Congratulations to Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, on getting a knighthoood. He turned the internet from something accessible only by computer geeks into something that has changed how all of us live and work.

Berners-Lee's model for the development of the web is an excellent example of how standards can develop without the need for government bodies setting them. Through the World Wide Web Consortium, of which he is Director, he has ensured that the web remains a system based on open standards. His knighthood is well deserved.

There is a noose around the neck of every businessperson in Britain. Every time a government minister opens his or her mouth, the noose gets tighter. The government says it wants to help, introducing programmes like the "Better Regulation Task Force" - but the end result is always more regulation and higher taxes. Gordon Brown has decimated inward investment. Taxes are endlessly getting higher. Gordon doesn't seem to realise that you cannot keep on spending ever increasing amounts on the public sector if you kill off the part of the economy that creates wealth. Cut us all some slack, Gordon.

A report in the London Times points out that new EU rules against age discrimination could eliminate many of the benefits given to reward long service. Young people could claim they were not old enough to qualify. Out might go the traditional gold watch, the admission into extra medical and other benefits, and even the party to celebrate 25 years of service.

The EU is guilty here only of carelessness: it is the gold-plating of EU rules which causes problems like these. While other EU members do not enforce the ones they do not like, British bureaucrats do it zealously. Even casual or sloppily worded directives are imposed rigorously. It derives partly from UK respect for the rule of law (apart from taxation and speeding, that is). This makes the burdens fall selectively heavily on Britain.

The intention was to prevent discrimination against older workers, but the first effect might be to outlaw any positive benefits they receive. Employers' groups are advising them to withdraw such privileges.

I always thought gold watches were over-rated. They are often handed out at retirement, just when the employee no longer needs to check the time. The civil service does it much better, handing out a £2 lump of bronze instead, and calling it a CBE. I hope that the honours system will be exempted from the new rules. Along with pantomimes, it amuses and brightens the early days of a new year.

The house designs were ready for approval, but the planning officer had one last point. Where I had red pantiles there had to be blue slates. I didn't like blue slates, and felt red clay tiles fitted the design better. No, I was told. Blue slate gives a much better vista with the next house. The next house was some way away, and only from half-way up a tree 500 yards away could one see 'a vista' through the obscuring foliage. Furthermore, I added, most of the houses in the village had red pantiles. No, came the reply, blue slate was called for.

I found that the planning officer did not have the power to require blue slate. I wrote back indicating this, and saying that this was a question of taste. Since it was my house and my money, it was going to be my taste. Back came a letter. True, she did not have the power to insist, but she 'strongly recommended' blue slate. I wonder how many people even question the powers which government has conferred upon these pocket Hitlers to interfere in such detail in our lives. Had it not been for a chance remark by my builder, I doubt if I would have checked up.

Surely we can devise a better system, preferably one which does not have local authorities snooping with helicopters to detect 'unauthorised' conservatories? We could start with a presumption of the right to develop your own property, perhaps, and use case law to build up a precedent of what counts as abuse. We could admit that our present planning and zoning laws are a mess.

By the way, the red pantiles, when they went up, looked superb.

The UK used to be the most attractive economy for EU foreign investment, easily first in foreign direct investment. Now it isn't.

It used to be a low tax economy. Now taxes are rising faster than in any EU country.

It used to have the most successful private pensions sector in Europe, bigger than all the other countries' private pensions investments put together. Now that's being killed by the UK Chancellor's £5 billion-a-year raid on the pension funds. So there are now more pensioners in poverty than 1997.

We're creating jobs - but in the public sector. The 350,000 new public-sector jobs we have created consume wealth, they don't produce it.

There have been at least 60 'stealth' tax rises since 1997. The average household in Britain pays £4000 more in tax than six years ago. That means working an extra week every year, just for the Chancellor. After tax, Britons have suffered the first fall in take-home pay in 20 years.

Taxes yielded £360 billion when this government took office. Now it's up to £500 billion. Yet despite all the spending, half of us think that health and transport are worse than in 1997.

Meanwhile, people earning £40,000 a year find themselves eligible for social benefits; doctors, teachers and small businesses spend more time filling in forms than ever before.

Am I just being cantankerous, or is this all a bit of a mess?

