Another low cost airline in US has just chosen Airbuses. These aircraft are at the centre of a trade dispute between EU and US. Just as production cost is hard to measure in dumping disputes, so are subsidies. However, the allegations from Boeing are of European government subsidies for Airbus.

Some jobs might be lost at Boeing, but many more might be created by the extra trade facilitated by cheap aircraft. Using EU tax to facilitate growth in US seems bizarre, and the US economy will no doubt appreciate the generosity of EU taxpayers in providing it with cheap aircraft. The EU would do well to consider if its subsidy to aircraft manufacture, or agriculture for that matter, might create more growth and employment in the EU if spent differently.

A rational examination of what subsidies cost, the distortion they cause to markets, and how the money might otherwise be used, might do more to liberalise trade than the current WTO with its halting deregulation and failed negotiations. Its all-night deliberations seem more geared to retaining employment in its own offices than in getting to the root of trade problems

There might be less acceptance of support for 'national flag carriers' if more people knew what their full cost was. Meantime, US passengers who fly Airbus might give silent thanks to EU taxpayers (like me) who help them get such good value.

Computing, the newspaper for IT professionals, is skeptical of the government's ID card proposals. In its editorial in this week's issue, under the headline Government is data obsessed, it says:

The government - and particularly Home Secretary David Blunkett - have become dangerously obsessive about data-centric solutions to any social issue.

In the same publication, Michael Gubbins writes:

What, how, why and when we collect data is one of society's biggest issues but we're all too busy staying afloat in the floods of emails and bloody texts to see it.

The difficulties will become apparent when they touch our lives. My prediction is that we will all eventually have reason to rue the obsessive policies of our dataholic Home Secretary Mr Blunkett.

Every time the Daily Mail writes a headline, he sees a database.

I don't believe that anyone has a clue how the data will be effectively managed or accessed, what the political and legal implications might be, how much money we will have to spend feeding the beast, or how many ghastly cock-ups will occur.

What I can see is a clear image of an unkempt, overweight burned out Big Brother shovelling in the Prozac.

All handguns were banned in Britain a few years back, in response to a massacre of schoolchildren. Since then the amount of gun crime has soared. It seems to be mostly a city thing related to drug gang territories, and involving young men with illegal handguns or automatic weapons. One response has been to seek tighter restrictions on shotguns, even though they are rarely featured in such crimes.

Britain has fairly few road accident deaths by international standards, but some are caused by drunk drivers. There is a campaign to lower the legal blood alcohol limit for drivers from 80 milligrams per 100 millitres of blood to 50 milligrams. A large proportion of the deaths is caused by repeat offenders who are several times over the legal limit. There is no evidence that any deaths are caused by drivers with between 50 and 80 milligrams of alcohol in their blood.

The desire is there to do something about difficult problems, but because it is difficult to do something which would help solve them, people do something else instead. It is a kind of displacement activity whose main function seems to be one of satisfying an activist urge, even where the action taken will make little or no difference. People often say "But we must do something." It might make more sense, though, if the action targetted the young men shooting off handguns and automatics in city streets, rather than those shooting pigeons in forests. It might make similar sense to try to keep serial drunks out of cars instead of hounding respectable motorists who don’t kill people.

Some of the campaigns pursued by the environmentalist lobby seem to derive from a similar urge to 'do something,' even when that something bears scant relationship with the objective.

It's official. Burt Rutan has announced that Scaled Composites will make a bid for the X-Prize on September 29th and October 4th. The prize will award $10m to the team which can take 3 people (or weight equivalent) over the 100km (62.5 mile) frontier into space, and repeat the exercise within two weeks.

Rutan's dates are significant, as usual. His planned second trip is within 5 days of the first, well inside the two-week deadline, giving him time for another throw if one is aborted. More to the point is that October 4th marks the dawn of the space age with the launch of Sputnik One.

Now, making a private manned flight to win the prize some 47 years after that flight, Rutan is telling us that this is the dawn of the private space age. He is the favourite, but others are on his heels, including the da Vinci project whose balloon-launched rocket will be unveiled in August and fired soon thereafter.

Very soon there will be private customers (including me) paying money for space trips to non-government builders and operators of spacecraft. This money will act as a spur to develop new vehicles, and to bring spaceflight within the domain or more and more people. It is the market's next frontier, as well as mankind's.

Regular visitors to the Institute may notice a couple of new faces from next week. Sam Nguyen and Xander Stephenson will be joining us having recently completed their A-Levels, and will be heading off to university after a gap year with us.

