make money from those investments.
One observation we can make here is that this is why specific interventions into the economy are such a bad idea.
Because by intervening we create the interest group that insists on the continuation of the ban, or import restriction, or whatever else it is that we've done.
By having listened to these people once we're now stuck with them for decades, even if the original justification for the 165 cc limit has entirely disappeared.
We can also go one step back, to Adam Smith. As I've pointed out before, all of economics is either footnotes to Smith or wrong.
One point Smith made was that “the purpose of all production is consumption”.
Implicit – in fact pretty explicit – in this is that profits on current investments are not the point of production.
Nor is employment, building up the country, pleasing politicians or, even, preventing young men from strutting their stuff on fast bikes.
The purpose of production is that people get to consume what is made.
This has an obvious corollary: What is produced should be what people desire to consume.
Which then gives us our metric, our system of measurement, to decide between the two sets of claims.
The bikers say they want the larger engines.
The producers say they shouldn't have them because the producers will make less money or, heaven forfend, experience losses.
The correct response to which is: Damn the producers.
For we don't care about who produces, how, or at what profit margin. The purpose of all production is consumption – that consumers get what they want and more of it please.
Thus, complaints from producers about how a change will harm them can be simply and perfectly rejected as irrelevant to the decision making process.
As the grandfather of teenage girls I am, of course, adamantly opposed to young men having larger engines upon which to pose and go faster.
That my own father's Norton 500 undoubtedly had something to do with my own existence, to the point that mother had a set of maternity leathers made for her, only underlines this now mature insistence.
But the arguments about allowing bigger engines or not allowing them do have to be made on such – possibly – relevant arguments. Not upon whether the current producers are in favour or not.
They're entirely outside the circle of people we should be listening to.
We never, ever, care about what is good for producers. It is the consumer that we build the economy for – no one else.
Tim Worstall is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London