The discovery that people were being made to wait for many hours before receiving emergency treatment prompted the NHS to set targets. No patient brought into accident or emergency is supposed to wait more than four hours before receiving some attention.

Now the Association of Ambulance Professional Personnel has revealed that hospital chiefs are forcing ambulances to wait with the patients in hospital car parks until casualty staff are prepared to accept them. Sometimes the wait is an hour and a half before the patient is officially handed over and the clock starts running. The ambulance crews point out that this is not only bad for patients, it also ties up paramedics who could be going to assist others.

It calls to mind the production quotas and targets of the old five year plans of the Socialist economies, together with the almost universal cheating which accompanied them. This resemblance is hardly surprising, since the NHS itself is a throwback to the economic system which characterised them.

George Orwell's Newspeak sought to change the language to prevent people even thinking any thoughts the party disapproved of. A speaker on BBC Radio 4 said that political correctness, by making people talk differently, forces them to think differently. She approved.

Political correctness counts on good manners. We do not like to offend. If people object to some words, we switch to others. Many terms of racial description were originally descriptive, not intended as insults. They were dropped from polite speech, however, because they were regarded as such.

I myself use 'they' to mean either he or she. It makes language more awkward, but it no longer leaves out half the human race. Unfortunately some people trade on our good manners. Persistent sales representatives rely on people being too polite to silence them. Similarly, many advocates of PC rely on our reluctance to offend.

At student conferences speakers were booed for talking of lame excuses, blind to the problem, or deaf to the arguments. This language was alleged to offend disabled people. If it were only about language we might grudgingly acquiesce, making jokes about Snow White and her Seven Vertically Challenged Companions. But it is not just about language. It goes with attitudes which attempt to make outcasts of those whose thoughts and habits are currently unfashionable.

This includes smokers, drinkers, and those who eat hamburgers, drive cars, and use disposable nappies, as well as those who use unreformed language. Incessant propaganda tells us that these anti-social types are causing disease, violence, death, and ruining the planet. In fact, these people are like us. They are friends who enjoy a cigarette, or a drink. They find fast cars as convenient as fast foods, and they hate washing nappies.

PC is preaching intolerance. It tells us to castigate those whose lifestyle choices we do not share. If we do not smoke, drink or hunt we have to be anti-smoker, anti-drinker, anti-hunter. The harm of the PC attitude is not that it tries to make us talk differently but that it tries to destroy the easy-going glue of tolerance which holds a civilised society together. It seeks to turn us against each other, and to turn intolerance into a virtue.

The Left does not seem to like companies that succeed in the marketplace. One such business is Google. It entered the market late, but quickly became the top search engine simply by being being better than its competitors. However, since Google announced its plans to float, the company has been under fire.

BBC Online journalist Bill Thompson met Google co-founder Sergey Brin in 2000 and found the man "completely devoted to making a better search engine rather than making himself rich... Now his search engine is the equivalent of programmes on ITV, there solely to attract eyeballs for advertisers."

Does Bill Thompson really think that Google was ever about benevolence? Isn't it more plausible that Google was created in order to make money? And isn't it a good thing that the founders of Google, motivated by the search for profits, created a search engine dramatically better than anything that went before it?

What worries the Left most of all about Google is that it keeps on adding new services. I find Google News great: I get an e-mail whenever the words "Adam Smith Institute" are mentioned in a participating newspaper. The Left says that Google is only adding new features in order to get more advertising. That's a bad thing? It means I don't have to pay, which suits me fine.

Thompson has called for a new government regulator to protect us from Google, called the Office for Search Engines. Why bother? If Google stops being any good, we can just dump it. That's what we did to AltaVista when Google came on the scene.

Of course, if we wanted to get rid of the profit motive from search engines, we could just pay for a search engine out of taxation. Oh… we already do.

A new study from the International Centre for Alcohol Policies (ICAP) estimates that at least half of the alcohol consumed in the world is non-branded, locally produced. The generic term 'moonshine' covers everything from Irish poteen to Russian samogon to Mexican pulque, plus a local equivalent just about everywhere.

Moonshine has a 'buyer beware' reputation, and is often associated with toxins ranging from methanol to paint thinner, not to mention rat faeces and battery acid for extra flavour. Cases of blindness, paralysis and death are sometimes reported.

