Consumers value the benefits of advertising

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A worrying fact for the BBC.

Debi Wendes deserves a job

3868

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A lesson for the work-shy.

The NHS: Systemic failure

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Not all the failures of the NHS are unseen.

Free speech for bloggers

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free-speech-for-bloggers

Bloggers arrested in Azerbaijan.

Matthew Anisfeld joins the ASI

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Having just completed my penultimate year at Haberdashers' in Elstree, I have the summer to await my AS level results. I wrote exams in Music, Economics, Mathematics and Further Mathematics. I hope to continue all of these subjects into my final year at HABS. Results permitting, I will apply at the end of this year, to Cambridge University to study either music or economics, two of my great passions.

I would describe myself as a free market devotee; so I anticipate that this week of work experience will provide further depth to my beliefs. In these economically fascinating times, it is easy to take the view that this is the fall of the free-market. I would argue quite the opposite. To quote Eamonn Butler “If you bound the arms and legs of gold-medal swimmer Michael Phelps, weighed him down with chains, threw him in a pool and he sank, you wouldn't call it a ‘failure of swimming'." It is therefore obscene to suggest that this financial collapse is a failure of the free-market.

A modern tale

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It is the month of August, on the shores of the Black Sea. It is raining and the little town looks totally deserted. It is tough times, everybody is in debt and everybody lives on credit.

A rich tourist comes to town.

He enters the only hotel, lays a 100 Euro note on the reception counter and goes to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one.

The hotel proprietor takes the 100 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the butcher.

The butcher takes the 100 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the pig farmer.

The pig farmer takes the 100 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the supplier of his feed and fuel.

The supplier of feed and fuel takes the 100 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the town's prostitute who in these hard times, gave her "services" on credit.

The hooker runs to the hotel and pays off her debt with the 100 Euro note to the hotel proprietor to pay for the rooms that she rented when she brought her clients there.

The hotel proprietor then lays the 100 Euro note back on the counter so that the rich tourist will not suspect anything.

At that moment, the rich tourist comes down after inspecting the rooms and takes his 100 Euro note, after saying that he did not like any of the rooms and leaves town.

No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now without debt and looks to the future with a lot of optimism..

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Europe and North America are doing business today.

A brief return by Jokesmith

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Terrorists plan to plant bombs in tins of alphabetti spaghetti. They reckon that when one goes off, it could spell disaster.

In praise of the Fawcett Society

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It's not often that I'll praise blinkered ideological groups like The Fawcett Society but today I find that I need to. For they've finally managed to catch up with what has been obvious to the rest of us for years. Their latest report (.pdf) is called "Not having it all: how motherhood reduces womens' pay and employment prospects".

No, really, they've just noticed. After years of telling us that the gender pay gap is grossly unfair, a denial of human rights, a symptom of the patriarchy and a blot on the landscape of this fair land they've finally managed to work out that there isn't really a gender pay gap at all, there's actually a mothers' pay gap. 

Motherhood has a direct and dramatic in uence on women’s pay and employment prospects, and typically this penalty lasts a lifetime.

Quite, something I've been known to bang on about now and again. When you look through all of the statistics about the so called gender pay gap you find that it doesn't apply to never married childless women. That could be something of a clue to the point that it's not in fact a gender pay gap at all. It's all, as this report points out, about motherhood, taking time out of the labour force to have and to raise children.

Now, I think that the Fawcetters and I might differ about where we go from here: if pay gaps are a result of different choices in life then I've not got a problem with them. I don't complain that I don't earn City money for I tried the City and realised I wasn't willing to live like that to earn City money. Fawcetters seem to think that we should change society so that there isn't a mothers' pay gap: their right to advocate such, of course.

But at least we now all agree upon the analysis: no, there isn't a gender pay gap, there's a motherhood one. We can now move on to discussing whether this is something we want to change or not and if so, what might we do in order to do so?

For only if we've correctly analysed the causes of any problem can we possibly hope to solve it.

So well done to The Fawcett Society: however, in future, do you think you might try to be less than, say, five years behind the times?

Time for liberty

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time-for-liberty

And now that the legislators and do gooders have futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems. And try liberty…

Frederic Bastiat, The Law (1850)

Capitalism: A hybrid system

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It [is] urgent to understand at long last that what goes by the name of capitalism in ordinary language is a hybrid system crossbred from liberalism and social democracy, where the freedom of contract is allowed to work in some respects but is stymied in others and where perverse incentives springing from taxation and regulation are mixed with the profit motive that drives competitive markets.

Anthony de Jasay, Greed, Need, Risk and Regulation