People in Britain spend over 150 days of the year toiling, just to pay their taxes. This year, Tax Freedom Day falls on 30 May. That's 3 days later than last year and 6 days later than when Gordon Brown entered 11 Downing Street.

It's a tribute to Brown's skill with "stealth" taxes that so few people seem to have noticed the huge rise in taxes that has overtaken them. But Tax Freedom Day is a clear measure of the total burden which he can't escape.

And don't forget that Brown has been on a borrowing binge, which future taxpayers will have to pay for. Adding that burden in would push the date out to 11 June.

In the Euro zone, Tax Freedom Day doesn't come until 28 June, a whole month after Britain's. But in America, Bush's tax-cut policy makes the US Tax Freedom Day 11 April, the earliest in 37 years.

Look at those dates again. And remember that America is forecasting 4.5% growth this year, Britain 3%, and the Euro zone just 1.7%. Says something about the tax burden and a country's economic health, don't you think?

Five former Labour ministers are calling for the abolition of European farming subsidies, which they say worsen global poverty and cost British families £7 billion a year.

In a letter to the Times, they argue that the Common Agricultural Policy is a major obstacle to their aim of convincing Britain that its destiny should be in the EU.

The letter is signed by Michael Wills, a former trade minister; Doug Henderson and Keith Vaz, both of whom are ex-ministers for Europe; as well as Sally Keeble and George Foulkes, who were international development ministers.

Britain's rail workers, who are preparing to strike for more pay and pensions, are actually 15% better paid than their passengers, according to a survey done for The Business newspaper.

Train drivers already earn £32,400 a year, twice the rate for bus drivers. Even the average rail construction worker earns £28,400.

Meanwhile the UK average wage is just £24,700.

Britain's Constitutional Affairs Secretary, Lord Falconer, has done a u-turn on reform of the legal profession.

It seems that the antiquated system in which an elite band of lawyers can call themselves "Queen's Counsel" - and charge higher fees, of course - is to continue, for the time being at least.

The selection of this upper-crust bunch of lawyers has been widely criticised as unfair and opaque. Our own report Silk Cut showed how it just gives state legitimacy to a monopoly-rent-seeking closed shop. It has been condemned by the Office of Fair Trading as uncompetitive. It's time it should go.

For years, people have complained that Adam Smith's tomb in Edinburgh is untidy and difficult to find. We've just pledged quite a tidy sum to help repair some damage and improve it a bit, but this great figure of the Enlightenment still needs a better monument in Scotland's capital.

So we have engaged the leading Scottish sculptor, Sandy Stoddart, to create a 20-foot-high bronze of the sage, which we hope will go in the Royal Mile, just near to the City Chambers. Our application for planning consent goes in next month and then our fundraising for the project will have to start in earnest. All being well, Edinburgh could be unveiling a very impressive statue of Smith in a year or two's time.

The report in the Edinburgh Evening News isn't completely accurate, but it shows that there is a lot of support for the idea.

Here's the sculptor's sketch of how it might look:

And a photo mock-up of the statue superimposed on the street in Edinburgh:

Does giving the Fairtrade mark to Mexican farmers reduce poverty?

Per capita GDP is $8,900 in Mexico. Not great in comparison to the UK ($25,500), But much higher than in coffee-producing countries like Kenya ($1100), Uganda ($1200), and Tanzania ($600). Only 5% of Mexico's economy is agricultural, with industry taking up 26% and services taking up 69%. It joined the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) in 1994 and also has a free trade agreement with the European Free Trade Area (and, thus, the European Union). Mexico is a largely free-market economy. The result is that the economy has moved away from agriculture into more profitable areas. Yes, Mexico is poor compared to Britain. But the population have significantly greater opportunities and wealth than other coffee producers.

