If only Owen Jones Actually understood his history

Owen Jones is attempting one of the standard tu quoques. Sure, communism was a rapacious and murderous ideology that exterminated tens of millions at least. But, look, capitalism! This is, obviously enough, rather to miss the difference between sins of omission and commission. That famines happened under early capitalism, just as they did before capitalism, is in a different moral class from shooting people in dank basements.

But it's not just - as the good little propagandist that Jones is - this false comparison, there's a significant lack of understanding of basic fact:

That is, of course, not to excuse the horrors of Stalinism: the totalitarian model pioneered and exported by Stalin’s regime deprived millions of their liberty and, in so many cases, their lives; similarly, the millions of lives lost to murder and famine in Maoist China can never be forgotten. Yet the charge sheet against communism does not aid the champions of capitalism quite as much as they would like. According to The Black Book of Communism, a disreputable key reference point for the right, almost a hundred million humans perished at the hands of self-described “communist” regimes, mostly victims of Mao Zedong’s regime in China. The Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen notes that between 23 and 30 million people did indeed die as a consequence of Mao’s catastrophic Great Leap Forward policies in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

But he also noted in a 2006 paper that in the middle of the 20th century, China and India had the same life expectancy – around 40 years. After the Chinese revolution, a massive divergence took place. By 1979, Maoist China had a life expectancy of 68 years, more than 14 years longer than that of capitalist India.

The error there - and one that Sen would laugh at - is to think that post-independence India was in any manner a capitalist economy. Quite famously it wasn't, in fact it was the one place that the fantasies of Fabian Socialism were enacted for any substantial number of decades.

For yes, Nehru's India was planned socialism. Not, note, communism, but that intermediary stage oh so close to the sort of policies that Jones recommends we follow today.

Which really is something Jones should know about the history he points to, isn't it? That his preferred policies are even less successful at raising lifespans than full on communism?

India and the tragedy of socialism

Today started with complete incredulity at an Owen Jones piece in the Guardian. I’ll admit, that’s quite regular, but this one really took the biscuit.

It wasn’t the way that OJ blithely glided over the 23 to 30 million killed in Mao’s Great Leap Forward policies (a low-end estimate by the way – most believe nearly 45 million died in those four years). But then, what is fifteen million extra dead but mere statistics to communists? The lives lost, the dreams dashed and futures foregone. Communists care not a jot, they’re to be swept under the carpet and minimised, not commemorated or mourned. 

No. What really stunned me was the way he decided to compare the increase in life expectancies of ‘communist China’ with ‘capitalist India’ between the end of the Second World War and 1979 as evidence that communism was being unfairly maligned in the British press. ‘Capitalist India,’ he charged, failed to increase life expectancy. Capitalism killed millions he surmised. 

If this jars, it is because it is meant to. And if it strikes you as complete bunkum, it is because it is. 

That ‘capitalist India’ that Owen Jones speaks of is one of pure fantasy. Owen’s ignorant analysis shows just how little he cares about history and just how little he cares about the impact of the policies that he now actively supports.

Let me spell it out for him: after independence, India was a socialist state. 

Jawaharlal Nehru, first leader of independent India, was an avowed socialist. He made no secret of the fact. 

Nehru acclaimed to the Lahore Congress in December 1929 that he was a ‘a socialist and republican’. In 1927, at the Brussels Congress he was made an honorary president of the openly marxist-leninist League Against Imperialism, and later that year visited Moscow for a four day visit to explore the practical application of socialism and communism. 

He said of his time in among the socialists and communists of Europe that: “My outlook was wider… without social freedom and a socialistic structure of society and the state neither the country nor the individual could develop much.”

His commitment to the creed, over the prosperity of his people, would lead to decades of growth delayed. It would lead to poverty for tens of millions. As Owen Jones says: it has meant death for hundreds of millions of Indians earlier than their counterparts in China.  

Just how socialist was Nehru and the rest of Congress? 

Well, in the 1950s they followed socialist creed and the state seized control of steel, mining, machine tools, water, telecommunications, insurance, and electrical plants, among other industries. The Indian government had seized the commanding heights of the economy.

But they had not finished. The Banks came next. 

In 1950 there were 430 commercial banks in India. In 1955 the Imperial Bank in India was nationalised and renamed the State Bank of India. In 1969 all commercial banks holding over Rs.50 crores (just over £200m in modern money) were nationalised. The 14 largest transferred 70 per cent of deposits into Indira Gandhi’s hands. In 1980 all remaining banks were nationalised. 