According to the new study, these are very rare exceptions. Chemical testing of samples world-wide reveals that "most of the moonshine produced is of reasonably high quality." Marcus Grant, President of ICAP, suggests that reputable moonshine producers take care to do nothing to harm repeat customers. In contrast to moonshine's 'raw' image, a taste testing saw some Russian Samogen actually beat Cutty Sark.

The report suggests that there is increasing convergence between the branded and unbranded markets, with some commercial producers trying to pitch new products somewhere between aspiration and tradition. True, Mr Grant does conclude that moonshine, while not intrinsically bad, causes social problems by the way people drink it. But these are problems of poverty, not quality, in much the same way that cheap gin 150 years ago was 'the quickest way out of Manchester.'

Moonshine is popular because it is cheap. It is cheap because those who make it and drink it have chosen not to join the tax system. It brings relief and pleasure into the lives of poorer people, which is more than can be said for tax-collectors.

From The Sun newspaper:

Barmy BBC bosses have banned reporters from calling tyrant Saddam Hussein a former dictator. Instead, staff must refer to the barbaric mass murderer as "the deposed former President". The astonishing edict was seized on by MPs last night as more proof of a Left-wing bias inside the BBC against the Iraqi war... A spokeswoman said: "This was reiterating existing guidelines to remind BBC News Online journalists of the need to use neutral language."

But as Au Currant points out, Augusto Pinochet is described as a "former dictator" over 500 times on the BBC website. Why the double standard?

We have to get used to absurdities, they are what govern our lives. But some people are so used to absurdities they are completely blind to them.

Take, for example the assertion that the government by not taxing something is subsidising it.

This is of course absurd, there are countless things the government doesn't tax - fresh air, for example - but please don't tell them that. They might think it competes unfairly with argon and neon, and slap VAT on it.

Ecologists would have us believe the government is subsidising air travel by not taxing aviation fuel at the same level as other fuels. This is wrong, they say, because it makes air travel more attractive than any other form of travel, although quite what competes with a flight from London to New York they don't say. But nonetheless they are campaigning vigorously to have this 'imbalance' removed by increasing taxation on aviation fuel.

Why not, a reasonable person might enquire, simply reduce taxation on other forms of travel? Making car, train and bus journeys cheaper would make them compete more effectively with air travel on longer journeys within the UK or to Europe. Why stop there? Reducing taxation on many other aspects of car ownership would greatly benefit those on lower incomes, not that they are people this government is concerned about.

Reducing taxation on hotels and restaurants would greatly increase domestic tourism. Reducing taxation on both together would make dramatic changes, which serves to underline the basic premise that taxation is always bad for the economy. Any other view is absurd.

In the beginning there were internet messageboards. The political left took to them like fish to water. The problem was that they were unmoderated, so they descended into places of general abuse. This suited the left because they were able to debate in the way they prefer: by shouting slogans. The occasional right-winger who tried to explain international trade would not have his ideas examined: he would just face personal insults.

But now internet messageboards are old-hat, and blogs are chic. Unlike messageboards, almost all of the major political blogs are right-wing. The left isn't happy. The New Statesman has called on the left to take part in the blogosphere to stop it being "dominated by the political right".

What the New Statesman missed is that the blogosphere leans to the right for a reason. Blogs offer a medium that is ideally suited to the right. They enable the more detailed explanations that right-wing ideas require.

To be successful in the blogosophere, you have to make reasonable arguments, and win over your readers. Left-wingers are very bad at explaining what they believe. They support fair trade coffee because it is fair. They want "people before profits", because it sounds good. They say "it's all about oil" because it is. They hate multinational companies, but don't understand economics. The more hip and trendy Third Way Left offers a much better tone, but they simply replace the slogans with meaningless jargon, which is just as bad.

Perhaps this lack of understanding is because relatively few on the left have converted to the left. Conversely, many on the right were brought up with left-leaning ideas, ingrained from their teachers and parents, and then during their teenage or university years worked out that they were wrong. An inherited view is just believed: a view you are won over to has to have an intellectual foundation.

The UK's Conservatives say they want to introduce a student 'passport' so that parents can choose whatever school they think best - state or private - and the state contribution to education will follow their choice.