By encouraging agricultural production in Mexico, the fair trade lobby may be doing more harm than good. The price of coffee has slumped because there is too much being produced. Other coffee producers - thanks to their governments and those overseas - do not have the same freedom to trade as Mexicans. It is more difficult for them to switch production. The fair trade lobby's support for Mexican coffee makes everyone else's plight worse by keeping up the oversupply, instead of encouraging Mexicans to switch to other employment.

In 2003, the Fairtrade Foundation launched a trial in association with the Soil Association to extend the Fairtrade scheme to include British farmers. The idea was praised by Prince Charles as a way of supporting small, local farmers. However, much of Britain's farming only occurs because of the Common Agricultural Policy, which the fair trade lobby opposes because it takes away exports from poor countries. So it seems strange that they should now try and encourage UK production. The Fairtrade Foundation appears to have backtracked on the idea after criticism. But this – like the support of Mexican coffee producers – suggests a lack of clarity in what 'fair trade' is supposed to be doing.

Greek travel agents are complaining that - despite the attraction of the Olympic Games in Athens this August - hotel bookings are down 10%-plus over last year's.

There are a lot of excuses - hoteliers raising prices to cash in on the Games, travellers' uncertainties about whether Games venues will be finished, continuing security concerns...

But to me the most obvious reason is that Greece is just 10%-plus more expensive than last year, because it is now in the Euro area.

One monetary size just cannot fit all, and I fear that Greece is suffering. The Business newspaper reports that Milton Friedman, the veteran free-market Nobel economist, believes the Euro may collapse under the strain of having to cope with ten new member states. "Differences are already accumulating between countries. The euro zone could collapse... It is a strong possibility." Already the euro zone is lagging, with expected growth of 1.6% this year, as against 4.7% for the US. According to David Smith, UK economist at Williams de Broe, the euro zone's high regulation and taxation puts it "in the geriatric ward of the world economy."

The role of the brand in education has been given a further boost by the decision of a top London private school, Dulwich College, to manage a a 'city academy' school, largely but not entirely funded by the government. Dulwich will do the management and quality control.

This is good news. Yet the National Union of Teachers recently hit out against the idea of brands in schools, claiming that it would lead to a supermarket-style market in education. Well, Dulwich is really rather good at education. I'm sure most people would prefer their children's education to be protected by the Dulwich brand and management, than the control of a Local Education Authority.

The real problem with government education policy is that it is all too tame. The government thinks of something good, and then limits it to only a few state school pupils. Good on Dulwich for rising to the challenge, but what we need is a real reforming agenda from the Department of Education. We need one which will improve quality across the entire state sector, not just in a few spots.

The Observer newspaper today published an interview with Michael Moore, the anti-Bush, anti-war film-maker. It is not a particularly favourable interview, portraying Moore as someone who doesn't treat ordinary people well, and it points to possible inconsistencies between his claims and reality. But one thing stood out in the interview like a sore thumb: he gave a defence of school choice:

'Every parent wants to do what's best for their child. Whatever I can afford, I'm going to get my kid the best education I can get.

'I'm not a liberal. When you come from the working class and you do well enough whereby you can provide a little bit better for your family, get a decent roof over their head and send them to a good school, that's considered a good thing. If,' he emphasises, 'you're from the working class. What's bad about it is if you get to do that and then shut the door behind you so nobody else can do that.'

Indeed. Too many on the Left are willing to send their children to private or selective state schools, but oppose the idea that this choice should be extended to everyone else. Education is just too important to be controlled by meddling bureaucrats and teacher unions. Increasing parental choice is essential if we want to improve our schools.

Andrew Wood has published a page of photos of the site where Adam Smith was born (in Kirkcaldy, Scotland). Click here to view them.

At a recent conference on EU (over-) regulation, Bull Durodie of King's College London mentioned the new REACH standards, by which 30,000 chemicals (basically, everything produced in quantities of more than one tonne per year) have to be subjected to a battery of health and safety checks. Of course, many of these chemicals have been used harmlessly since Roman times, but never mind: better to be expensively safe than sorry, say bureaucrats.