As ever the aim was to ensure more people had bank accounts, ‘fairer’ credit access, restriction of monopolies, a reduction in inequality and to ensure lending was prioritised according to political directives. Owen Jones might recognise this and even the terms used to push it internally within Congress. It was called ‘Social Control’ and Prime Minister Desai said it would mean India’s politicians could “regulate our social and economic life so as to attain the optimum growth rate for our economy and to prevent at the same time monopolistic trend, concentration of economic power and misdirection of resources."

The outcome was predictable: thinly spread and poor banking facilities, deposits never properly matching liabilities, efficiencies and profits so low and with huge mandated expenditures which dragged the public banks into deficits. 

And of course, political interference meant a huge spike in non-performing assets. Oddly, when something isn’t commercially viable enough to succeed as a private venture, it’s rarely commercially viable to succeed as a public one. 

Sadly it didn't end with Nehru. Unlike China, which developed a taste for neoliberal policies under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, India would reaffirm its commitment to socialism by enshrining it in its constitution in 1976 and pushing ahead with further nationalisations in the 1980s. 

But there was hope for India. In 1991, Congress took the collapsing Soviet Union as the warning sign it was. Communism and Socialism should be abandoned. Capital and coverage ratios were reduced, government intervention in commercial decisions was reduced, branch licensing was abolished, interest rates were to be determined not by politicians but by market forces. 

As privatisation of state owned companies began, and reductions on foreign capital and foreign direct investment took effect, growth took off – reaching 7% a year between 1997 and 2011. 

But India still has controls that are markedly socialist and which hamper development. The World Bank in 2017 ranked India a dismal 130th out of 190 countries by ease of doing business. 

Corruption, cronyism, nepotism, investment and divestment based on patronage and not profit. These are what have kept India down. They are the hallmark of socialist states everywhere that rely on perceptions of fairness and commitment to the cause, rather than the output that is achieved. It is evidenced, as Professor Ramesh Thakur puts is, by the fact that it is “easier for a person of Indian origin to reach high public office in Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the U.S” than in India. If you’re of Indian descent in the UK you are far more likely to succeed in exams, far more likely to go to university, and far more highly paid, than the rest of the population. 

The development of an entrepreneurial Indian state was possible, it didn’t need to be left to those that found new lives in the capitalist countries of the West and capitalist city states of the East. Nehru was half right when he said “without social freedom and a socialistic structure of society and the state neither the country nor the individual could develop much.”

Half right because you need social freedom – that’s the beauty of our liberal democracies and the social revolution we’ve undergone. But you need economic freedom too, not socialist structures and plans. If India wants to develop to its full potential it has to open up to the world, bring down the remaining capital controls and socialist structures. It needs to free its citizens from the dead hand of the state. 

If Owen Jones wants to claim that India’s lack of development was a tragedy, then I’ll welcome him with open arms. It was a tragedy. It was a socialist tragedy. 

How the UK can become a #VapeNation

Practical liberalism promotes consumers’ free informed choice by allowing for the existence of viable options. Expanding consumer choice is a crucial economic issue, because it is closely linked to promoting better standards of living. It is accomplished through dismantling the heavy restrictive regulatory network and promoting innovation, which makes possible the production of cheaper, more consumer-friendly and less harmful alternatives.

Concern of implementing practical liberalism when conducting policy is often focused on social issues, surrounded by controversy and debate. One such issue is the attempt at tobacco harm reduction by promoting the use of e-cigarettes, which has seen a variety of attempts at regulation, including the EU's pervasive Tobacco Products Directive.

Despite the existing restrictions, placed on tank sizes and refill containers, as well as the limitations on nicotine strength, Britain has one of the most progressive regulatory environments, which accounts for the e-cigarette market experiencing the largest growth in the UK. Consumer demand is driving innovation in a variety of flavours, according to a 2017 EY report. Furthermore, for several years the UK government has tried to actively promote e-cigarette use by marketing it as a safer, less harmful substitute of cigarettes. As a result of these liberal regulatory policies, in the UK vaping has achieved astonishing results in getting smokers to switch to the, as per Public Health England's report, 95% less harmful electronic cigarettes.