The ASI gap year is an opportunity to develop skills and widen horizons, and of course, earn some money. The job involves working on every aspect of the Institute's work, including administration, dealing with journalists' queries, replying to the Institute's mail, writing 'think pieces' and organizing events.

Richard Wake, an undergraduate from Southampton University, took a gap year with us for part of the year and then went visiting Grenada studying turtles. He sent us this picture.

If there were any word in the English language that could be forgotten, my choice would be the world 'inevitable'. It is used habitually to refer to ends that are not inevitable, and is used to discourage others from arguing against something. It is used simply as a morale-basher.

In the mid to late 1990s, we were told by pro-EU campaigners that Britain's use of the Euro was inevitable. Those who opposed the Euro were supposed to leave the debate with their tails between their legs because they were wasting their time. Instead, the supporters of Sterling fought an excellent campaign, and the government has put the Euro off the agenda. What was once 'inevitable' is now extremely unlikely. Fortunately, I have not yet seen anyone claim that British adoption of the EU constitution is inevitable.

I noticed at the weekend Action on Smoking and Health describe a government ban on smoking in pubs and restaurants as 'inevitable'. It certainly might happen. But people also said a ban in Washington was inevitable, and these people helped defeat it - for now. The power of individuals to beat the 'inevitable' should not be underestimated.

Britain has easily survived a major world downturn, inflation is low, house prices are booming, and there's almost no unemployment. Our economy seems to be going famously.

But is it? No, says George Trefgarne. There is one solid indicator of an economy's health and of what future investors think is going to happen - the stockmarket. How much are people actually prepared to pay for a piece of the action in British Business.

But the FTSE is languishing as it has been for months, still below its level when Labour came to power 7 years ago. Perhaps wily investors see that the economy is being sustained by huge public borrowing which is spent on civil-service jobs rather than productive ones. Expect more interest-rate and tax rises soon, then a long hangover as we realize that it was a false boom, built on politicians' promises rather than businesspeople's hard work.

We're bringing together the expertise of 100 policy experts, businesspeople, parliamentarians and commentators to take part in The Omega Project. This is a major initiative which will produce a complete policy blueprint for modernising Britain. It will examine key policy areas such as health, education, crime, transport, regulation, and taxation.

If you'd like more information, download this PDF.

Our favourite blog this week is a newcomer called The Commons. Astute readers will have guessed that this is an environmental blog, named after the famous 1968 Garrett Hardin essay, The Tragedy of the Commons. The blog itself looks at how market mechanisms can solve environmental problems - solutions that are often ignored by environmental pressure groups, despite their effectiveness.

The Commons has a team of over 20 contributors who are noted experts on environmental policy. Go and take a look.

It seems that the state - which already has a dismal record in running a pensions business, a hospital business, a disability and unemployment insurance business, or a mail-delivery business - now wants to get into the home-loan business too.

According to a Sunday Telegraph report, pensioners will be allowed to supplement their income by cashing in the equity on their homes, under a state-backed scheme approved by Labour policy makers. They could borrow up to 40 per cent of the property value in return for a weekly payment.

The scheme would be managed by local councils. And let's face it, they're not much good in running an education business, a housing business, or even a garbage-collection business. Spare us.

"Special interest politics is a simple game. A hundred people sit in a circle, each with his pocket full of pennies. A politician walks around the outside of the circle, taking a penny from each person. No one minds; who cares about a penny? When he has gotten all the way around the circle, the politician throws fifty cents down in front of one person, who is overjoyed at the unexpected windfall. That process is repeated, ending with a different person. After a hundred rounds everyone is a hundred cents poorer, fifty cents richer, and happy." - David Friedman (via Conservative Commentary)

People are right to be alarmed about the superbug, MRSA (methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus). Britain's National Health Service thinks it's killing off 5,000 people a year by allowing this nasty infection to get into patients' bloodstream. But many more may die of it, undiagnosed.

As James Bartholomew points out in a Sunday Telegraph article, bloodstream MRSA is entirely a disease of our state health system. Compare BMI Healthcare: it runs 47 private hospitals, treating a million patients a year. How many of them have left with MRSA in the blood? None. Ever.

Monopolies breed complacency, inefficiency, sloppiness and low standards. It seems out state healthcare monopoly is breeding something far worse. Poor staff training, insufficient cleanliness, the persistence of open wards that compromise not just patients' privacy but now their immune systems - blame what you will. But the root cause is the state monopoly. Time to break it up.