But why aren't the animal rights lobby up in arms about this? According to Bill, we will need 9m rats (plus about 4.5m of their offspring) to test all these chemicals on to reassure the EU about their safety. To date, only 1m rodents have been used in the whole history of animal testing!

The trouble is, it's regulations that are breeding like rats.

Jan Figel is world famous in Bratislava, as Slovakia's first EU Commissioner. He is a pretty sound guy, but he told me that he was very keen that Slovakia should be good members of the EU club.

Poor chap seems to have gone native in just three weeks of Slovakia being admitted. Tony Blair wanted to be at the heart of things too, but after his first summit meeting you could see him visibly seething - the ministers spent more time talking about the seating plan than real issues like unemployment.

Sometimes I think Brussels is like a slot machine that does not pay out. There is no point just trying to reason with it. You have to give it a kick. The new countries will soon find that, and with any luck we will be kicking too.

By the way, I found out why Germany does not have many huge company successes. In Germany there is a law saying all offices have to have windows of a certain size - many big American companies, especially in Silicon Valley, were founded in garages.

I write this from Bratislava, where I've been lecturing to the Entrepreneurs' Association about the horrors of EU labour market regulation. With its liberal employment code and 15 percent flat tax rate, Slovakia sees itself as one of the new European tigers - a sort of European Hong Kong. They're not much pleased when Old Europe tells them they need to adopt lots more regulation and raise their tax rates so that the EU is properly 'harmonized'. Chancellor Schoeder was saying that to them just last week and it did not go down too well.

In the process, though, I've been boning up on some of the facts and figures surrounding workplace regulation. For example, one of the things that has puzzled me for a long time is why continental Europe boasts much higher productivity levels than Britain. Sometimes this is used as a reason why we should have more government intervention in research and development.

But here's the reason, as I discovered from a useful IEA paper on EU employment regulation, Regulating European Labour Markets: More Costs than Benefits? Social costs make it much more expensive to employ people in continental Europe than the UK - something approaching 60 percent more. And that means that continental businesses simply have to be more productive, just to overcome that barrier. So they make sure they employ only the most productive workers, experienced workers. They try to avoid employing anyone young, inexperienced, disabled, old, with family commitments, less-well educated... all the people we want workplace regulation to help, in fact. Look at youth unemployment on the continent, for example, and it's far higher than ours. Continental businesses also employ more part-time workers so they don't get locked into contracts.

It seems to me another case of regulation doing the opposite of the intended goal.

On May 13th private space travel drew closer as Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne flew over 40 miles high, reports Leonard David:

In a post-flight statement from the company, the SpaceShipOne team reported that their space plane flew to 212,000 feet altitude, almost 41 miles. NASA awards astronaut status to anyone who flies above 50 miles in altitude.

The $10m X-Prize, which expires at the year's end, requires a passenger carrying flight to over 100km, repeated in the same vehicle within two weeks.

Followers of Burt Rutan will spot his preference for anniversaries. The first private supersonic flight took place 100 years after the Wright Brothers' first flight. He might go for July 4th, but this summer sees the 35th anniversary of the moon landing on July 20th. This looks a more likely bet, given there are rivals who may attempt flights later in the year.

If he does do it, space will no longer be just for governments. The era of private space travel will have dawned.

A capacity crowd approaching 200 sixth-formers came from all over the country to our summer 'ISOS' seminar in Westminster last week. The theme was 'economic and political myths' and the idea was to challenge a few of the orthodox assumptions about politics and the economy.

The sixth-formers heard an eclectic collection of speakers, including Westminster journalist Peter Oborne, BP executive Richard Ritchie, pollster Peter Kellner, 'Butterfly Economics' guru Paul Ormerod, and Alan Duncan MP. Responding to a questionnaire, nearly 40% of the participants rated the event 'excellent', and nearly 60% said it was 'good' - nobody marked it as 'poor' or worse.

