We are one week away from the Chancellor’s Spring Statement, which she insists is not an emergency budget (it is).

As the Labour government debates ways to reduce the spiralling welfare bill, eyeing £5 billion cuts to sickness and disability benefits, it continues to ignore another rapidly soaring component of welfare spending – the state pension.

The government has announced that the price of a passport will rise to £94.50 for adults, up from £88.50. To justify this, the Home Office has said:

“The new fees will help the Home Office to continue to move towards a system that meets its costs through those who use it, reducing reliance on funding from general taxation. The government does not make any profit from the cost of passport applications.”

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

Critics of capitalism sometimes suggest that advertising is wasteful, diverting resources into promoting goods that might otherwise be used to lower the price.

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:

The illusion that one can be scientific about complex phenomena (such as the workings of economic life) that depend on facts, values and information that we could never ascertain, is a dangerous one.

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.