It is clear that Britain has the potential to become a global leader in tobacco-harm reduction. What the UK has to do is take the liberal approach and disregard the ideological and moralistic opposition surrounding the issue. In order to accomplish this, it has to further relax its regulation framework. Not allowing for endorsement by health professionals, as well as inability to feature advertisements of nicotine-containing e-cigarettes in popular media channels is restricting the potential of vaping to become an even more well-established alternative to smoking. Doing so endangers the health and lives of many smokers, who are deterred from switching to e-cigarettes because the heavy restrictions prevent the supply of information consumers need in order to make an informed choice.

Brexit offers a further opportunity for liberalising regulatory measures, as in some post-Brexit scenarios, the UK will no longer be obliged to implement the Tobacco Products Directive, which gives it the opportunity to further expand consumer choice, end prohibitions and black markets and reduce the harmful effects of smoking on people’s health.

Adelina Fendrina is the winner of the 18-21 category of the ASI's 'Young Writer on Liberty' competition.

What caused Britain’s FinTech boom?

A free-market economy is fuelled by the constant drive for change, improvement and growth, which is facilitated by a liberal innovation policy. This applies particularly to small businesses and start-ups, which are considered to be key drivers of economic growth and as exemplars of economic dynamism their development is crucial for progress and innovation.

Instead, the stifling of competition through a heavy regulatory network and artificial barriers to entry has led to a lack of incentives, poor productivity and, ultimately, the decline in start-ups entering the market manifested itself in the current lagging economic growth.

Despite the persistent global trend of declining entrepreneurship, Britain is consistently lauded as the jurisdiction with the most liberal approach towards growing innovation in the technological sphere, especially in the FinTech industry. One success story that accounts for this is the peer-to-peer money transfer service TransferWise, developed and launched by two Estonians - Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus, in 2011 in London. Now a billion dollar company, the platform supports a multitude of currencies and makes money transfer cheaper by matching transfers with those going in the opposite direction. It charges a small fee instead of the traditional broker's commission. Such a revolution in the financial system was facilitated by the government's liberal regulatory approach, which allowed for innovation and promoted competition by introducing new visas for entrepreneurs and tax breaks for early stage investors.

The government has embraced innovation and entrepreneurship and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) received the statutory objective of promoting competition in 2013. Its Project Innovate offers advice to budding entrepreneurs on how to navigate the regulatory framework. Another part of Project Innovate is the regulatory "sandbox", which allows companies to test their products under temporary approval. This support for the natural growth of the technological ecosystem has removed barriers to entry, turning UK into the world's leading FinTech hubs. The FCA has promoted competition by encouraging innovation for the benefit of the consumer, and TransferWise founder Taavet Hinrikus hails it as "the most innovative regulator in the world".  

Britain’s approach to promoting growth and competition in the technological industry is closely followed by countries like Australia and Singapore. The FinTech-friendly regulatory framework and the fertile investment landscape has turned UK into an innovation powerhouse, a leader in the global financial regulatory services and a representative case of the far-reaching positive effects of innovation without permission on standards of living.

Adelina Fendrina is the winner of the 18-21 category of the ASI's 'Young Writer on Liberty' competition.

Immigration after Brexit

Productivity is the fundamental driver of national prosperity, and thus of increasing wages and improving standards of living. It is therefore only natural that boosting Britain's production capabilities is seen by many as the route to Brexit's success. In fact, leaving the European Union grants the UK the possibility to disengage itself from many of the union's heavy regulatory restrictions and adopt a more liberal approach to a variety of issues, among which is immigration.

When migrants move to countries with higher productivity, they ensure efficiency in labour allocation and also supplement the skill composition of the workforce, which then encourages specialisation, increases productivity and raises national wages. The aim for Britain should therefore be to outline a system of policies that would boost the contribution of immigration to economic growth, namely one based on prioritising highly skilled immigrants because of their higher contributions to innovation and productivity.

One way this could be accomplished is by rethinking the regulatory approach towards non-EU migrants with a view of attracting more high-skilled workers. This begins with recognising that the skilled non-EU migration cap has consistently hindered economic growth – hitting this upper limit for the past few months has led to a staffing crisis in many key economic sectors.

Such labour shortages mean that it is imperative Britain remains open for immigration from the EU – an endeavour which could be achieved by abolishing the net migration target that was meant to scale back immigration to the "tens of thousands", but its impracticality made it economically unfeasible, since it could only be achieved by severely depressing the economy. Furthermore, it is vital that the devised immigration policy does not deter international students from studying in the UK.