Andrei Illarionov, chief advisor to President Vladimir Putin, addressed an audience at the Adam Smith Institute today on key policy issues. Clarifying Russia's position on Kyoto, he said: "Kyoto would result in an economic holocaust for Russia. Kyoto-ism is another example of totalitarian ideology like Marxism, communism and socialism. Russia has imported those ideas from Europe and suffered badly in the twentieth century. Kyoto-ism would lead to the creation of bureaucratic monsters at national and supra-national levels that - through allocation of emissions quotas - would be a blow against basic human freedoms and human rights, and would decide the fate of nations, companies and people worldwide."

He went on to describe the science behind Kyoto as "deeply flawed". Viewed over the past 100 years, the increase in global temperatures may appear significant. However, over a longer period it becomes obvious that global temperatures vary a great deal - largely as a result of natural phenomena. The current global temperature is lower than has been observed at other times in the past 1000 years.

Last Friday Russia's Academy of Sciences concluded that the Kyoto Protocol "has no scientific foundation". It also stated that the Protocol does not achieve the goals of the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change, and in fact would be economically harmful to Russia and global development generally.

"Nature's real weapon of mass destruction is actually global cooling, not warming. It is ice ages and cold weather which cause hardships and catastrophes, whereas increases in temperature have historically coincided with periods of prosperity."

The 'sue the bastards' campaigners say that companies should be responsible when people abuse their products. Overweight? Nothing to do with you being a slob: sue McDonald's for not telling you fries were fattening. Fall off a ladder? Sue the makers for not telling you ladders can be dangerous.

The film Super Size Me will increase demands on fast-food chains to put the calorie count up on the menu board. (But campaigners might have a shock: you can eat three times a day at McDonald's and consume a weight-losing 1800 calories - try that at your local English Fish & Chip shop.) And the calls to force burger bars to offer healthier options like salads or baked potatoes (again, try that at the local chipper).

There are 1001 kinds of cafe, takeaway and restaurant. They don't all have to offer veggie delights, because there are plenty of others that do. Using the law to force everyone to conform to some campaigner's ideal is just intellectual terrorism.

The core problem is much more alarming. State education manages to teach us less and less about health, diet, or even the elementary physics involved in erecting ladders; and when we do injure ourselves, we know the free state health service will pick up the pieces. So why bother to learn common sense?

But stupidity causes costly problems. Which is why big government and its fans are trying to pass the buck onto business. And why are they going after the big chains? Well, that's where the money is. No point in suing the local chipper, is there?

Before long, even bottles of water will come with a 99-page safety guide. Perhaps it's time we started suing governments for leaving us incapable of looking after ourselves?

Peter Clarke has a good article in the Scotsman calling for the Royal Mail to be privatized.

A few weeks ago a Channel Four television programme showed the squalor, waste, incompetence and even criminality in a London sorting office, and the latest surveys show that the perhaps only 62% of first-class mail actually gets there when promised, the next day.

Adam Smith described a monopoly as "a licence to sleep" And this one has been featherbedding mailmen since Elizabeth I's time. So what would happen if we scrap it, asks Clarke:

My hunch is that the Post Office would be jolted back into competence. Postmen could carry every other sort of item. The crooks and duds would be retired. We might prefer pick-up points if prices were far cheaper than home delivery. It may turn out that speed is not that important (Robert Burns said: 'Only love letters and money are urgent' but that was before e-mail).

I see that Saddam Hussein has a lawyer, Jacques Verges, the man known as the "Devils' Advocate" (having previously represented Claus Barbie, Carlos the Jackal, Slobodan Milosevic...).

He's announced he's going to sue Britain for war crimes against the peace-loving dictator's regime. He's French, of course.

You're a farmer and you come across a dead animal on your farm. What do you do? Well, you dig a hole and bury it.

Not any more, you don't. European Union regulations now expressly forbid that. For some reason. Even though that's what people have done for centuries without any mishap.

