Alex Singleton

Robert Fike, the US political campaigner and strategist, has died aged 36. Fike was notable for his work in the early 2000s at Americans for Tax Reform, a campaigning organisation that has been described as “the center of the vast right-wing conspiracy”. Fike was a popular and effective lobbyist for small government. He campaigned not […]

In the 1990s, the BBC broadcast a popular sitcom called 2 Point 4 Children. One of the actors, Kim Dodge (pictured), has recently started a blog. (She also played characters in Grange Hill and political comedy The New Statesman.) She relays her frustration at the Post Office:
I’ve just come back from a frustrating visit to […]

It’s often pointed out that moderate drinking of red wine can improve your health. It turns out that alcohol is good for your income as well. The Reason Foundation, a Californian think tank, has published a study saying that drinking and earnings are positively correlated.
The explanation, the study explains, is because drinking increases people’s “social […]

At a Downing Street reception I asked chancellor Gordon Brown about Adam Smith’s principles of taxation. There are four of them: people should contribute in proportion to their abilities; taxes should be transparent; payment should be convenient; and taxes should be ones that are cheap to collect, without needing huge armies of collectors or inspectors, […]

One of the most common urges of politicians is to try and making things neater. They like to tidy things that individuals and the markets in which they operate would, left to their own devices, allow to carry on in a seemingly haphazard way. One example is the way in which the market traders dubbed […]

A mock constitutional treaty for the EU has been published by a group of prominent European figures, headed by Giuliano Amato, former Italian prime minister. Fifteen others sat with Mr Amato, including former EU commissioner Chris Patten. The mock treaty incorporates main elements of the rejected 2005 constitution but is much shorter. It drops the […]

Yesterday’s intellectual battles involved left against right. They were between Communists and Anti-Communists; between those who wanted to nationalise the “commanding heights” of the economy and those who wanted to privatise them; between Thatcherites and the likes of Arthur Scargill and Michael Foot. But in today’s world, the language of left and right is outdated. […]

“The trouble with ’social justice’ begins with the very meaning of the term. Hayek points out that whole books and treatises have been written about social justice without ever offering a definition of it. It is allowed to float in the air as if everyone will recognize an instance of it when it appears. This […]

David Willetts, a Conservative politician, is setting up a study group to look at the problems facing children in the UK. One of the subjects his group is looking at is to “look at how children can be better protected from commercialisation”.
Part of the impetus for this study is a deeply flawed UNICEF report that […]

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own […]