Back in January the IEA published a blog post by Emmanuel Comte with the title “Why Brexit was a mistake, from a libertarian perspective”. I believe this judgement is wrong – or at best, premature – but the libertarian case for Brexit does often need restating. Dr Comte, a Senior Research Fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP), argued that the UK’s departure from the EU had actually increased government control of the economy, rather than reduced it, and therefore that it had failed a crucial ‘libertarian’ test. The blog prompted a lot of tedious claims o ..read more

The Resolution Foundation has published a report entitled Housing Outlook, written by their Research Director Lindsay Judge and their Principal Economist Adam Corlett, which looks at UK housing costs in an international comparison. There have, of course, been previous cross-country comparisons, which show what proportion of their total household budget an average household spends on housing costs. The problem with such comparisons is that they sometimes tell us more about the housing market conditions of the past than about today’s housing market conditions. Suppose three neighbours, all owne ..read more

Last Tuesday, the Guardian published an article entitled “The end of landlords: the surprisingly simple solution to the UK housing crisis” by Nick Bano. It is another exercise in supply-side denial, as the subtitle makes clear: “Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock”. The article is easily summarised: Britian has no housing shortage. We have a housing crisis, in the sense of a crisis of housing affordability, but it has nothing to do with supply. The real problem is “landlordism”, i.e. the existence of a private rental sector. Private landlords are s ..read more

In economics, we often pick out countries or regions that consistently outperform their neighbours, or some other plausible comparison group, in some important respect, and we then ask what it is that they do differently. If you chose that conventional approach, it is unlikely that you would develop a strong interest in either Poland or Vietnam. In terms of current economic indicators, neither economy is particularly outstanding. Yet if we look at relative changes over time, we get a very different picture. Over the past three decades or so, Poland and Vietnam have been among the world ..read more

There has been a long-running decline in social mobility in the UK, dating back to the 1970s. This has combined with stagnating living standards in recent years to reignite concerns about inequality and fairness. How can society justify extreme wealth while those from less well-off backgrounds are denied economic opportunities? An unequal society risks the development of sustained differences in outcomes across generations. This is because, it is argued, of disparities in access to opportunity. Richer families can afford better schooling for their children than poorer ones. These children als ..read more

The good news in last week’s budget statement is that over the short term the cut in national insurance rates by two percentage points will, as Jeremy Hunt undoubtably hopes, cause the economy to grow a bit faster. Tax cuts can incentivise more work or (where applicable) more savings and investment in capital, and these extra inputs mean higher output. I emphasise “over the short term” because these inputs are subject to diminishing returns, which is why tax cuts do not generate sustained higher rates of economic growth. That is why, when we focus our attention on particular episodes from the ..read more

This year’s International Women’s Day theme was #InspireInclusion, one of those clichéd phrases which do little other than signal adherence to the woke progressive orthodoxy of our time. Feminism, a movement which was originally easily compatible with classical liberalism, has long been taken over by the progressive Left, often incorrectly blaming “problems” like the gender pay gap on sexist discrimination. But was it ever thus? Is International Women’s Day a day of celebration, of protest… or a clever marketing ploy? IWD began in 1909 after Russian refugee and labour organiser Theresa Malkie ..read more

Early last month, former Foreign Secretary William Hague praised Onward’s The Case for Conservatism, emphasising its call for an ‘active state’. At the heart of its calls for more government is a desire for industrial strategy, particularly in ‘cutting edge’ areas like AI and – the ever vaguely defined – ‘skills’. This triggered an interesting interaction on Twitter between Guido Fawkes and Onward’s Gavin Rice. It went like this: Guido: “Billions wasted in malinvestment by the ‘active state’ seem to have been overlooked. Billions taken from taxpayers who could have better ..read more

A BBC Report finds that, forty years after the Miners’ Strike, former coal-mining areas remain economically depressed. The Beeb’s survey suggests that 73% of people living in mining towns and villages have seen little or no progress on ‘levelling up’. With a sad predictability, residents report that there are no suitable jobs in their area and that prospects for young people are grim. But it’s not just former mining communities, is it?  There is a similar picture in other areas, former textile centres such as in-the-news Rochdale or Blackburn, or seaside towns such as Blackpool or ..read more

Every economic transaction involves at least two sides. Any measure that discourages economic transactions necessarily affects both sides of the bargain. You cannot clamp down on a voluntary economic activity in a way that only hurts one side. You cannot make it harder to sell X without also making it harder to buy X. You cannot make it harder to produce Y without also making it harder to consume Y. For every frustrated buyer/consumer, there must be at least one frustrated seller/producer, and for every frustrated seller/producer, there must be at least one frustrated buyer/consumer. I feel ..read more