So now you have to get your dead animal carted away to be disposed of in a way the Eurocrats approve of. But never fear, our helpful government has (after a lengthy delay) set up a scheme, and indeed a Fallen Stock Company, by which farmers can pay a 'nominal annual fee' to find out who might actually do the carting off.

Of course, our European masters are reasonable: so if your pet animal drops dead, of course you can bury it close to home. Which prompted some very strange advice from ministers to the British Horse Industry Confederation: "If people are in any doubt whether their horse is a 'pet' they must first contact their Trading Standards officer in their Local Authority". Only governments could think up anything quite so daft.

UK Education minister Charles Clark says that he's happy to pay for 6th-form kids to take courses at private schools - allowing them to study A-level subjects not offered by their own state school.

This may not apply to many kids, but as the London Evening Standard points out, it 'breaks one of the last great taboos of the Labour Party', the fetish that education should be delivered by the state, and not privately.

Now that the principle is broken, why doesn't the government get out of education provision entirely? Why doesn't is just pay for kids to go to the school of their choice, and have independent groups providing those schools? That's exactly what happens in welfare - the state doesn't run grocers stores or clothing shops: it gives needy people the money to buy these essentials, and lets a dynamic and competitive market provide them. And indeed, in health now, the government is paying for some NHS patients to be treated in private hospitals. So why cling to the taboo?

I'm typing this from a hotel room in Las Vegas. Like all cities, Vegas has its share of social problems. But there's one it avoids: bar throw-out times. The usual 11pm closing time in England is often unpleasant. People rush their drinking to get an extra pint or two before closing - getting much drunker than if they took things more slowly. They then get put out on the street simultaneously, which leads to brawls and arguments. In Vegas, thanks to 24-hour licensing that doesn't happen. I can walk down The Strip in Vegas late at night, surrounded by bars and casinos, and feel a fair deal safer than in central London.

Every right must be claimed off someone. To say that there is a right to free education is to say that some groups in society have a morally binding obligation to pay for the supply of it for others. Education is not plucked from trees; resources, including skilled labour, have to be put into its production. Someone has to pay for those resources.

If people paid for education directly, the parents and children who consumed it would determine the level of supply, and would choose on the basis of price and quality. They would take into account its future value to them, and the type of it appropriate to their needs.

When the state takes on the task of providing education, it puts it into the political arena, where interest groups vie to have it address their view of what should be taught. Too often quality of education is sacrificed in order to achieve social goals such as equality, or to pursue currently fashionable ideas about child psychology. Too often it is captured by producers, and parents lose their power as consumers to influence it..

Instead of talking of rights, we might do better to say we prefer to live in a society where no-one is denied access to education on account of poverty. This means transferring enough resources to poorer people to enable them to afford a decent education. It could be done by cash payments, vouchers or scholarships and bursaries. It does not need the state to enter the production of education or to direct its output.

When a British company gets bought by an overseas one, some people worry. They think Britain is losing out, throwing away the future profits that the company would get. But when a company is sold to an overseas buyer, we should not worry. Instead, we should view it as a successful export.

Take Acorn Computers, which for years made losses trying to make computers and other IT-related products few people wanted to buy. In 1998, its core business was bought by management for £1m, and refocused on producing "DSP chips". A couple of years later it was sold to the US company Broadcom for $594m. The asset was created and then cashed in. Seems good to me. There is not a fixed quantity of assets: we in Britain are constantly creating them.

The smoking-come-good-life mag, Cigar Aficionado, reports that cigar sales are up in the US despite the introduction of several smoking bans. They are happy to see that Arnie has introduced an ouside smoking space by his office, signalling his liberal attitude to smoking in the face of California's very tough anti-smoking laws. And the magazine reports: "upstate bars and restaurants in New York are now eligible to win exemptions from the state's new antismoking law, implemented last July. They must prove through documentation of their revenues before and after the law that their buisnesses have been negatively affected. Downstate juristictions, including New York City and most of Long Island have yet to allow any exemptions, but it's just a matter of time."