This idea is already sweeping the world, because countries see the benefits of having enterprising providers, together with some taxpayer financing to ensure fair access to education.

America is well on the road - with tuition tax credits, vouchers to allow disabled kids or those in failing state schools to go private, roughly 2,700 Charter Schools (privately run but financed from the taxpayer) and even 50 'Virtual Charter Schools' providing online learning.

But social-democratic Europe is ahead even of this in realizing that essential public services need not be the monopoly of public servants - and that it is actually better if they aren’t.

In the Netherlands, 70 percent of Dutch kids go to non-state schools. Parents choose the school they want, and the state pays. They change schools, and the money follows the child - exactly the same amount of money that the state would have spent on them in a state-sector school. So parents have a choice, and public money makes sure is a real choice, even for the poorest.

It must be awful to be a left-wing environmentalist (I am not saying there are other kinds). The effective way to stop people doing things is to make them cost more, so they advocate taxing stuff like cars and planes to cut down the demand. But this means that they will then be limited to the rich, which does not sit easily with a left wing conscience (if such there be).

Thus Ken Livingston's Congestion Charge in London has made life a lot easier for people driving posh cars. The streets are clearer of those down-market cars with which ordinary people used to clog them. George Monbiot wants to tax most of the wicked areoplanes out of the sky, making airports less crowded for the rich (and those jetting off to international environment conferences).

The other thing about being a left-wing environmentalist is that you find yourself constantly thwarted by human ingenuity. They make stuff cleaner and quieter, which is not what you wanted. What you wanted was for them to live more simply and be content with the limits you put around their lives.

On the anniversary of the Wright Brothers' first flight, the usual nutters railed against the evil the plane has wrought. Meanwhile, unnoticed by them, the first private enterprise space plane, SpaceShipOne from Scaled Composites, made its first powered flight, breaking the sound barrier. This is the vehicle which will soon carry private citizens, including me I hope, on commercial space flights.

So while the anti-progress brigade railed on about yesterday, tomorrow was peeping out under their noses. On balance, I rather think the future will beat the past.

Today is the 100th birthday of the first plane flight. Not everyone is celebrating. George Monbiot, an environmentalist, wrote a piece in yesterday's Guardian calling for "a day of international mourning. December 17 2003 is the centenary of the world's most effective killing machine."

He backed this up in part by saying that planes have been used in wars to kill. Fair enough. But his argument lost all credibility when he tried to apply the killing point to civilian flights, saying that commercial planes are a "weapon of mass destruction" because of their environmental effects. The word exaggeration comes to mind. Maybe he is referring to the planet Guardianopolis, but not Earth.

Regardless, air travel is becoming ever more environmentally efficient. As George Trefgarne points out: "today's aircraft are 75 per cent quieter than those in the 1960s. Last night, Boeing gave the go-ahead to the new 7E7, which will consume 20 per cent less fuel than any other airplane of its size."

Monbiot's article then twisted into a bizarre neo-communist rant: "commercial flights, like military flights, are an instrument of domination. As tourists, we engage with the people of other nations on our own terms. The world's administrators can flit from place to place enforcing their mandate. The corporate jet-set shrinks the earth to fit its needs. Those with access to the aeroplane control the world... The aeroplane, more precisely than any other technology, represents the global ruling class. In the past we raised our eyes to the men on horseback. Today we raise our eyes to the heavens."

Monbiot has it all wrong. It is environmentalists who want flying to be accessible to only the rich through punitive taxes. Cheap flights from EasyJet, RyanAir etc. have enabled flights to be accessible to everyone in the developed world. Increasingly, those in poorer countries are also getting access to flights. He wants to stop this.

Besides, it's a bit rich for Monbiot to attack flying. Professional environmentalists don't seem to have a problem jet-setting off regularly to world summits. They presumably think that it is only other, less worthy individuals who should be prevented from flying.

One of the best UK blogs to be launched this year is The Daily Ablution, written by Scott Burgess. He's skeptical of what environmentalists preach, and rips to shreds some climate change graphs used by The Guardian (which would get a red line through them if you put them in a school maths exam).