If immigration numbers are to be restricted, a way to allocate visas that maximises the economic benefits of immigration would be the establishment of an auction system for employer permits to hire migrant workers. Utilising the price mechanism to form an auction market for tradable employer permits would allow employers to adapt easily to changing economic conditions and market-determined prices would ensure the efficient allocation of scarce resources.

With this in mind, liberalisation of Britain's immigration restrictions is fundamental to ensuring productivity growth and thus improving living standards. As Jonathan Portes, former director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, puts it, being "open for business" means that Britain cannot be closed to migration.

Adelina Fendrina is the winner of the 18-21 category of the ASI's 'Young Writer on Liberty' competition.

The GMB's campaign to re-nationalise the water companies

Into our mailbox drops an insistence from the GMB that the water companies should be re-nationalised. The argument is - and this is all that's there too - that the capitalists are making lots and they shouldn't. This is to entirely ignore the point of prices of course, they're information to us, hugely valuable information: 

Dividends worth £1.4 billion were paid out in 2017 alone, GMB Union figures show

An investigation by GMB, the water union, has revealed the nine privatised water company shareholders have made more than £6.5 billion in just five years.

England’s privatised water companies showered their shareholders with a total of £1.4 billion in 2017 alone. [See note 1 for breakdown by Water Company and year]

The figures come from a joint investigation into the accounts by GMB and Corporate Watch [2] as part of GMB’s Take Back the Tap Campaign to bring England’s privatised water industry back into public ownership.

£1.4 billion isn't a lot here. The equity capital (no, not the regulated capital base, that includes that financed by debt) appears to be of the order of £20 billion. Average return on capital appears to be some 12 to 14%, depends upon the year. That's for non-financial companies as a whole across the economy. GMB and others tell us that the water companies are paying out near all of their profits as dividends, thus that return to shareholders is about the same as the return on capital.

As simple maths tells us, the water companies seem to be making about half the return on capital employed of the economy as a whole. Given their safe-ish status as utilities perhaps that's appropriate.

Which brings us to our point about prices. There should be a price paid for the use of capital. Doesn't matter whether it's the state allocating it or the market. We still need that information from prices to know that we're allocating it where it does the most good. No, we can't go and insist that the state can, through superior knowledge, allocate capital without prices. For that's the reason we privatised the water companies in the first place, the state wasn't allocating enough capital. For decades the UK government invested too little in that infrastructure - given political pressures to spend elsewhere - which is why there was a massive bolus of capital spending immediately following privatisation.

Re-nationalisation would change who received the dividends, certainly. For the simple reason that it would change who provides the capital itself. But it won't change that a return would be made, must be made, upon that capital, thus it's not going to change consumer prices by eliminating either profit or dividends. All this quite apart from the point that taxpayers investing in water companies would appear to bring them half the return they'd get from investing in the economy more generally. A most attractive deal we must all agree.

Oh, and why is the GMB campaigning on this issue? Because they think that re-nationalisation would mean better employment terms for more members of the GMB, obviously. And that's going to increase the return to taxpayers, lower prices to consumers, isn't it?

Well, what would we expect from a commission on social housing?

If someone is going to set up a commission on social housing - a Social Housing Commission even - then we'd not expect them to start telling us all that social housing isn't needed, or we've enough of it, or, in fact, anything other than that we should be spending billions and billions to have very much more of it. 

Fortunately, Ed Miliband and Jim O'Neill don't disappoint:

Our commission will produce concrete recommendations in the autumn, but our work so far leads the two of us to be clear about some basic principles. We must end the prejudice against new social housing which has afflicted our country and damaged people’s lives. And we must see social housing not only as a last resort for the neediest, but as something to meet the demands of those in dire need and those for whom owning is out of reach. Reasonably priced social housing could make all the difference.

We must make a profound and generational shift away from a belief that housing benefits alone can solve this problem and back towards investment in bricks and mortar and a view that affordable housing is a national asset like other infrastructure. And we need to understand that, with the costs of borrowing at historic lows but the sense of anxiety about the prospects of future generations at such a high, investment in social housing is an absolute and vital necessity for our country, whatever party is in government.

Well, yes, that doesn't disappoint, does it? Self-appointed investigation into pet project demands oodles for pet project. We're surprised, right? 