Promoting understanding of the negative health affects of smoking is good. Some smokers have given up as a result, but others would rather take the risk and enjoy smoking. The anti-smoking campaigners came to protect us. Now it is the anti-smokers we need protection from.

No it didn't. The masses already had a fair amount of poverty and misery. The mediaeval myth of rosy-cheeked and carefree villagers dancing around the maypole before returning home to dine on roast beef is a later construction of romantic conservatives. The reality was squalor and unremitting toil. Death from disease or childbirth was common, as was malnutrition and starvation.

The industrial revolution created employment opportunities and gave the chance of advancement. True, women and children worked long hours. They had always done so. True, working conditions were poor and often dangerous. They had always been so. With the spread of mechanized production, the wage labourers were gradually able to afford better food, better clothing, better household goods such as china, and luxuries such as tea. The wealth-creating process gradually made society able to afford better public health and social amenities. The industrial revolution was a step up, and its spread has been the one of the greatest advances humanity has made.

In the past, there were fewer choices for our leisure times. A century ago, books were more expensive and we didn't have television. Foreign holidays were not commonly affordable. How things have changed. In recent years, many of us have become more picky in what we will watch on television: instead of just watching television, we now expect to be able to watch a really good film on DVD or pay-per-view. There just aren't enough hours in the day to waste on bad TV.

In Britain we have the luxury of historically large amounts of leisure time. Yet some people attack modern society for making us 'time-poor'. Could it be that 'time poor' is just another way of saying that we live better, more exciting lives? Never before have so many things been available for us to do in our leisure time, all vying for our attention.

Here's some news for politicians: your attempts to minutely control the economy and make it do exactly what you want aren't working.

For example, the UK Chancellor has made great play of his R&D tax credit, designed to get British business investing more in research and development. It was slow to get started, but now there has been some take-up by companies. And just maybe, those companies have been enabled to do R&D that they wouldn't otherwise have done.

A success, then? Is British business rushing headlong into a new age of innovation?

Er...hardly. A survey from Ernst & Young last February found that many firms were either unaware of the tax credit, or felt the benefit was not worth the trouble of filling in all the forms. Of the companies that did make a claim, one-third said they found it harder than they expected to identify qualifying R&D activities. And 40% of the companies that did claim were subjected to inquiries by the Inland Revenue.

Politicians' attempts to micro-manage the economy don't work. If it did, we would now be seeing an increase in investment, rather than the decline we have actually witnessed. How to reverse the trend? Cut and simplify taxes, don't raise and complicate them even further. Give business the space to breathe and grow.

It's official: the civil service are not even very good at running their own offices.

On the basis of £300m savings made when the Inland Revenue and Customs offices were given over to private management, the National Audit Office says that other government departments could similarly save hundreds of millions of pounds by getting outside contractors to refurbish and manage their accommodation. (Source: Financial Times)

And think how much more we'd save if we actually contracted out the actual work of the civil service too!

Last night we held a reception to celebrate 25 years since the election of Baroness Thatcher. The Oxford and Cambridge Club was a perfect venue, but even the vast room was very packed. There was a distinctly young feel about the event: about 60 percent of those attending were not even born when Thatcher was elected. Lords Tebbit, Parkinson and Powell gave brief remarks about what it was like serve with the reforming former PM. Here are some photos.

More photos are on Samizdata.net.

Governments reluctant to raise visible taxes sometimes use 'stealth' taxes which are less obvious. Taxes collected by others, such as those on insurance policies or airline tickets, are often favoured. When even this meets resistance, sometimes the costs are loaded onto employers by obliging them to provide benefits. The myth is that 'business' is paying for this.

In the UK the National Insurance tax on wages has both employee and employer contributions, and many who pay it fondly suppose that they pay only the employee part. In fact the employers pay their contribution out of what they call the ‘wage pool,’ with money that is not then available for salary payments.