Scott has also compiled a selection of quotes about environmentalists - by scientists and others who take a scientific approach to environmental issues. There's a great one by Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, who says: "The campaign of fear now being waged against genetic modification is based largely on fantasy and a complete lack of respect for science and logic."

There's some interesting agreement breaking out the among business editors of the UK papers. They are all saying, all at once, that the love affair between the Chancellor Gordon Brown and Prudence is now over. (The love affair between Gordon Brown and Gordon Brown will of course carry on.)

First I saw it in Andrew Neil's Core Values column in the excellent The Business. How prudent is it, he asked, to plan on borrowing a total of £176 billion over the next six years? Particularly when even that's probably an underestimate: in 2001 Mr Brown told us he would borrow just £10 billion this year; in 2002 he told us it would be £14 billion. This April his guess had shot up to £27 billion. Now it is £37 billion! That's OK, he says, it's indebtedness of 'only' 31% of GDP. But if Mr Brown used the standard European (Maastricht) definitions like everyone else, he'd see it was really 38% of GDP, and will be a golden rule-breaking 40% plus next year.

Then this morning I saw my friend Christopher Fildes making the same point in the Daily Telegraph. And he notes that the Chancellor is now spending 9.4 percent more money this year than last year. But the £460 billion question is: where is the money going? In the public sector, you pay 7% more this year for exactly the same thing you got last year. And as our report Costing Jobs showed, quite a lot of that is wasted on non-jobs.

So it's all over for Gordon Brown's prudent spending plans. But has the entire New Labour project been jilted too?

Yes, according to the New Labour insider Stephen Pollard. "The unpleasant truth for those of us who invested such hopes in Tony Blair and New Labour is that the game is up for worthwhile reform," he says. This has become "a straightforward tax-and-spend government."

The Foundation Hospital idea, for example, is "so watered down as to have almost no practical utility". Welfare reform is a damp squib too: despite the 1997 promise to reduce the "cost of social failure", benefits have risen from £95 billion to £105 billion.

"New Labour, as we now know, never existed as more than the hope of a few deluded Blairites," concludes Pollard. "Tony, we've lost."

We were prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt back in 1997. But for me, the Chancellor's figures and Pollard's article are undoubtedly the financial and intellectual obituary on the whole Project. I'm not quite sure when the electoral obituary will follow. Maybe before too long.

The Economist has an article defending offshoring - the export of (service-sector) jobs overseas. It points out quite correctly that both countries exporting jobs and countries importing them benefit economically from the process. Indeed, the US gains a greater net benefit from offshoring jobs to India than India does.

Some readers might think, "Ah yes, this is indeed good if you treat America as one unit. But the economic benefits (cheaper goods and services) go the rich, and the ordinary workers stay unemployed." It is a difficult argument to counter. But it is a false one.

It is rooted in the Fixed Quantity of Jobs Fallacy (a close friend of the Fixed Quantity of Wealth Fallacy). The argument goes that there is a limited number of jobs available in the world, and that we should protect our jobs from Indians, otherwise there we will suffer mass unemployment. It sounds like a sensible argument. But America and Britain have been losing jobs to the rest of the world for decades, and yet the total number of jobs in our economies are higher than at any point in history. Our total wealth has increased, too.

"But hang on a minute!" some readers might say, "This worked fine when we got rid of manufacturing, and switched to service-sector jobs. But now we're getting rid of service-sector jobs also." That's the real killer argument for a lot of people. They supported free-trade because they felt that being a modern economy is about services, not manufacturing. But how come the service jobs are going too?

Perhaps the distinction between manufacturing and service jobs has been over-emphasised. If it makes sense to allow manufacturing go overseas, it is really any different to allow call centres to go overseas?

Lower-end service jobs - like answering the phone in call centres - might as well go abroad. Those is poorer countries need them more than we do. It helps those overseas climb up the economic ladder, and helps us too. The anti-capitalists say that globalization is a race to the bottom. Actually, it is a race to the top. In Britain and America, thanks to investment in technology, our jobs are getting more and more productive. It is quite clear that as we get richer, we will keep on losing jobs to overseas countries. The good news is that we will keep on creating new, better ones as well.

A new UN report claims that climate change "cost $60bn in 2003". The figure adds up the cost of all unusual weather during the year, from floods in China to a heatwave in Europe. We are told it will get worse if we do not control emissions.