The UK government has no idea how to finance local government. Only about 25% of it is raised locally (versus 62% in the US, and 66% in France and Germany).

Suggestions were floated in the last two weeks that Council Tax (on the value of homes) might be dramatically increased, especially on high value property. As Alister Heath points out in The Business, this would amount to a 1% property tax introduced by stealth. Having taken as much of your income as they can get away with, they now turn their attention to your assets. Few things are more destructive of growth and wealth creation than the depletion capital pools by taxation.

Heath revealingly points out that UK property taxes are already among the highest in the developed world. He quotes OECD figures which put property-related taxes at 4.42% of the UK's GDP in 2001. Comparable figures were only 3.05% in the US, 3.09% in France, 2.7% in Australia, and only 0.84% in Germany.

The ideas floated attracted such hostility that the government kicked them into touch until after the next election. The Adam Smith Institute's proposal (PDF) is to refashion the VAT which the national government collects on most goods and services (but not food) into a local government sales tax. It has the advantage that it is easily collected via cash registers, and does not suddenly impose huge bills which people have not planned for and cannot afford.

Our paper on the subject deals with some of the potential plus and minus points. Like many ASI policy ideas, it might have to wait a little before it is eagerly taken up by both parties, but the take-up rate is accelerating!

Iain Murray writes in National Review about a certain country trying to politicize scientific debate:

The scene was a scientific workshop set up to discuss the science of global warming. It took place in a non-Western country and was convened by the country's Academy of Sciences. Delegates came from all over the world. Yet the delegation from one major Western power behaved in a most undiplomatic fashion. The way the science was being presented was inconvenient to their political agenda, so they tried to get the scientists they disagreed with silenced. The organizers refused, so the delegation went to its government to exert political pressure. The organizers still refused, so the delegation disrupted the conference. When it became apparent they weren't going to get their way, they walked out.

And which country are we talking about? Check out the full article.

The Social Affairs Unit Blog makes an interesting argument about AIDS in Africa. It says that the principal force against AIDS in Africa is not African leaders, but the lobbying of homosexuals in the West. Their work means "sufficient funding has been provided to make the development, by Western pharmaceutical companies, of a vaccine to fight the spread of Aids a real possibility."

Britain's Conservatives have just published a very smart little book called Towards a Lifetime of Saving. The idea is to give people a personal lifetime account, with a bit of government money thrown in to encourage people to add to it when they can. You can use it to save up for your retirement (and you keep everything you save - no means-testing it away like today's pension savings. But you can also dip into it through your lifetime, for things like illness, buying a house, or paying college fees.

It's a good idea. Well, I would say that, because it's remarkably similar to an idea that the Adam Smith Institute developed nine years ago, called the Fortune Account.

Indeed, it's been a good two weeks for ASI policies. Both Labour and Conservatives have adopted the choice agenda for health and education that we worked up 22 years ago. The government has endorsed another proposal we have been pushing for decades, using road user charges to replace fuel duty and car tax. The CBI revived our idea of upping the state pension (and the pension age) to overcome today's perverse incentives against saving.

Now, if only we could get politicians to adopt our proposals for slashing tax and regulation, we'd be in good shape!

Britain's parliamentary Education Committee whines about the "evils" of selection. But in the US, there are no such doubts. This Education Department website lists the benefits of the many "Charter Schools" - independently run but publicly funded.

The fact that students are never assigned to a charter school, but are there as a conscious choice, helps create a voluntary civic community... the tremendous commitment on the part of the teachers, parents, community members, administrators, and students is palpable.

And selection doesn't mean academic selection. It means parents being able to choose a school that is right for their child. In many Charter Schools, the mission is to prepare low-income, urban students... students who enrol with below-grade skills but who aspire - and get to - college. Others reject the traditional academic agenda and "strive to educate the whole person, mind, body and will for peace, justice, freedom, compassion, wholeness and fullness of life."

"The way we are going about closing the achievement gap for our kids," says Roxbury Prep's principal on the site, "simply would not be possible under the present confines of the public school system."

Visits to classrooms in these charter schools found students engaged, on task, and learning. A strong, clearly articulated purpose focuses the work, creates a pervasive positive spirit, and promotes consistent expectations from class to class.

At each of these schools, the culture forged around a shared educational vision creates a strong sense of community. Parents choose to send their children, and students know why they are there.