Sadly, there's a significant error in their thinking:

Indeed, we believe that experience and the historical record in Britain suggest something important. The market on its own will never produce the large quantities of low-cost housing that we need.

The market did - in the 1930s that free market, unadorned, produced some 300,000 dwellings a year. That being before the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 (the decade wait there over some European unpleasantness) stopped people from being able to build the houses people wanted to live in where they wanted to live.

So, if we wish to have that volume of housebuilding again the obvious answer is to remove the government imposed bans upon building. As is so often true the solution to one of our ailments is indeed government action. All we have to do is stop government doing what is causing our ailment. Something which a real investigation, rather than a commission, would point out to us.

Game-changers

Commentators seem so locked into the aftermath of the Financial Crisis of 2007/8 that they are in danger of overlooking a series of developments that have the potential to change everything. Historically, economic growth has been fuelled by advances in productivity. As workers became more productive, they could earn higher wages. New technology, now emerging in several areas will spur increases in productivity as well as transform people's lives:

Autonomous electric transport

Self-driving transport powered by electricity will transform most people’s lives. The interiors of cars need not look they have done for decades, with people in forward-facing seats.  People might face each other, or have the interiors kitted out as offices or small living rooms, as people choose to do other things than driving. Road crash fatalities and injuries will fall dramatically. Commuting times will fall, and the hassle of commuting will be much diminished.

Commercially the cost of freight transport by road and sea will fall as autonomously driven vehicles become the norm, raising productivity and enabling higher living standards. The same will probably be true of air transport, both freight and passenger, as autonomy and electric power take over. Electricity, powered by fracked gas and solar, will be very cheap. The use of fossil fuels, petrol, diesel, and aviation fuels, will rapidly diminish to near zero.

Drones

For almost 3 million years homo sapiens has moved in two dimensions, forward, back, left and right. This is about to change dramatically as people-carrying drones become a reality, and people move in three dimensions. Aircraft did this only to a very limited extent, taking people in groups to pre-set destinations, but drones will achieve it for individuals. Drones will be used for delivery and freight, but the big change will come when they transport people. For decades people have dreamed of flying cars, imagining cars that would sprout wings and take off like planes. Vertical lift drones have changed that, with passengers not required to possess a pilot’s licence since the vehicles will be autonomously driven.

The complexity of controlling traffic in 3 dimensions and avoiding collisions is beyond human skills, but it will be done my machines that react faster and detect potential hazards long before humans could. Traffic jams will be dramatically reduced, as will travel times, and the architecture of city buildings will change to accommodate this development.

GM organisms

Genetically modified organisms have the capacity to transform agriculture and medicine. GM cops can be developed to fertilize themselves by fixing atmospheric nitrogen and to incorporate genes that make them resistant to pests without the need for pesticides. They can be modified to thrive in hitherto infertile lands, such as those afflicted by drought or salinity. They can produce increased crop yields. In short, they herald a second Green Revolution.

In medicine genetic modification has the capacity to remove inherited diseases in the womb, before the child is even born. GM organisms can be used to treat hitherto intractable diseases. CRISPR editing can be used to remove errors in DNA that lead to illnesses or disabilities. It could theoretically be used to alter the genes that cause undesirable traits such as arthritis or dementia to develop.

Cultured meats

When the first lab-grown burger, partly funded by Sergey Brin, was unveiled in 2013, it had cost $230,000 to produce. That cost had fallen to $11 by 2017, and is still falling. Cultured meats are produced from a few cells of the animals, fed with nutrients. This technique can be used to generate muscle, fat and blood, and very soon scientists will achieve the means to develop texture, so that the cultured meat will look, taste and chew like the real thing.

This will lead to an agricultural revolution. For 12,000 years people have practiced animal husbandry. As the cost of cultured meats falls below the cost of animal-produced meats, the millions of acres of arable land given over to sheep, cattle and other livestock will become free for other uses. This will change the physical appearance of most countries. It will greatly improve the diet of poorer people across the world, and eliminate the diseases that can accompany meat, as well as the antibiotic resistance in bacteria caused by the use of antibiotics in agriculture.