The report illustrates the degree to which UN agencies have been captured by environmentalist groups. The reports are political, not remotely scientific, yet are cited in turn by environmentalists as "further proof" that man-made global warming is a scientific fact. The agenda is political, to have us live more simply, consume less, and concentrate on wealth redistribution, not wealth creation.

If there is global warming, it is far less than they say, and falls well within the pattern of cyclical geophysical change which occurs naturally. No recent man-made emissions have been remotely in the league which might cause extra hurricanes, floods, and heatwaves, although this does not stop UN agencies from telling us how many extra deaths we cause.

Intriguingly a recent paper suggests that our primitive ancestors probably averted a cyclical cooling 8,000 years ago by burning forests, though whether our industrial emissions can now avert an overdue ice age is problematic.

The move to non-polluting production and transport will be rejected by the environmentalists because it does not support their political, anti-progress agenda. They hold their views not as a scientist should, dependent on evidence and tests, but as Michael Crichton suggests, as a religion. Matthew Parris makes a similar point.

Why do they do this? Partly, perhaps, as a means to power, and to have others live as environmentalists think they should, instead of how they choose to. For some it seems to be a yearning for simplicity, a retreat from modern complexity and pace into an imagined time was all was more measured and within an individual's control.

It may derive partly from their loss of faith in a real religion that they make "nature" or "the environment" the all-embracing good to be revered and worshipped. It is nonsense, of course. The planet has always changed, by the processes of the universe and the interaction of life upon it. It is well, on the precautionary principle, to watch the possible consequences of our actions. But the way to eliminate harmful ones is by using more technology, not less, and by becoming rich enough to afford it.

Whenever environmentalists get involved in a debate, you know that sound science and reason are going to get thrown away. Environmentalism is a religion - and one without a basis in reality. The case of DDT, a chemical essential for killing malaria, is case in point. Thanks to environmentalists, malaria kills one million people each year. If environmentists did not exist, malaria could be eliminated with DDT.

So DDT must be a pretty evil chemical to stop its use? Well, that's what the environmentalists say. Ever since the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, they have claimed that it is carcinogenic and kills birds - and opposed its use in fighting malaria. The scientific evidence indicates that it has no effect on humans, and that it is not carcinogenic. There can be an effect on birds - the thinning of egg shells - but only when exposed to very high levels of DDT, not the levels used in fighting malaria. The science thus suggests that the environmentalist claims are just wrong.

Now Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton has added his weight to the debate:

I know you haven't read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally don't report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn't carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn't give a damn.

The DDT fiasco remindes of something said by Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore. He described his former organisation, Greenpeace, as "a band of scientific illiterates who use gestapo tactics." How true. The environmentalists have a lot to answer for.

A couple of months ago I blagged my way into a London party for Third Way movers and shakers. In the middle of the party, there was a speech by a guest speaker who attacked the internet: "The problem with the internet is that it's all about content. Content should be dead: what matters is contact." He then said that we were all selfish and spend too much time accessing Amazon and not enough time doing e-democracy.

His talk, to me, brought together exactly what the Third Way stands for: style over substance with added contradiction. I enjoy meeting Third Way types, but I don't always understand what they are talking about. They have terms like "regulating self-regulation", "outboard brain", "network entropy", and "new economics". Normally the jargon they use simply means more government controls. But why don't they just say that? At least with traditional socialists it was easy to understand what they were arguing for.

Do education vouchers improve education? The schemes used in the US show that they do, and quite significantly. Some of the schemes are privately funded, and pay pupils to exit from state schools into private schools. Others schemes (and this is more relevant to the British debate) use taxpayer money to allow students to go whichever school, state or private, that they choose. Both types of schemes have brought benefits.

Vouchers have cut school dropouts: for example, the Milwaukee Parental choice program saw the annual dropout rate decline from 16.2% to 10.6% between 1990 and 2001. Milwaukee voucher parents – because they were given market power - became more involved and interested in their children's education, and were more likely to attend parent-teacher meetings. In other words, people who say that school choice can't work because lots of parents don't care, are simply wrong: the parents rose to the responsibility of school choice.