Don Boudreaux, Chairman of the Economics Department at George Mason University, writes:

Jobs are ubiquitous; there's no shortage of them. One job that I often offer to people is the job of painting my house for free. Of course, no one will accept this job. The reason is that people don't want the job so much as they want to acquire purchasing power.

Therefore, "creating jobs" is not the real challenge. Jobs are everywhere. The real challenge is creating widespread opportunities for earning large and growing purchasing power.

And thus attempts to create jobs by policies like France's maximum 35-hour week miss the point.

Education blogger Brian Micklethwait is rather skeptical of government attempts to solve problems by appointing 'tsars'. On the appointment of a Bullying Tsar, he writes:

There is something especially absurd about the idea of a Bullying Tsar. This is reminiscent of Lenin's classic solution to the problem of bureaucracy in early revolutionary Russia: he appointed a committee to look into it.

Is the appointment of Tsars just a government attempt look like it is dealing with problems it can't solve? Or is it a way of cutting through the bureaucratic mess it has got itself into?

Do readers have any evidence that any of the government's Tsars have been a success?

This year marks many important anniversaries. One of them is the end of the BBC radio monopoly in 1964, forty years ago. The BBC had offered a diet of such treats as Music While You Work. It rarely allowed youngsters to listen to pop music, partly because it loftily disapproved, and partly because it was under the thumb of the musicians' union, which allowed only a tiny amount of 'needle time,' and insisted on music mostly from live (non-famous) musicians.

The BBC boasted of the popularity of its Sunday Family Favourites programme, its weekly concession to pop records. Meanwhile teenagers turned in desperation to Radio Luxembourg, which broadcast pop from Europe with variable reception.

Then came Ronan O'Rahilly (pictured). He wanted to promote new pop talent, but this was impossible on the BBC, and Luxembourg was block-booked by record labels to promote established artists. O'Rahilly's response was to start his own radio station, broadcasting from a ship moored outside UK territorial waters and UK jurisdiction. It was an early example of off-shoring. Forty years ago Radio Caroline began to broadcast a lively mixture of pop and DJ chatter.

It proved so popular that within a year it had been joined by several other 'pirate stations,' as they came to be affectionately called. The BBC lost its monopoly and its audience. The Labour government, with the same sensitivity as it now shows to popular liberties, brought in a law to outlaw any support, supply or advertising on the new stations. The others closed down as the act became law, but Caroline famously stayed on the air illegally. O'Rahilly, having started it, wanted to finish it.

In the 1970 election it broadcast loudly against the government, and contributed to a shock defeat for the government. The swing to the Tories was noticeably higher in the districts within range of Caroline. The Tories had opted to let youngsters have their way, and were pledged to legalize commercial radio stations to play pop music. It happened, the BBC monopoly was broken, and the sound of UK radio changed forever.

It took courage by Ronan O'Rahilly, and by his top DJs Johnnie Walker and Robbie Dale, among others. They made a difference, and it is worth remembering with some affection, forty years on, the role that Radio Caroline played.

A Spanish edition of our book Hayek: A Commemorative Album has recently been published by Foment del Teball Nacional in Barcelona. This supplements Canadian, Italian, Korean and English editions. Here is part of the blurb from the back of the book (but translated into English):

This book illustrates the life and work of Freidrich Hayek, Nobel Laureate in Economics and the twentieth century's leading thinker on liberalism. In the book, John Raybold brings together for the first time a unique collection of photographs and documents from the Hayek family archives, many of them never before published.

Here is my list of the 10 greatest Scots of all time. Of course, there are infinite criteria on which one might base such a list, but since this is my list, I have chosen the following: those writers and thinkers who have contributed most to our appreciation of human nature, our understanding of society and, of course, our ongoing quest to live in freedom. So here it is, my list (in ascending order) of the 10 Great Scots:

10. David Livingstone (1813-1873) was born in Blantyre, south of Glasgow. Despite growing up in poverty, he studied Medicine and Theology at the University of Glasgow. Livingstone became a doctor and scientist, and one of the great explorers of the African continent. He aimed to introduce Christianity and legitimate commerce to Africa, and struggled for the abolition of slavery. Livingstone's motto as he crossed Africa was 'Christianity, Civilisation, and Commerce.'

