Thatcherism is dead. It has ceased to be. It has expired and gone to meet its maker. It has kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil and joined the bleedin' choir invisible. That seems to be the obvious inference to draw from Penny Mordaunt's call for the reintroduction of national service. Let's call this what it is - forced labour. Whereas Thatcher long and loudly proclaimed the value of freedom - so much so that the Economist's obituary labelled her a "freedom fighter"- her epigones now want to deny people the most basic of freedoms of what to do with their lives, thus rejecting Tha ..read more

A recent Yougov poll found that most people think that people out of work should not be able to afford smartphones, takeaways, visits to the pub or pets. This is not just evidence of their mean-spiritedness, but also of their anti-capitalist attitudes. I say so because of a basic economic idea - the circular flow of income. Out-of-work benefits are not so much payments to people as payments through them. They are payments to Greggs, Primark and Aldi and other places where recipients spend their money. Just as there's tax incidence, so too is there benefit incidence. The beneficiaries of benefi ..read more

One of the tricks of bourgeois politics is to blame workers for the systemic failures of capitalism. So it is with the claim that there's a problem with increasing numbers of over-50s being out of the workforce. The Guardian, for example, says: This is placing strain on the labour market, with many employers struggling to recruit, and is part of the reason for high inflation, the Bank of England has said. The numbers, however, don't bear this out. There are now 3.47 million people aged between 50 and 64 who are economically inactive. Whilst this is 250,000 more than at the 2019 low-point, it ..read more

Whatever happened to the right's faith in market forces? I ask because of their complaints about "woke capitalism" after Coutts refused Nigel Farage's custom. Farage says: I find it extraordinary that in modern corporate Britain, being seen to be politically correct matters more than making profits. In theory, though, market forces should solve this problem. Imagine a business were to systematically turn away customers whose views it didn't like. Then a rival company that wasn't so fussy could serve them. This rival would expand at the expense of the "woke" one, possibly even driving the lat ..read more

Sir Keir Starmer has ruled out significant rises in public spending under a Labour government. He's partly right. What his supporters and many critics fail to appreciate, however, is that a tight fiscal stance is wholly consistent with some very left-wing policies. First, why is he partly right? The answer has nothing to do with "iron-clad fiscal rules". Such talk is merely to appease the nonces, imbeciles and billionaires' gimps in the media. Instead, Labour's problem is that we are close to effective full employment; certainly, there are very few doctors or builders out of work. This means t ..read more

Katherine Birbalsingh recently tweeted something insightful: "Having small c conservative values" is not political. Many lefties have them. True. I think of myself as one of these. The conservative disposition, wrote (pdf) Michael Oakeshott, "is averse from change, which appears always, in the first place, as deprivation." And there have been many changes in my lifetime which are indeed deprivations: the dumbing down of the public sphere and disappearance of the public intellectual; the loss of music teaching in state schools; the closure of thousands of pubs; the insertion into football of ..read more

Why is inflation a problem? I ask because the common sense answer is wrong, whilst a standard answer among economists is out-of-date. You might think the answer is obvious: inflation is making us poorer. Not so. Of course, wages haven't kept pace with prices, especially of food and fuel. But this, strictly speaking, isn't inflation. It is a change in relative prices. If utility bills were rising 17 percentage points faster than wages and food prices 12 percentage points we'd have a problem even if other components of the CPI were falling so that overall inflation were low. Nor are higher mortg ..read more

No, you can't. This is the mindset of our political class. Labour has this week reneged on its promise to offer universal free childcare for children following Rachel Reeves' delaying of Labour's proposed £28bn of green investments on the spurious grounds of the need to observe fiscal rules. At the same time, the government - with Labour's connivance - is further restricting our right to protest. Which fits a pattern of hostility to freedom seen recently in the proposed ban on "buy one get one free" offers on fatty foods; the call for cycling helmets to be compulsory; and the demand from Darre ..read more

"Globalisation, as we once knew it, is dead" said Rachel Reeves this week. Which is a problem for anybody wanting a high-wage high-productivity economy. I say so for a simple reason: globalization in the sense of faster world trade growth raises productivity. My chart shows the point, plotting three-year growth in world trade (as measured by the CPB) against UK productivity growth. It's clear that there's a correlation between the two. Of course, correlation is not causality. Some of the link is because the same things that depress one also depress the other - such as the financial crisis and ..read more

Years ago, before the Great Forgetting, economists knew that people's preferences often did not originate with themselves but were instead cultivated by producers themselves. Inspired by Vance Packard's best-selling 1957 book, The Hidden Persuaders, J.K. Galbraith wrote: Production fills only a void that it has itself created...That wants are in fact the fruit of production wll now be denied by few serious scholars...The even more direct link between production and wants is provided by the institutions of modern advertising and salesmanship. These cannto be reconciled with the notion of indep ..read more