Quite classic government. The private sector invents some useful new technology, government at various levels ties it all up in red tape making it uneconomic whereupon government decides to subsidise it. Not having the red tape in the first place would of course leave us wondering why we have all those governing us, something which would never do.

More government: why we really really don't want them to take over the job of drug development. But we'd love to see them trying to run a system in parallel to the private sector, just so we can benchmark the two systems.

One underappreciated glory of the markets. You don't have to expand if you don't want to: you can simply carry on doing things in your own desired manner.

There's a very good reason that we want (as Adam Smith noted) continual economic growth. It makes the whole society happier.

That credit boom and bust: yes, there was indeed a large supply of capital from China. But why?

Competition time! A one sentence explanation of why this doesn't tell us what people think it does.

And finally, the true state of play in the Olympic medals table.