Vouchers have helped improve school ethos. Parents of children using vouchers reported that there was a more positive environment, and reports of property destruction, distraction, tardiness, missing classes, fighting, cheating and racial conflict declined.

Finally, and most importantly, vouchers have improved academic results dramatically. The following represent specific schemes, but similar academic improvements can be found wherever voucher schemes are used. In the Florida scheme, for example, pupils achieved higher scores on both the Stanford and FCAT tests. Voucher students in New York achieved higher scores of 7.6 percentile points on reading and maths than their counterparts. In New York City, reading and math test scores for black students who had used the vouchers to exit state schools and attend private schools for three years were 9.2 percentile points higher than those of similar black students who did not attend a private school.

And that strikes at the most important part of school choice. Well off people can live in areas with good state schools, or can pay to go private. Without vouchers, those families not so well off - particularly those in black inner-city neighbourhoods - get trapped in failing state sector schools. Taxpayer money is being spend on these schools, but it's failing to provide decent schooling. Those with most to gain from school vouchers are the poorest in society.

Environmental groups are urging the UK Chancellor to increase airport tax "for environmental reasons". He might think he could raise revenue by another stealth tax, but it would do great economic damage and restrict choices for millions.

In the strange world inhabited by the groups who promote this, it is called a "subsidy" if government does not tax something. They say we should all travel less, and at greater cost. The hundreds of thousands of jobs which would be lost to the air travel industry and the package holiday business apparently do not count. Nor do the choices which low cost air travel has made possible, especially for young people and those of fairly modest means.

The opportunity to interact with people of different cultures is one of the many benign products of low cost travel; to limit this to the rich, as it used to be, would be to turn the clock back perversely and needlessly. Modern aircraft, like cars, pollute less than their predecessors. The way forward is by technological progress toward less polluting, less noisy, more fuel efficient aircraft, as we have been doing, not to price such travel out of the means of people on average incomes.

This week, BBC Radio 4 asked me to do an interview on the origins and growth of the non-state healthcare market. Boning up for it, I was reminded just how significant the independent sector is. It provides 85 percent of the UK's residential care beds, for example, and 20% of all acute elective surgery - that's the stuff like hip replacements that isn't exactly life-threatening, but which you want to get done fast anyway.

Indeed, the independent sector has more beds than the NHS and local-authority care homes put together!

It employs almost as many people - roughly 750,000 of them - and it accounts for a quarter of UK health and social care spending. In addition to the 15,000 nursing and residential care homes that the sector provides, private agencies care for more than 200,000 people in their own homes.

In a free society pensions would be voluntary. People would decide their level of contribution and would live with the consequences. Charities might care for those who made inadequate provision, or were unlucky with their fund.

Problems arise when state provision offers a safety net, for there will be those who use it as an excuse for profligacy. Some of those who have been prudent and have saved will be upset that the state rewards the spendthrifts who would otherwise be destitute. Yet few modern societies would be prepared to let some of their elderly citizens starve.

One approach is to require people to contribute to their own pension funds, and a minimum 12-14 percent of salary has been suggested. Choosing between competing providers, they would see their fund gradually accumulate, making them independent of the state in retirement. Indeed, if growth kept up its long-term trend, they would be quite wealthy.

The scheme uses compulsion, just as car insurance does, and allows people to choose a fund appropriate to their needs and tastes. Proponents point out that this is not surplus compulsion, in that the state scheme supported by taxes and national insurance is in no sense voluntary. The new plan allows them the choice between private alternatives to the state. A similar approach has been used in Chile.

Given the complete mess which decades of state interference have wrought upon the UK pensions industry, the day of a simple, all-embracing plan for personal provision might be drawing near.

As a free-marketeer, I recognise the importance of compensating others for costs imposed on them. For example, if someone pollutes a river, he should have to compensate those with property downstream which backs onto the river. It's difficult to decide exactly how much that compensation should be. Sometimes it is difficult to decide who should be compensated. However, as a general principle, it is good.

But let's say that instead of imposing a cost on society, you impose a benefit to society. Should society pay you for that benefit? Yes, claim the advocates of "free" university education. They say that students gain qualifications and skills which benefit the rest of society. After all, graduates become doctors or civil servants or businessmen, who help all of us. Therefore, society should pay for their education.