The same is true of other benefits which employers are obliged to provide. They form part of the costs of employment. These non-wage costs could otherwise have been given as wages, but instead employers are obliged to spend them on stipulated benefits. They constitute, in effect, a tax. Of the total money allocated by a business to its labour costs, some is directed by compulsion to purposes determined by the state.

The employees, had they received the money, might have chosen to spend it on similar benefits; but they might not. By having employers spend it on their behalf upon the required benefits, they lose choice in the matter. Many of them undoubtedly think that their employer, rather than themselves, is paying for these benefits. Few of them realize they are paying extra taxes, which is probably why politicians like it.

Adam Smith was not infallible. He took the view that the labour it took to make or acquire something constituted its value.

"Labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities."

"What is bought with money or with goods is bought with labour."

"Labour alone, therefore, never varying in its own value, is alone the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared."

- all from Wealth of Nations Chapter 5 of Book 1 (1776)

Hume had expressed a similar view in his essay Of Commerce (1752), and Marx was famously to take the labour theory of value and build upon it the notion of profit as surplus value and exploitation.

Yet Smith had earlier expressed a demand and supply account of value. In his Lectures on Jurisprudence delivered in 1763, Smith said, "It is only on account of the plenty of water that it is so cheap as to be got for the lifting, and on account of the scarcity of diamonds... that they are so dear." He also noted that a rich merchant lost in the Arabian desert would value water very highly.

Mark Skousen points this out in The Making of Modern Economics, and asks if Smith was suffering from absent-mindedness when he later wrote The Wealth of Nations and opted for the labour theory. He quotes economist Roger Garrison suggesting that Smith's Presbyterian values led him to distinguish between 'useful' production of things like food, and 'unproductive' items such as diamonds.

It is more useful to think in terms of a demand theory of value. Something can take a great deal of labour to make, and yet be worthless if nobody wants it. A good worth a great deal at one time can fall in value if people cease to demand it because of changes in fashion or technology. Yet it might take just as much labour to make it. Fountain pens suddenly fell in value when ball point pens first appeared on the market. It was the demand which changed, not the labour it took to make them.

Successful entrepreneurs include those who correctly anticipate that demand will give more value to particular goods and services than the costs, including labour, of making them. Too bad about the labour theory, but Smith was right about almost everything else.

Here's a challenging Guardian article by Lord Taverne on our billion-pound organic food industry. Proponents claim organic food is healthier. But, says Taverne, it's also full of natural chemicals like ricin, aflatoxin and botulinum toxin. Pesticides in non-organic food don't kill anyone, but if people are worried, they should promote pesticide-resistant GM crops, which reduce their use.

Does organic food taste better? Blind tests show people can't taste the difference. And since 70% comes in by air, it's not exactly environmentally friendly, either.

But Taverne's main objection is organic farming's inefficiency: yields are 20-50% lower than those from conventional farms. And we need to treble food production in the next 50 years to feed 3 billion extra people. What contribution can organic farming make? In the words of the Indian biologist CJ Prakash, its only contribution to sustainable agriculture will be "to sustain poverty and malnutrition". Strong stuff.

A New England think-tank is the latest to question the viability of wind power as a credible alternative to nuclear generation.

After an extensive cost-benefit analysis, the Beacon Hill Institute says that a plan for 130 wind turbines in Nantucket Sound is a bad deal in the making for taxpayers and local ratepayers.

The Adam Smith Institute's own research suggest that, while wind-power technology is improving all the time and some installations could be economically viable, wind farms are simply no solution for the power shortages that will surely occur as a result of the UK government's plans to phase out nuclear generation.

Tonight, friends will mark the retirement of Dr Digby Anderson as Director of the Social Affairs Unit, where he has been succeeded by ex-ASI employee Michael Mosbacher.

