Jamie Whyte is a management consultant and former lecturer in philosophy at the University of Cambridge. This collection of his best columns for newspapers including The Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times captures his entertaining, thought-provoking style. Whyte is primarily concerned with the relationship between the state and individuals: invariably arguing that politicians should back off and leave us to make decisions for ourselves.

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Why Help to Buy will stoke a housing bubble by boosting demand without doing anything for supply, and risk taxpayer money in the process.

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Robert CB Miller gives a modern Austrian explanation of the crisis, and argues that tightening the 'loose joint' of bank credit expansion is the key to preventing a repeat in the future. Based on the work of FA Hayek and other Austrian school economists, he says that the recession is a necessary part of the recovery process, as bad investments are liquidated and new profit routes discovered, but government draws out this process by regulating markets and restricting trade.

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In this report, Dominique Lazanski calls on the government to commit to a 'Digital Freedom Charter' ahead of the Communications Bill. The report argues that the Internet is currently under threat from an increasing regulatory burden and that we need a charter committed to now in the UK to set out principles to ensure competition, innovation and growth in and around digital communications and the Internet.

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A new study by the Reason Foundation evaluates wind power and finds that wind power is limited in practice due to the increased need for power storage, the decrease in grid reliability, and the increased operating costs.

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Tim Ambler and Eamonn Butler review the government's plans to reform financial regulation, and argue for a more streamlined approach that does not inhibit competition by smothering new market entrants with costly regulatory requirements.

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Politicians claim that a single government block is needed to safeguard children online. However, as Dominique Lazanski argues, this ignores the wide range of market-based solutions that already exist.

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We need a real market for corporate control, argues Elaine Sternberg. Private firms may have good reason to pay their executives highly, and shareholder sovereignty should be protected. The most important thing the government can do is to remove state restrictions on shareholder power — and stop meddling in how private companies are run. 

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Adam Smith and David Ricardo explained the benefits of trade, based on specialisation and comparative advantage. These concepts, says Arnold Kling, also can provide the basis for explaining fluctuations in employment. In this paper Kling proposes that we jettison the Keynesian paradigm of aggregate supply and demand (AS-AD) in favour of an alternative paradigm, which he calls patterns of sustainable specialisation and trade (PSST).

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The government is spending enormous sums of money on renewable energy. This report assesses the economic and energy security cases for renewable energy subsidies, and finds that there is no prospect that renewable energy will be able to provide a substantial amount of Britain's energy needs.

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