Hickel writes: What's striking about capitalist civilization is that it has no real direction. There's no vision for social progress, no commitment to improving human welfare or ecology. All we get is the chaos of profit-oriented production and accumulation as the world burns around us.

This is not a proof, this is a musing. But we have a strong feeling that all tax systems tend to their Laffer Curve peak.

This is to get the whole point of economics the wrong way around:

Apparently, when private equity capitalism goes wrong it’s the consumers that benefit:

This will not be the most intuitively obvious of contentions but you’ll get it once explained. Increasing the cigarette, or tobacco, tax reduces the price of cigarettes or tobacco.

The base idea enshrined in the theories of Professor Mazzucato is that the Man from Whitehall does know best. What should be produced, how it should be produced and by whom it should be produced.

In a piece about how the plan - by defining as flood plain and therefore making flood insurance impossible - has just killed off Ell Pie Island, we see this:

In a piece about how the plan - by defining as flood plain and therefore making flood insurance impossible - has just killed off Ell Pie Island, we see this:

A useful little example of this free market thing here. The grand freedom is that we, us consumers, bend the capitalists to our will by our actions.

Good to see that some are grasping this simple concept: Wes Streeting has ordered a “high-stakes” reorganisation of the NHS that will scrap 10,000 jobs in an attempt to free up cash for frontline care.

We spent a decade making the case that the personal allowance - for both NI (both types) and income tax - should be whatever the full year, full time minimum wage income is. We even won the case intellectually but of course by the time it was phased in inflation had moved the target beyond what happened.

The grand thing about markets is not, in fact, that people can profit from doing the right thing well. Rather, it’s the firm thwack in the face people get from doing the wrong thing badly.