9. John Witherspoon (1723-1794) was born in Gifford, Haddingtonshire. His father was a Parish Minister, and John became a minister himself, after attending Edinburgh University. In 1768, he emigrated to the United States, where he became President of Princeton University, a post he held until his death in 1794. Witherspoon fought for American Independence and, as a representative from the state of New Jersey, was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He also coined the term 'Americanism'.

The public sector union Unison has announced that a deal has been struck with the government to end "two-tier workforces".

That is, that staff recruited when public services are outsourced would have to be given terms no less favourable than those enjoyed by the staff whose contracts are transferred.

So - apart from the fact that outsourced workers may be better managed - there is very little point in departments trying to cut costs and raise service quality by outsourcing. Any outsource workers have to be paid exactly what they'd have got in the equivalent cushy Whitehall job, plus all the tea-breaks and holidays (and no doubt index-linked pensions) too.

Great for civil servants. But very bad for taxpayers and service users.

Some years ago, the trade unions tried to stop privatization by just the same method, promoting the 'TUPE' transfer-of-undertakings rules. Again, the idea was that a privatized company would have to have identical employment practices, so there wasn't much point in privatizing anything, was there?

Add in all the recent working-hours and Social Chapter legislation, and it's plain that Britain's workplaces are becoming as sclerotic as those in continental Europe.

On a recent trip to Washington, I met Will Wilkinson who was very proudly showing his "Keep it Coolidge" t-shirt. Coolidge was a US President who is sometimes regarded as someone who didn't do anything. But as the Mises Institute points out, he cut income tax from 65% to 20%, and was good all-rounder, pursuing a free-market agenda.

A couple of years back I met Sir John Cowperthwaite, who had served as Financial Secretary of Hong Kong from 1961 to 1971. P J O'Rourke wrote this about the man:

The British government had accidentally sent the right man to Hong Kong. No one at Whitehall seemed to notice that the young colonial officer John Cowperthwaite was without sympathy for Labour Party aims and ideals. Cowperthwaite came to Hong Kong in 1945, charged with stimulating a recovery of the economy. A Far Eastern Economic Review article about him, written some fifty years later, said, "He found it recovering quite nicely without him." Cowperthwaite rose through the bureaucracy, becoming the colony's Financial Secretary in 1961; he held that post for ten years. Owing in large part to his efforts, Hong Kong has virtually no import or export duties, no restrictions on capital flow, no capital-gains tax, no tax on interest, and no sales tax. The personal income tax is a flat 15 percent, and the corporate tax is a flat 16 percent of profits. Hong Kong has produced perhaps the most dramatic expansion of human wealth in history. Cowperthwaite told the Far Eastern Economic Review, "I did very little. All I did was try to prevent some of the things that might undo it."

So I asked Cowperthwaite what it was like to follow an economic policy of 'doing nothing'. "It was a lot of work," he said.

We should congratulate the government on contemplating UK-wide road-pricing. It's much fairer and it will reduce congestion. But it needs a simpler system than the satellite tracking systems being proposed; roadside systems which scan a smart-card in the car window are perfectly adequate, and quicker to bring in. And crucially, it should replace car and fuel taxes, not just supplement them (sorry, all you Treasury guys, we're on to that wheeze).

Our research in The Road from Inequity shows that rural drivers in particular pay three times too much for the modest congestion, pollution, accidents, and noise nuisance they cause, while peak-time city drivers pay too little. A fairer system would be one where car tax and fuel duty are replaced by charges which vary according to people's actual road usage.

Road pricing will prompt people to use the roads more efficiently, and travel off-peak if they can, relieving road congestion. The money raised will fund road improvements. Let's hope the government's acceptance of this principle leads to its adoption on a nationwide basis.

Free-marketeers and friends of Dr Laurence Hayek will be shocked and saddened to learn of his sudden death at the age of 70. A very practical microbiologist who always thought economic theory completely bamboozling, he was of course the son of the Nobel Laureate in Economics, Friedrich Hayek.

In later years he became a sort of roving representative for his father's life and work, appearing all round the world on platforms alongside other Nobel laureates (Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, Gary Becker...) and prominent people like EU-Commissioner Fritz Bolkestein, former president of the German Central Bank Hans Tietmeyer, Lord Harris of High Cross, Professor Ralf Dahrendorf, and many more.

I saw him last a few weeks back, at an evening seminar to mark the 60th anniversary of the publication of his father's book The Road to Serfdom. As usual, he had brought an impressive (and priceless) assortment of family memorabilia, including early photographs, the Nobel Prize certificate, various medals, and of course the legendary manuscript copy of The Road to Serfdom itself.

