Welcome to the IEA Weekend Newsletter

• Project Overspend 
• Regulation Without the State?
• John Stuart Mill on the sugar tax... 
• Retroactive Witch Hunts 
• You're Invited! 

Project Overspend

The government is wasting billions of pounds of taxpayers money due to mismanagement, according to a new FREER report, penned by FREER co-chair Lee Rowley MP. 



Lee draws on his experience sitting on the Public Accounts Committee, which has dealt with nine separate instances of project failures, to argue that botched projects could have been better handled or mitigated had the current structures and institutions favoured efficiency.  

Accumulatively, the combination of separate instances have cost the taxpayer over £7.5 billion poundsand collectively amount to 34 years of project delays.

Writing for The Times Red Box, Lee argues for “a renewed drive to reduce waste and failure [that] could deliver billions to spend on public services, without the need to raise a single penny more in tax”.

To read ‘Project Fear: How the Government wastes billions through project failures, and how to prevent it’ by Lee Rowley MP, click here. 

Regulation without the State 

In an age of increased regulation and state intervention in financial services, triggered by the financial crash, it is often assumed all regulation must originate from the state - but this ignores hundreds of years of successful market self-regulation.



A new report, ‘Regulation without the state: the example of financial markets’ by Senior Academic Fellow Professor Philip Booth, examines the growth of state regulation, sets out modern and historical examples of how private alternatives can work, and asserts that the process of competition in regulatory services is necessary to discover the best approach to regulation. 

          

Writing for City A.M., Philip notes that “governments regulate to prevent monopolies, but do not seem to mind government monopoly regulators”, arguing for allowing the “Competition and Markets Authority to investigate both whether state regulators inhibit competition and whether state regulation is itself monopolistic.”

John Stuart Mill on the sugar tax...

Would John Stuart Mill have backed the Nanny State?

In ‘On Liberty’ the famed philosopher articulates his ‘Harm Principle’ which establishes that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."

On this week’s podcast, our Head of Lifestyle Economics Christopher Snowdon and the Big Tent Ideas Festival’s Dolly Theis apply this principle to the 21st century, debating whether today’s ban-happy politicians violate or conform to the principle by using the law to discourage ‘harmful’ activities like eating sugary food, drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes. 

They have a wide-ranging discussion on Mill's early political feminism, personal freedoms that don't harm others, and the boundaries of government intervention, as well as the tyranny of pursuing equal outcomes and modern behaviour theories on those who would rather embrace freedom of choice.

Download the podcast here. To subscribe to our podcast, IEA Conversations, click here. 

Retroactive Witch Hunts

On the blog this week, IEA Editorial and Research Fellow Len Shackleton argues that the ‘eugenics furore’ at UCL, where a committee is now considering removing the names of Marie Stopes and Francis Galton from the lecture theatres, is emblematic of today’s judgemental view of the past. 



He argues that “we are all influenced by the standards of our times, and most of our current orthodoxies will one day seem as stupid and bigoted as eugenics appears to today’s ‘woke’ students”.

Read his full blog piece here.

You're Invited!

Raising the Roof

On the 31st of July, the IEA will host a panel discussion on ‘Raising the Roof: How can we solve our housing crisis?’

UK’s housing costs are among the highest in the world. National taxes, green belt protections, and statutory control and regulation of the planning system have all driven up house prices. But with such a complex system, differing explanations for the crisis, and existing homeowners reluctant to see the value of their homes fall, how can the problems be solved?

The speakers will debate why the average house now costs four and a half times what it cost in 1970 - with the UK’s housing costs among the highest in the world - and what steps should be taken to tackle the problem to revitalise the property-owning culture and help young people get on the housing ladder. 

To ensure your spot today, RSVP here. 


On the money...

IEA Fellow Professor Pedro Schwartz will be delivering a series of lectures on monetary theory at the University of Buckingham in July and August, in partnership with the Institute of International Monetary Research.



The lectures will cover money in an open economy and central banking on the 31st of July and 1st of August.

These lectures will be free to attend and promise to be highly interesting for specialists and non-specialists alike, and will place monetary theory and developments in the context of historical thought and events.

For more information, and to confirm your attendance, click here.