The delightful results of the abolition of that 10 p tax band again: yet more of the poor face 60% marginal tax rates. as we insist all the time around here, the poor simply have to be taken out of the income tax net.
Looking at population projections: yes, predictions, especially about the future, are very hard. But it would help is we at least extended the current trend.
A question for those advocating "high quality childcare for all". Just where are all the people going to come from?
Britain's Association of Chief Police Officers is lobbying for the creation of a 3,000-strong counter-terrorism border force, to be made up of a special branch of uniformed officers.
Somehow, I cannot imagine that this will be a welcome development for travellers. Sure, I want Britain to keep out terrorists, gangsters, drug-thugs and the like. And we have a UK Border Agency already, charged with managing border control, enforcing immigration and customs regulations, and dealing with citizenship and asylum. It's a wide brief, to be sure, but that at least moderates its behaviour. My fear is that when an 'elite' counter-terrorism force gets put in charge, travellers to the UK will be viewed with suspicion as potential terrorists, rather than welcomed with enthusiasm as potential tourists or traders.
I just have this vision of perfectly innocent families who have some glitch on their passport being marched off by heavies in riot gear to be generally inconvenienced and intimidated. When you give exceptional powers to public officials, they do have a habit of using them indiscriminately. Local authorities' use of surveillance against litter-louts and wheelie-bin rule-breakers is an example. But at least local authority officers don't tote Heckler & Koch MP5s.
Governor Jon Huntsman Jr. of Utah is bringing radical change to his state next month. Currently state employees work eight hours a day, five days a week. Starting in August, they will work ten hours a day, four days a week. The idea is to help employees save on gas and to reduce the state’s energy bills. By closing hundreds of buildings for an extra day of the week, the state will save $3 million a year.
Unfortunately, when politicians try to solve problems they usually make them worse. But this idea shows a keen understanding of supply and demand. Tariffs, taxes, minimum wages, and price controls distort markets because they work against supply and demand. But a four-hour workweek will help 16,000 state employees.
Further, the money workers save will be spent in other sectors of the market and the $3m the state saves can be invested in infrastructure, schools, or given back as tax breaks. In March, Utah was named the best-managed state in America and last year it had the most economic growth and it continues to perform well even as the economy slows.
Creativity, intelligence, and an understanding of economics. Imagine the possibilities.
The law used to recognize the right of individuals to protect themselves and their property from illegal transgression. People who found themselves facing assault or theft were entitled to use what the law called "reasonable force" to resist such infringement of their rights, and to secure the safety of their person and their property.
Recently the determination of the police to exercise a monopoly of violence, coupled with a determination by lawyers and judges to protect those accused, has systematically eroded the common law right of self defence. Those who have apprehended criminals in the act of theft or assault have found themselves arrested for false imprisonment, kidnapping, or assault.
Our right to protect ourselves is surrendered to an impartial authority more likely to exercise dispassionate judgement, provided that it does indeed safeguard our interests. If that authority fails to protect, however, then people have to protect themselves. In undermining that right, recent decisions have also undermined the rule of law and the right to life and property.
'Twas ever thus: politicians seem insistent on subsidising the things that don't really need subsidising while refusing to subsidise those that might be worth it.
Here's a good example of what not to subsidise: an oil producer importing petrol and then subsidising it.
A quite excellent application of technology: tracking imports, container by container. There are simply so many uses for this.
Not what you might expect to see around here: Clement Atlee was correct on the NHS.
Following the various scandals about how MPs spend our money on 'expenses' for running second homes in London. Westminster is abuzz with ideas on how to ensure that parliamentarians keep their snouts in the trough without precipitating quite so much public outrage. The simple solution would be to pay themselves more and cut out the expenses scam entirely, but there never seems a good time to raise MPs' salaries, and this is certainly one of them.
One idea that's doing the rounds is that MPs should be given a flat rate £40,000 to help with second home costs. The idea is that this would leave less scope for abuse of the system.
But it would still abuse taxpayers. £40k for 646 MPs comes to £25,840,000, which is a fair chunk of change.
But look around London. It's getting to be a good time to buy property. According to my friend James Wyatt of John D Wood, there are quite posh riverside developments looking for buyers, in London SE1, SE11, SW1, SW3, SW6 and SW11. One bedroom flats here go at around £350-£400 per week, plus utility bills and council tax.
