Why a tolerant society is not a free society
Individual freedom is the libertarian ideal, the abstract value which guides moral action. As a political idea, libertarianism emerged in the latter part of the 19th century from liberalism, the overarching political paradigm to come from the Enlightenment. Liberalism centred the individual, both as the architect of his own destiny through his faculty for [...]
The EU’s mad fight against Google
Last Wednesday, the EU charged Google with using its dominant Android operating system to hinder competition. The EU’s competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, is [...]
UK unemployment: the Living Wage in action
The National Living Wage of £7.20/ hour is now law. UK unemployment rose for the first time in 7 months. Is there a connection? Too early to tell, some might say – but we [...]
Fiscal dominance: how central banks will wipe out your savings
We already wrote about the threat of an outright war on cash, motivated by the central banks’ need to make a zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) effective by forcing money to [...]
Abenomics’ predictable failure
When it was announced that in Q4 2015 Japan’s GDP was shrinking by a whopping 1.4% on an annualised basis it confirmed that the land of the rising sun is still sinking, as [...]
The real minimum wage is still zero
The UK labour market has a persistent malaise: low productivity and the resulting anaemic wage growth. This has been a feature of the British economy since the Great Recession [...]
The great steel robbery
UK industry has been in decline for decades, and for the very good reason that production costs are simply too high to compete with Asia and other low-wage/cost economies. The [...]
Does the trade deficit matter?
The trade balance is getting a lot of attention in the US presidential primaries, due to Donald Trump’s anti-trade rhetoric. Trump wants trade barriers to “protect” US [...]
Chinese recession is coming
For the last couple of years the talk has been of a Chinese ‘hard landing’, meaning growth dropping below the 6-8% we have witnessed the last few years. But that’s not [...]
Iain Duncan Smith: politics, not economics
The resignation of Iain Duncan Smith dominates headlines, and for good reasons: the narrative that the Bullingdon Club boys in the Conservative government are looking after [...]
Why the EU referendum is not so important after all
The general consensus among believers in free markets is that the UK should vote to leave the EU in the June referendum. And as a general principle, the chance to leave a [...]