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IN THIS ASI BULLETIN THINGY:
- Guillotining Whitehall: How to reduce civil-service headcount, starting with education
- Students: Gap year opportunities, one-week Cambridge seminar, book choices
- Digging for Britain: Our eponymous economist hits back
BUT FIRST...
I note that the rail and London Underground unions called their first strike for the longest day of the year. (I guess they hoped to maximise the duration of the inconvenience caused to the public.) A few trains are running, though (you can tell that by their tracks! Geddit?—Ed). “Industrial action” they call it, but to me it looks more like industrial inaction. (It all reminds me of when my father bought me a train set and told me I could only play with it once every two hours.) Still, I suppose that lots of people will just work from home (or in the case of the Queen, reign from home).
Still, train strikes seem less bothersome when you reflect that you can’t afford to ride on them anyway. As they say, inflation is having lots of money in your pocket but discovering you’re still poor. Everyone’s complaining about the cost of living (though the activity still seems pretty popular). For example, I’m paying twice as much for a haircut than I did ten years ago, even though I’ve got less hair. I’d write a complaint to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but these days, putting in your two pennyworth now costs more like two quid.
Boris Johnson’s ethics adviser has resigned, which was a surprise. (The biggest surprise being the revelation that someone was actually advising Boris on ethics.) I suppose Downing Street will be advertising for a replacement (you know the sort of thing: “Wanted: Government Ethics Adviser. Must have no visible ethics.) (How about Vladimir Putin? He’ll be looking for a job soon—Ed.) Boris, BTW, has been thanked by Volodymyr Zelenskyy for his offer to send over troops to train Ukrainian soldiers (If he sent troops in to knock British Rail ‘workers’ into shape, he’d get the thanks of the UK population, too).
Still, the French government of Emmanuel Macron is in disarray after the parliamentary elections, so that’s something that will cheer up everyone in Britain.
But I digress…
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Report Card on Whitehall
The first of our new series on reducing civil-service headcount (sadly, my proposal of calling it Guillotining Whitehall was rejected) focuses on the bloated Department for Education (DfE). Management consultant Tim Ambler has cut his way through the DfE’s bureaucratic sprawl, recommending that quangos should be cut, various agencies merge, school funding simplified and more. That, he figures, would leave the Department more efficient with only a third (32%) of the headcount it claims to need today.
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SPEND YOUR GAP YEAR AT THE ASI
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If you are 18-20, coming up for a gap year and want to spend it at the most exciting think-tank in London, you’re in luck. We have extended the deadline for gap-year internships to Tuesday 5 July. We take very few, normally one or two, but we make them a full part of the team, writing reports, organising events and meeting all the important people around Westminster (that can’t be many—Ed.). Find out more and apply here.
And on that subject, we are sad that this year’s gap years — both currently at a major economics and policy conference in the United States — are about to leave us. We thank them for so quickly becoming loyal and diligent members of the team. Charles Bromley-Davenport will be with us a couple more weeks before taking up a place at the London School of Economics, and Fiona Townsley is taking up a couple more Westminster intern opportunities (only to be sorely disappointed, I’m sure––Ed.) before going to Oxford. Here she is talking about her time with us.
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Ten books every libertarian should read
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We all know the standard tomes — Hayek, Friedman, Locke, Mill, Smith, Mises and so on. But Dr Madsen Pirie has a more eclectic list. It includes science fiction (like James Gunn’s The Joy Makers and Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), social psychology (like de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America) and biting criticism (like Orwell’s Animal Farm and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago). Time to expand your library!
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HELP US KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK
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You know the refrain by now –– we rely entirely on donations from people like you to keep our efforts alive. From our educational work to our research and media outreach, our goal is to build a coherent case for free markets and free society. We're making our case in the halls of Westminster, school rooms across the country, and directly to the public via their screens and newspapers.
When it seems to be all going wrong, we believe we can do some things to make it right. So, I can’t think of a more urgent time for us to be stepping up this effort. Please make a donation to the Adam Smith Research Trust here, today. It’s easy! And it’s super-effective!
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If it's not hot enough outside for you, there's no shortage of hot takes on our podcast, The Pin Factory.
Tune in each week to hear our Daniel Pryor interview special guests on topical issues or areas of speciality. Recently he hosted The Spectator's Economic Correspondent Kate Andrews (formerly of this parish) to discuss Tax Freedom Day, the growing tax burden, and the incomprehensible tax policies dripping out of the Treasury.
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Kate Andrews on Tax Freedom Day
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Kate Andrews on Windfall Taxes
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Beyond our homegrown content, we even appear as guests on other podcasts! Our Daniel Pryor was a guest on fellow think tank Bright Blue's Bright Blue TV recently. He was discussing (say it with me now...) the cost of living crisis. Thanks for the great conversation Bright Blue!