So call it £500 per week. That works out at £16,842,142. In other words, we could give every MP his or her own London flat, everything included, and still have £9,000,000 in change from the expenses plan that our great leaders are discussing. I think we should do it. Mind you, if we cut the number MPs by about half, we'd save even more money...
In the wake of the floods that have devastated Midwestern America, a recent CNN headline read "Insurance not required, FEMA told flooded town." Long story short, a number of people blame the government for their failure to insure their homes against floods because the government did not require them to do so. They "said they felt misled about the risks of not having flood insurance," and thought that the risks were "miscalculated." As a result, legislation is now being introduced to require that all people living in levee-protected areas have flood insurance.
The problem here is not that FEMA did a bad job or that the levees were improperly built. They were designed to withstand a hundred-year flood, and this one was simply bigger than that. There is no reason to think that the risks were miscalculated; even events with very small probabilities will happen sometimes. No, the problem is much deeper. The problem is that people are relying on the government to make their decisions for them; they live in a levee-protected town, but will only make the decision to buy flood insurance if the government tells them that they absolutely must do so.
This psychology of dependency, in which "the government" is responsible for anything bad that happens, is one of the most insidious results of a big government. If people did not expect the government to have full knowledge of possible disasters, perhaps more than 28 of the families in the flood zone would have taken the responsibility on themselves. Individuals should be thinking about their lives, their futures, and the risks that their various decisions might entail. The floods were a tragedy, a natural disaster beyond the predicted levels, and were no one’s "fault," per se. Nonetheless, freedom requires responsibility, and blaming the decision not to purchase flood insurance on the government only furthers the psychology of dependence that led the unfortunate victims of this flood not to consider insurance in the first place.
As a woman, I am all for equality. With that being said, parts of the recent Equality Bill are just silly and meaningless.
The recent Equality Bill is now allowing 'positive discrimination' in hiring practices. That is, employers can now favour women or ethnic-minority applicants over equally qualified males. This law doesn't require the employer to hire the minority, so if they are both equally qualified what is the point in the legislation? The male could still be hired if the employer sees their personality working better for the job. This is just another example of pointless legislation that causes the state to interfere.
The proposal is said to tackle the ‘problem’ of men dominating industries such as construction. Apparently women only make up 1 percent of the construction workforce. Honestly that doesn't surprise me, nor does it bother me. I don't know too many women who want to work in construction or who are qualified. Strength and physical fitness are important elements in entering the construction field and I'm sure if a woman was interested in this area and did hold the requisite muscularity she could find an employer.
In the end, this part of the bill is a purely symbolic legislation that is unnecessary and intrudes upon private business and also sets a standard that forces employers to categorize people into separate pools such as woman, minority or male instead of evaluating them as individuals, impartially and equally.
The history of liberty is the history of limitations on the power of government, not the increase of it. When we resist, therefore, the concentration of power, we are resisting the processes of death, because concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human liberties.
While this is the American experience, worth considering over here as State funding of political parties is discussed. Why campaign finance laws are in fact Incumbent Protection Acts.
And finally, not quite the Ladybird books you remember.
Colin Matthews, Chief Executive of the UK airports operator BAA, has launched into the debate on the future of London's airports with a big speech at the Transport Times conference. There has been suggestion that more traffic should be decanted to other London airports; but, says Matthews, if people were unable to make connections at Heathrow (and, I suppose, faced a gruelling trip across London on the capital's ailing public transport system), it would be a major strategic mistake. Charles De Gaulle or Schipol airports would be only to happy to pick up those interlining passengers, and the UK as a whole would suffer.
So he is strongly in favour of a third runway at Heathrow, rather than resurrecting the old idea of building a new hub in the Thames Estuary. (That idea was floated in the 1960s, but dropped for environmental reasons, leaving Stansted to become the third London airport. I cannot imagine that environmental concerns have got any lighter in the intervening period.) And Matthews thinks the suggestion that Heathrow should be made better before it is made bigger is a false choice. Heathrow needs both new runway capacity and better terminal facilities, not just one or the other.