There were plenty of economic think-tanks around when Digby founded the SAU in 1980: but he saw the need for better thinking on social and moral issues too. The Unit's work began with critical evaluations of the welfare state, including adoption, education, and social security. In all of them, Digby surmised that commonsense principles were being overtaken by a bogus professionalism and political correctness.

He quickly moved on to start a series of books and papers on the social and cultural foundations of society, such as virtue, manners, friendship, personal responsibility, public-spiritedness -- and the perverse effect of politically correct social policy upon them.

Digby - also a witty food writer in the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph - then took head-on the approved wisdom of the professionals in a series of books on regulation and consumer affairs. In the mid-1990s he reported that people should be drinking far more than the official 'guidance' to stay healthy, and that much of the 'healthy eating' debate was unfounded nonsense.

It was after this that we dubbed the Social Affairs Unit 'The Contrary Institute'. And Digby was right: in an age where officials and professionals presume themselves to have a monopoly of wisdom over how we should live, the contrary view must be voiced. The SAU has now lost the guidance of its greatest contrarian. But thanks to the firm foundation which Digby Anderson built for it, the Unit will continue discomforting the PC professionals for some time to come.

When Margaret Thatcher first became UK Prime Minister in 1979 Britain had the worst strike record in Europe and among the lowest growth rates. The trade unions were out of control and inflation was rampant. The state owned and ran many of the major industries. Subsidies were paid to support them out of taxation, with the top rate of income tax at 83 percent, plus an extra 15 percent if it were derived from investment. Britain was known as the sick man of Europe.

The Thatcher governments turned Britain around from its postwar decline. Its strike record went from the worst to the best. Its growth rate became one of Europe’s highest. The unions were brought within the law and inflation was tamed. She privatized the buses, the trucks, the ferry services and the airline. She privatized the companies which made the buses, the trucks, the ships and the planes. And those which made the cars and the steel. She privatized the telephone service, the gas, electricity, coal and water industries. She privatized ports and airports.

Income tax came down to a top rate of 40 percent, with the starting rate also cut heavily. Millions of tenants of state housing were empowered to buy their homes at discounted prices. Currency exchange controls were abolished, allowing investment to flood in and Britons to invest abroad. Under her governments Britain rediscovered the value of enterprise, markets, incentives and opportunities, and set the lead for a worldwide revival of economic freedom. It was a remarkable period, and it started 25 years ago.

I read in the weekend papers that Germany is introducing a new workplace regulation, which insists that businesses must take on at least one trainee/apprentice for every fifteen workers they employ.

An excellent initiative to get young people learning a trade, you might think. But as with all government interventions over the marketplace, there are unintended consequences.

For Germany recently legalized brothels. And, like other businesses, they too are covered by the new law. So for every 15 girls employed, another must be enticed into the trade as an apprentice.

A rather odd result - which just shows what a tangle politicians get into when they start telling businesses how to run themselves.

The level playing field like the end of the day so favoured by sports commentators, appeals to good judgment and common sense. It is a cliché which is beginning to rival sustainability.

It reeks of feasibility, checks and balance and fairness. In practice it is used as a device to suppress competition and justify government intervention to protect the strong.

Tax harmonization in EU provides an example. Poor and often peripheral regions cannot compete in a market of standardized prices, wage rates, and uniform business rates. They might compete by accepting lower rates of profit, but that discourages inward investment.

Why not allow differential tax rates? Indeed that currently helps to explain the UKs favourable economic performance compared with France and Germany. Poorer regions could make themselves more attractive by imposing lower taxes on business. "But that would not be a level playing field," scream the rich and established members.

Of course the EU does not want a competition for lower tax rates. It wants to collect as much tax as possible, to transfer power to the centre at the expense of the peripheral member nation states. It prefers a combination of high taxes and handouts to make the EU itself the source of economic favours.

The 'level playing field' is a device to stop nations from asserting any kind of competitive advantage. It is, in essence, a form of price fixing; and price-fixing is used by the inefficient to keep out the efficient, by the established to keep out new entrants; and it is why the consumer suffers.