Tom Clougherty is the executive director of the Adam Smith Institute. His policy work focuses mainly on economics, where he is influenced by the Austrian school, but he is also a strong advocate of radical liberalisation in healthcare and education, and a fierce critic of the war on drugs.
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Blog - Tuesday 21 February 2012
It will probably have passed most British readers by, but US politicians have been talking a lot about contraception recently. The short version is this. First, the Obama administration decided to mandate that church-affiliated employers offer insurance ...
Blog - Tuesday 21 February 2012
The coalition government's healthcare reforms are in the news once again. My take on the proposals hasn't changed a great deal since I wrote the following for The Spectator last year: ...
Blog - Wednesday 08 February 2012
I was on Sky News earlier today talking about Stephen Hester’s £1m RBS bonus. To tell the truth, it isn’t a subject I relish tackling – there’s more nuance there than it’s easy to communicate in a short TV debate. For one thing – and I made sure to ...
Blog - Friday 27 January 2012
The McKinsey Global Institute’s latest report on debt and deleveraging contains the following diagram, which shows combined public and private debt in the ten largest developed economies over the last 20 years: ...
Blog - Friday 20 January 2012
In last week’s Spectator , Charles Moore bemoaned the dumbing down of BBC Radio 3. In this week’s issue, several letters to the editor make the same point. Now, you may dismiss this as the snobbery of classical music afficionados. Or you might agree ...
Blog - Monday 16 January 2012
I’m currently reading The Declaration of Independents , by Reason magazine’s Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie. It’s a good read with a compelling central thesis, and I’ll write a proper review once I’ve finished it. But for now, here’s one ...
Blog - Friday 13 January 2012
Professor Anthony Evans, of ESCP Europe , the Cobden Centre , and Kaledic Economics , has the given the following comment to Management Today , as part of their feature on whether the Bank of England should engage in more quantitative ...
Blog - Friday 13 January 2012
The Daily Mail (who else?) reports that reality TV star Kim Kardashian has been used in a left-wing political ad in California, which argues for higher taxes on the rich. The Courage Campaign, which is apparently backed by the California Federation ...
Blog - Friday 06 January 2012
Earlier today, Tim asked how we could determine whether one government was better or worse than another, concluding that it is almost impossible make a verdict on any objective basis. Like Whig in the comments below Tim's piece, I'd quote the ...
Blog - Thursday 05 January 2012
Nick Clegg and David Cameron have both been talking tough on tax avoidance, and trailing plans to introduce a general “anti-avoidance power” so that HMRC can ensure everyone pays “their fair share”. ...
Blog - Thursday 05 January 2012
Before it's too late, here are my Top Fives for 2011: ...
Blog - Saturday 31 December 2011
Samizdata's Brian Mickelthwait has done a great job capturing Jamie Whyte's appearance on Radio 4 last night to discuss the failings of the Financial Services Authority (FSA). Jamie's analysis is, I think, spot on: ...
Blog - Tuesday 13 December 2011
As I wrote on Thursday (and repeat in a ' rapid response ' to City AM this morning), the deal reached by EU leaders last week doesn't change a thing. Here's Detlev Schlichter on the ongoing crisis: ...
Blog - Monday 12 December 2011
I feel like I’m missing something. The media is obsessing over the latest eurozone summit, but as far as I can tell Sarkozy and Merkel have proposed nothing that would make the slightest difference to the eurozone’s immediate problems. As Detlev ...
Blog - Thursday 08 December 2011
If you are a regular visitor, you will probably have noticed by now that we have a new website. So welcome to the new, improved adamsmith.org! We were the first UK think tank on the web back in 1998, and were the first to launch a blog a few years later. ...
Blog - Monday 05 December 2011
Tom Clougherty Tax & Spending "We will explore all the options for maintaining the UK's aviation hub status, with the exception of a third runway at Heathrow." ...
Blog - Tuesday 29 November 2011
Christian Guy says there is no war on drugs. Perhaps he’s not familiar with a little country called the United States of America. Over the past 40 years, it has spent more than $1trn fighting its ‘war on drugs’. It currently has more than half a ...
Blog - Tuesday 22 November 2011
I was sceptical about the eurozone deal agreed last week from the very beginning. In a talk I gave on Thursday, the day the deal was announced, I said that it would either do no good, or be positively harmful. ...
Blog - Wednesday 02 November 2011
Over on The Spectator’s Coffee House blog, Fraser Nelson has mischievously offered a bottle of Pol Roger champagne to the reader best able to articulate George Osborne’s growth strategy. ...
Blog - Tuesday 25 October 2011
Charles Moore makes a good point in The Spectator : ...
Blog - Thursday 20 October 2011
An article in Planning in London makes a fascinating point about this summer’s London riots: ...
Blog - Thursday 20 October 2011
It is fast becoming accepted as conventional wisdom that Greece should default on its debts, leave the euro, print lots of its own currency so that it can carry on spending and, in the process, achieve a devaluation that would boost its economy. I agree ...
Blog - Friday 07 October 2011
So, the Bank of England has announced another £75bn on quantitative easing. Bad news. ...
Blog - Thursday 06 October 2011
This morning’s City AM contained some admirably sound thinking on the European Commission’s proposal for a Europe-wide Financial Transaction Tax, which would involve imposing a minimum tax of 0.1 percent on bond trades and 0.01 percent on derivative ...
Blog - Thursday 29 September 2011
