Dr Eamonn Butler

A report out yesterday said that in real terms, the minimum wage in the UK has lost much of its value. That is making life really hard for the people who have to live on it. Both statements are true, but there is a wider picture.

Something odd has happened in Washington. The cause, of course, is the usual one – inept legislation. The result, naturally, is the opposite of what was intended. But the really worrying thing is that the UK seems set to do exactly the same.

I for one do not wish to see the tax returns of our leading politicians.London Mayor Boris Johnson started this trend, publishing his own returns in order to embarrass his opponent Ken Livingstone, whom he accuses of avoiding tax by having fees paid to him through a private company instead of directly. (Though tax avoidance, of course, is not actually a crime. In my view it's a virtue, because it gives governments less money to waste.)

The Chancellor's proposal to end national pay bargaining in the public sector has been met with the usual howls of protests from trade unionists. They see it as a stealth cut in their members' wages.
Maybe, but for decades there has been a stealth rise in those wages. Public pay now averages 8% more than in the private sector – and the hours, holidays, sickness breaks, and of course those gold-plated pensions, are all much better. But the difference is a shocking 18% in Wales.

In 1947, the Chancellor Sir Hugh Dalton mentioned some of his tax changes to a journalist. Unfortunately they appeared in the early edition of an evening newspaper before he had finished his speech, and he was forced to resign as a result. Quite different from today, when the Liberal Democrat and Conservative partners in the UK's coalition have been debating their different tax ideas in full view of the public. Apparently that is the way the do it in Sweden, and Nick Clegg, the LibDem leader, was so taken by it that he decided to import the process into the UK.

UK Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone want to legalise gay marriage. Fine by me: I don't see why gay couples should not be able to sign up for the same obligations, rights and benefits that heterosexual couples observe and enjoy.

She also wants gay couples to be allowed to marry in church, like heterosexual ones. Again, I have no problem with that, if the church is willing to do it.

Everyone at the Adam Smith Institute is saddened to learn of the death of John Marks, the veteran campaigner for transparency and higher standards in the state school system.

I've just started the final draft of a new primer on the great 'Austrian School' (and Nobel) economist and political thinker F.A. Hayek. Perhaps more than anyone, Hayek kept alive the flame of liberty at a time, after the Second World War, where freedom had few friends. Communism had seized Eastern Europe, and in Western Europe, intellectuals were smitten by the appeal of state planning and confident in their abilities to 'win the peace' through greater government planning, spending and controls.

In the wake of the fuss about some people being fitted with dodgy breast implants, the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS) wants advertisements for cosmetic surgery to be banned and 'cowboy' plastic surgeons regulated out of existence.