Artificial Intelligence

Machines that can emulate human intelligence, but can apply it very much faster, taking in many times more data, are already with us. Their future development will transform many fields of human endeavour. People have pointed out that data trawling, as in police or legal operations, can be mechanized at a thousand times the speed and a fraction of the cost. This will impact upon medical diagnosis, with machine intelligence sorting through seemingly innocuous symptoms to give early warning of disease.

It will reduce the asymmetry of information to make markets more efficient as AI makes public the information concealed within trading movements. It will enable autonomous, self-driving, transport. A major use will be in education, where intelligent programs will give each child an individual tutor, with a class size of one, to bring each child to the maximum of its potential and at a pace it can cope with. The impact upon productivity will be immense.

These five developments are each game changers. Each one has the potential to transform the economy and society. In combination they will change the world into one where humans are more productive than ever before, can enjoy a lifestyle undreamed of in history, and offer opportunities for people to lead more rewarding and fulfilling lives. The drawback is fear, and the possibility that regulation will be applied by governments to hold back the unfolding future and keep the world back to one they think they can control.  

Fortunately there is no world government, and the countries that embrace and encourage these developing technologies will reap the benefits, even if others try to restrain them. We are stepping into an ever-changing river, and new waters are set to flow about us.

Is it time to rethink private prisons?

The UK prison system has reached crisis point. From serious overcrowding in 77 out of 119 prisons in the UK, to a rise in custodial deaths, self-harm and assault, it is clear that the government is failing UK prisoners. 25.3% of prisoners re-offend and for young adults the figure is higher at 37.9%. Our prisons clearly do not provide an effective system of punishment or rehabilitation and it is UK citizens who must fund this failure.

Given budgetary constraints, one solution to these problems would be to introduce market forces by experimenting with more private prisons. Currently we have 14 private prisons in the UK. This is a good solution partly because it saves the government money: less is paid to these private companies to run the prisons than it would cost the government to run them themselves. The reason for this is that the government does not have any incentive to run prisons at the lowest cost; arguably it has more important things to deal with, for example Brexit, and struggles to include prison efficiency in its legislative agenda. In addition, it is allocatively inefficient as the government does not provide society with a prison system they want or fully respect. However, if contracted out to private companies, the government would save money and therefore have more money to spend on other priorities.

Moreover, by handing over the prison system to private companies, the government could reward companies based upon their re-offending rates. This means that the companies would put more money and effort into training staff properly and into running effective rehabilitation schemes, hopefully increasing the wellbeing of prisoners and decreasing rates of self-harm and assault. Therefore if prisoner well-being is increased and skills improved, it would lead to a safer society due to reduced re-offending rates. Prisoners would also have the skills to work towards a long-term job and this would reduce crime rates as there would be less unemployment.

Caitlin Keenan is the winner of the Under-18 category of the ASI's 'Young Writer on Liberty' competition.

Why young people should support permissionless innovation

There is evidence to suggest the millennial generation has had lower standard of living than the previous generation. A 2016 report by the Resolution Foundation highlighted the divide between millennials and Generation X, showing that people in the younger generation earned £8000 less in their 20s than people in their parents' generation. A key reason for this is our heavily regulated world. The recession of 2008 is partly to blame, however, another reason is due to the tighter business regulations put in place in the 2000s which restrict innovation as it deters entrepreneurs from investing in new ideas. This is unlike the economic environment of Generation X where investment and innovation was widely encouraged. In order to increase our generation’s standard of living, the government needs to take a fresh look at restrictive policies on innovation.

For example, new technologies such as drones and autonomous vehicles can play a part in increasing our standard of living. These technologies could be used to increase productivity. Technological advancements can also cut pollution as we move away from oil and coal and towards cleaner energy (such as solar power and wind). New inventions can also be used for research and development across a whole range of products, improving our favourite gadgets year on year. The government therefore needs to adopt a cautious attitude towards regulating new technologies, allowing entrepreneurs leeway in experimenting with new goods and services.

Furthermore, many onerous regulations discourage competition by cementing the position of large incumbents, who are able to comply with complex and burdensome requirements. If firms do not have any competition, they could use their monopoly power to push up their and exploit consumers.

Innovation without permission is beneficial to society in many different ways. The millennial generation needs to fight against stagnant standards of living and addressing regulations on emerging technologies is one way to do this. Giving entrepreneurs the opportunity to fully and creatively explore new industries will create a richer, happier, freer population.

Caitlin Keenan is the winner of the Under-18 category of the ASI's 'Young Writer on Liberty' competition.