The Treasury, we’re told, is planning to relax its fiscal rules. Let’s be clear. This is not an issue of economics, but of moral philosophy.

There’s something about the Copenhagen summit that‘s puzzling me. To see it, approach the issue from the perspective discussed by James Buchanan in The Calculus of Consent. There are, he said, three broad ways of organizing our affairs, each with...

Gordon Brown has been widely criticised for playing the “Eton card”: “discourteous and unpleasant” says Matthew Parris; “tedious and juvenile” says Alex Massie: “feeble and off-putting” says Tom Freeman. I have a different problem....

Why is there still a row about bankers’ bonuses? What I mean is that the issue should by now be settled against them. There’s abundant evidence that large bonus “incentives” are not only not justified (pdf) by efficiency considerations, but can...

What should we infer from the fact that productivity in education has fallen (pdf), as higher spending hasn’t led to proportionately higher attainments? It’s  trivial to merely attack government waste here. Instead, there’s another possibility -...

Maybe it’s a good job that newspapers don’t matter, because even the so-called quality ones carry appalling errors. Via Tim and Danny, here are two in the Torygraph. First, it tells us that: A low income household is one that lives on less than 60...