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UBI is a crazy idea from the start. Most want income insurance – a guarantee of some income if you cannot earn your own, perhaps because of illness. In the nineteenth century, this was supplied by friendly societies and similar organisations. You paid in small regular subscription fees and the society paid you an income in the event of unemployment.


In the twentieth century, the state “crowded out” such suppliers with unemployment and incapacity benefits. But what it offers still resembles insurance. You pay regular small “premiums” through taxation, and the state pays you an income if you lose your job.


With a UBI, you receive enough to live on, whether you need it or not, and make large tax payments to fund the entitlement. It’s like a car insurance policy that pays you £15,000 every year, whether or not you have an accident, for which you pay a premium of slightly above £15,000 a year.


Even the progressive people at Autonomy would surely not sign up for such a policy.

At a conference last week, I spoke with a student and liberal activist from Budapest about Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s ongoing attempt to control inflation by capping the price of essential goods like food, mortgages, energy, and fuel. My Hungarian friend joked, “Orban used to be one of the biggest anti-communists, now he’s making us all feel like we’re living under communism again.” I laughed along – for all the British government’s faults and the dire state of our country and institutions I thought to myself that it could always be worse. The timing was cruelly ironic. In the last 10 days, reports have emerged that the government is contemplating a price cap on basic food items. Prices are not just made up numbers, they reflect tangible realities like the supply of goods and the ease of co-ordinating them. As such, the sellers of goods which have now had their prices controlled will have to make up the difference elsewhere. In the case of supermarkets, that likely means putting up costs elsewhere or reducing the quality and quantity of their offering. Prices also perform a vital function by communicating to the market that there is money to be made by increasing the amount of a certain good in short supply. This has been shown recently in the United States, where egg prices shot up at the end of 2022, prompting calls for price controls and regulation of ‘big egg’ to stop the so-called ‘greedflation’. These calls were resisted, and the price of eggs has cratered in the first quarter of 2023. If that mechanism is blunted, the incentive to find ways of producing more food products is stymied. Food price controls would represent the zenith of exactly the type of misguided, knee-jerk policymaking that we have come to expect from the current administration. It is yet another reminder that we must make the case for even the most basic free market principles all over again. Thankfully, we seem to have made a good start in doing just that. Our Economics Fellow Julian Jessop’s criticism of the idea has been carried far and wide across the media, featuring in publications ranging from The Guardian and The Independent to The Financial Times and The Telegraph, as well as broadcasters including the BBC and Times Radio. Perhaps the tide is beginning to turn against the government’s misguided and short-termist economic approach.

Human Nature and World Affairs:

An Introduction to Classical Liberalism and International Relations Theory


This week, the IEA published a new book by political philosopher Edwin Van De Haar outlining a classical liberal approach to international relations.

  • Van De Haar’s starting point is a realistic view of human nature, which values the social nature of individuals but also recognises their propensity to quarrel, fight and use violence.

  • He posits that war is a regrettable yet inevitable feature of international affairs and that we should seek to manage interstate conflicts rather than naively hope to eliminate them.

  • Further, nation states are the main actors on the international stage and, like individuals, their autonomy should be respected.

  • The international balance of power is spontaneous order on a global scale, and military intervention is only justified on just war principles.

  • The classical liberal theory of international relations champions free trade and globalisation and is sceptical of taxpayer-funded foreign aid.

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