He's probably right on all these points, though critics like Ryanair's Michael O'Leary complain at the cost of BAA's new airport infrastructure projects, and that a lot of travel these days is point-to-point, which can be done using smaller airports that are presently underused. One thing I still think should happen, though, is that BAA's London near-monopoly (Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted) should be broken up. We said that in the early 1980s in an excellent little paper called Airports for Sale. Competition works. It's time we had more of it in the provision of airports, just as we now do in airlines.
This week the Wall Street Journalpublished one of the best stories ever about how inconvenient political correctness and green living can be. Both US parties will try to host "green conventions," with the Democrats going to the extreme.
Some examples:
Union-labour and American made organic cotton caps, shirts, and fanny packs.
Bio-degradable balloons.
A rubbish brigade that will look to see that convention goers put recyclable rubbish in one bin and non-recyclable rubbish in another. After, the brigade will look through each bin to ensure no mistakes were made. "That's the only way to make sure it's pure," Andrea Robinson, a convention organizer says.
Food will be locally grown to minimize emissions from transportation.
Is this what is in store for the nation if the Democrats have their way? So many people accuse the neo-Cons of using fear to get what they want. How is the green madness movement any different?
We need to recognize a few things. Life expectancy is at an all time high. We live better and wealthier lives with much a higher standard of living than ever. We can communicate with people instantly around the world and travel to every corner of the earth.
Technology and modern living carry trade-offs, but we are better off for it. If patronising only domestic goods made by union-labour with organic materials is the model of the future, the third world can kiss an prospect of future prosperity good-bye, and the first world will slip toward economic mediocrity.
Gordon Brown wants oil-rich states to invest in Britain's renewable power projects as a long-term solution to the world fuel price crisis. At the Jeddah eneergy conference in Saudi Arabia this week, the Prime Minster said that it would cost the UK £100bn to meet its 2020 target of having 15% of its power supply from alternative energy sources, and he hoped that some of this investment could come from the Middle East.
I'm not sure this is altogether a good idea. With our gas supplies under threat from Russia and other unsavoury East European regimes, and our oil supplied by countries that are often even more unsavoury and even less democratic, energy security is something to worry about. If Middle East governments are going to be controlling large stakes in the nation's alternative sources, it's out of the frying pan into the fire. I'm surprised that the backbench MPs who are trying to derail the plans to build new UK nuclear power stations don't understand that.
From EU Referendum via Samizdata, here is video evidence of MEPs fiddling their expenses. They turn up at 7.30am (suitcases in hand) to sign the day's attendence register (so they get paid), and then they're off home for the weekend...
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Britain's Association of Chief Police Officers is lobbying for the creation of a 3,000-strong counter-terrorism border force, to be made up of a special branch of uniformed officers.
Governor Jon Huntsman Jr. of Utah is bringing radical change to his state next month. Currently state employees work eight hours a day, five days a week. Starting in August, they will work ten hours a day, four days a week. The idea is to help employees save on gas and to reduce the state’s energy bills. By closing hundreds of buildings for an extra day of the week, the state will save $3 million a year. 
Following the various scandals about how MPs spend our money on 'expenses' for running second homes in London. Westminster is abuzz with ideas on how to ensure that parliamentarians keep their snouts in the trough without precipitating quite so much public outrage. The simple solution would be to pay themselves more and cut out the expenses scam entirely, but there never seems a good time to raise MPs' salaries, and this is certainly one of them.
Colin Matthews, Chief Executive of the UK airports operator BAA, has launched into the debate on the future of London's airports with a big speech at the Transport Times conference. There has been suggestion that more traffic should be decanted to other London airports; but, says Matthews, if people were unable to make connections at Heathrow (and, I suppose, faced a gruelling trip across London on the capital's ailing public transport system), it would be a major strategic mistake. Charles De Gaulle or Schipol airports would be only to happy to pick up those interlining passengers, and the UK as a whole would suffer. 
Gordon Brown wants oil-rich states to invest in Britain's renewable power projects as a long-term solution to the world fuel price crisis. At the Jeddah eneergy conference in Saudi Arabia this week, the Prime Minster said that it would cost the UK £100bn to meet its 2020 target of having 15% of its power supply from alternative energy sources, and he hoped that some of this investment could come from the Middle East.