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Daniel Pryor appears on Bright Blue's panel show
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Aside from our extensive media coverage around Tax Freedom Day… (link here if you missed our special bulletin)
I went on BBC Radio 4’s The Moral Maze last week to talk about inequality (my IEA book on the subject will be out soon). Madsen, meanwhile, was in Westminster’s house magazine — called, er, The House Magazine on our new prioritization initiative, in which we propose that government departments should focus on, er, the priorities and drop the rest of their well-meaning bureaucratic gibberish.
Our summer intern Reem Ibrahim wrote an article explaining school vouchers on the leading libertarian website 1828 (in addition to two blog pieces for us—phew, we make them work hard).
Our research supremo Daniel Pryor was on the influential Reaction site talking about the impact of high taxes on the young, in the Daily Mail on the absurdity of new proposals to ban the purchase of cigarettes, and on GB News talking about the ‘Buy British’ nonsense. Emily Fielder was also in CapX on that last topic explaining why Adam Smith is still right to have extolled the virtues of free trade.
Elsewhere, our authority on the cost of living crisis, John Macdonald’s thoughts on the Windfall Tax were quoted in CityAM.
And just in case you didn’t click on the link above…here’s a highlight from our Tax Freedom Day coverage –– Morgan Schondelmeier on Politics Live talking about Tax Freedom Day:
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Morgan Schondelmeier appears on BBC's Politics Live
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If you’ve not stopped by our website recently, and it’s crammed with good things. Here is just some of the news, views and commentaries to be found on our spectacular superblog, for example.
A good time to bury good news. The more you think about it, the more it’s obvious that we have entered a time warp and are back in the 1970s. Weak and vacillating government. Inflation hitting double figures. Industries being nationalised. Crazy wage claims followed by national strikes. A heatwave. Punk music making a comeback and Kate Bush in the charts. (Let’s hope someone doesn’t suggest joining the Common Market—Ed.) The trouble is, our politicians and central bankers don’t seem to have learnt the lessons from that sorry time.
Sailing free. “If you give power to a man, you can take it away again if he abuses it. If you give power to the Church — or to a king — you cannot.” Gabriel Stein and John Nugee’s Sailing Free, says Reem Ibrahim, is a fast-paced modern Icelandic saga on the fight for liberty in medieval Iceland. Turns out the place had 300 years without any formal government, and everything was just hunky-dory: this novel is set when the governmental rot is setting in. Find it on Amazon and in all good bookshops (and probably a few bad ones—Ed.).
Adam Smith’s birthday. Adam Smith’s birthday is a real nuisance. We don’t know exactly when he was born, but his birth was registered at the local church on June 5, 1723. Then the calendar changed in 1750, and June 5 became June 16. Confused? Well, actually everyone in 1750 was confused too, which is why the UK tax year ends on 5 April — it was originally and romantically on the spring equinox, but people thought that the government was trying to swindle them out of eleven days’ extra tax, so it got pushed forward. Anyway, that has nothing to do with the subject, but you can read my piece about Adam Smith and his contribution to the world here.
Digging for Britain. Tim Worstall cites the great Adam Smith to satirise the government’s new ‘Grow for Britain’ strategy which is apparently going to spare us the rising price of food imports. (Boris’ foie gras and Burgundy bills alone must be a fair part of the deficit—Ed.) Giant greenhouses will be given planning permission under this scheme. Worstall points out that the carbon footprint of all that is much higher than growing, say, tomatoes in naturally warmer and sunnier places, which doesn’t square with the government’s other ‘Net Zero’ strategy. And there is the financial cost too: in the words of the master:
By means of glasses, hotbeds, and hotwalls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine can be made of them — at about thirty times the expense for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries.
Do four-day weeks make sense? With all the home ‘working’ around, we’re probably all down to a four-day week anyway, but a number of firms have recently instituted a formal four-day week and some say that productivity has been boosted by it. Reem Ibrahim runs the numbers and finds that other firms regret the same decision, and that the benefits of four-day working have been oversimplified and exaggerated — and they don’t last. Now there is a trial across 70 companies in the UK: but whatever the result, we believe that companies should make their own decisions, rather than have decisions forced on them by government legislation.
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KNOW SOMEONE WHO MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN OUR E-BULLETIN?
SEND THEM THE LINK BELOW!
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AND I QUOTE...
The suits that dominate the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee dropped the ball a while back, predicting that inflation wouldn’t be a problem. And now they have fumbled again, not raising interest rates to match the Fed’s, risking a fall in the Pound that would push up import prices (like food and fuel) even higher. But inflation is like toothpaste: hard to put back in the tube once it’s out. And inflation is even more damaging than recession because it messes up all prices, conceals what’s really happening in markets, and leads to hopelessly bad investment choices.
That is why the Nobel economist FA Hayek wrote, in A Tiger by the Tail:
“Inflation must be stopped dead.”
And in a letter to The Times he made a further point.
“If we want to stop inflation we must do it here and now.”
Bye,
e
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