But hang on a minute! This argument that there is a "positive externality" which society should pay for fails the consent test. My neighbour might say that all the properties in the area will increase in value if he leaves his Bentley in the drive. Should I be forced to pay him for that benefit?

If it is true that society benefits from a university education, then in a free-market economy those who go to university and gain worthwhile skills will be able to earn more in later life. The social benefit is tiny compared with the benefit to the individual. This is why, from a moral point of view, society should not pay for university education.

The movie Pay it Forward featured Haley Joel Osment as Trevor, the kid who does favours for people, asking them to do favours in turn for others. Charming idea, but lacking punch. The sequel Borrow it Forward is better. In it, UK Chancellor Gordon Brown borrows money now and gets praise for spending it. First £27bn, then £37bn. The clever twist is that he borrows it forward, and by the time it has to be repaid, someone else is in his job getting the blame. Meanwhile he is Prime Minister...

The third part in the trilogy, 'Go for Broke,' is due next year.

Swedish author Johan Norberg gives his take on recent Kyoto developments:

Russia refuses to ratify the Kyoto agreement, and the EU will also fail to curb greenhose gases as it promised. European protesters, politicans and media has compared US president Bush to a monster becuase he pulled away from Kyoto. But it appears that he was the honest one, who said from the beginning that the US couldn't do it. Will they now attack humbugs like Putin, Chirac and Schroder as violently as they attacked Bush? Of course not, their primary motive is not love for the environment, but hatred of the US. How predictable.

Quite.

We've been reviewing our blog, taking into account what our readers have been saying. We're going to have a greater variety of contributors, and more items. We are also rearranging where things are placed.

In line with sites like Andrew Sullivan, InstaPundit, Talking Points Memo, and many other of the top blogs, as of today the comments system has been removed. This is because only 1 in 1000 readers was using the system, and moderating comments was taking a lot of energy which we'd rather use to create new posts. But you can still communicate with us through the new "Feedback" option at the bottom of each item. And, indeed, we encourage you to use this feature to keep us on our toes.

The UK Chancellor's annual mini-budget this week reminds us that governments spend our money on lots of different things. (Too many, but that's not my point here.)

Most goes on the bureaucracy of health, education, transport, and all the other doing-stuff stuff. (Stuff that the government shouldn't be doing at all.) But another big wodge goes on 'transfer payments' like pensions and social security - cash to families facing poverty, unemployment, sickness or disability.

Yet politicians don't really have much control over these transfers. First, it would be immoral to deny people the benefits that they had paid toward for years. Second, social-security claims rise and fall automatically depending on whether the economy is doing badly or doing well.

Public spending is too high. But don't let's judge politicians on their overall spending. Judge them on the bit they can control. On the cash they spend running schools, hospitals, trains, ministries, you name it.

To get a grip on inflation, we use two measures: the headline rate, and the 'underlying' rate, which excludes the fickle element of mortgage interest.

Let's get a grip on the budget by focusing on the underlying rate of public expenditure - the amount that politicians waste by trying to do things - rather than the headline rate that includes transfers.

I occasionally met Hayek at meetings of the Mont Pelerin Society. He famously wrote he was not a conservative. In a 1987 tribute volume I wrote a postscript essay Why F A Hayek is a Conservative. My argument can be summarized thus: There is the conservative disposition, which likes to keep familiar things as they are. Michael Oakeshott expressed this brilliantly in Rationalism in Politics. Hayek was not like that at all; he wanted to improve things, not keep them the same.

Alongside this temperament, there is also the political tradition of conservatism. This represents a resistance to taking society in any preconceived direction, and especially towards any earthly paradise. Those of this school try to keep society spontaneous, and oppose any attempts to impose 'visions' upon it. Hayek said that conservatives had no goal, whereas his goal was for a free society. I suggested that conservatives have not only tried to retain the spontaneity of society, but also to restore it when it had been compromised. In seeking to preserve freedom, to extend it and restore it, Hayek fitted quite comfortably within that political tradition.

When he wrote his essay, there were conservatives who thought their role was to 'conserve' the socialism which then prevailed. Hayek saw no affinity with them. Fortunately for the rest of us, few others did either!