Larry Hayek had been very kind in lending much of this material to the Adam Smith Institute during the preparation of our illustrated biography of his father, Hayek: A Commemorative Album by John Raybould. He had become a good friend and is bitterly missed.

If Gordon Brown needs further evidence of Department of Trade and Industry ineptitude, he should look at their draft regulations for directors' reports to shareholders. Until now these "operating and financial reviews" have been guided by the Accounting Standards Board's advisory codes.

Now the DTI is using the 2003 EU Modernisation Directive to mandate how directors should report, and has gold-plated four EU paragraphs into 132 pages of muddle. For example, they want companies to set out their future strategies - though not, of course, in terms that would give information to their competitors.

Indeed, the DTI appears to have lost touch completely with what business is about. The words 'customer' or 'consumer' do not appear at all in the draft regulations. The consultative document mentions the business 'environment' (which directors can do nothing about and shareholders can see for themselves) 38 times and mentions 'strategy/ies' 22 times. It makes no mention at all of 'competitors' or 'market share' or even 'cash flow'.

Yet cash flow is what shareholders most care about, since its creation is what pays the workforce, suppliers, and ultimately their dividends. One might say that the DTI have lost their fox but that presumes they ever knew where the fox was. Their consultation period ends 5 August, so investors and directors should let their hounds loose now.

Britain's Chancellor Gordon Brown announced "more cash for science and research" in his spending plans last week. But should universities applaud this apparent new largesse for science, which comes to them via the DTI?

The money won't go only to science nor to the best research. Universities UK demands research funding is spent evenly by region, university and subject matter. Favouring productive research units is unfair, apparently.

Brown is only giving with his left hand what his right is taking away from universities through other channels. If he cannot get his hands to meet, why should universities applaud? He is micro-managing how universities spend their money and building a huge and wasteful research bureaucracy in the process.

Where is the analysis of taxpayer value in research and university funding? The government's research funding process gives poor returns for taxpayers, and would be better if it rewarded those universities that specialize in what they are good at.

Gene Healy has tried out a different US supermarket:

There's this pejorative phrase, "market worship." Well, having just visited Wegman's, the temple of the great god Market, sign me up for the cult. As Tyler Cowen put it, Wegman's "makes Whole Foods look like a 7-11." The first 15 minutes in the store, I couldn't buy anything, my circuits were so fried by the obscene abundance around me. I wanted to jump through bins of sausage and bruschetta cackling madly like Scrooge McDuck. I wanted to make myself a hidey-hole behind some cereal boxes, and stay burrowed away until the store closed, and then eat myself sick all night like a dog.

So competition in the food industry brings good results. Much of the world has too little food, but in capitalist economies we have to deal instead with obesity. It's odd that while we let food be open to competition, we try to limit competition in other essential things like health and education. Maybe we need a little less 'government worship'.

Our top blog spot this week goes to Hit and Run. It is published by Reason, the ultra-hip libertarian magazine edited by the excellent Nick Gillespie. The whole Reason team writes for Hit and Run, and - like the magazine - it takes conventional wisdom and stomps all over it.

Some of the team have personal blogs of note, too. Jesse Walker writes The Perpetual Three Dot Column; Julian "Leisure Suit Larry" Sanchez writes Notes from the Lounge; and Matt Welch writes over here.

A Welsh village called Llanfynydd is applying to change its name to Llanhyfryddawelllehynafolybarcudprindanfygythiadtrienusyrhafnauole in protest against the installation of wind farms. The new name will be the longest placename in Britain and apparently means: "A quiet beautiful village, an historic place with rare Kite under threat from wretched blades".

Polly Toynbee gets her facts wrong when arguing we need to integrate further into the EU:

Average wages in western Europe are far higher than ours, their standard of living better, yet we brag about our brief recent economic growth while conveniently forgetting how far behind we remain.

But Scott Burgess points out:

Polly must have missed the latest report from Eurostat (PDF), which states that "the MS [EU member states] with the highest level of earnings are Denmark and the United Kingdom."

If we compare "Average gross annual earnings in industry and services of full-time employees in enterprises with 10 or more employees," we find that, of European countries, only Switzerland, Norway and Denmark have higher earning levels. Indeed, 2001 figures (the latest complete dataset) put UK earnings at 22% higher than the 15 nation EU average. "Far higher," one might even say.

Finally, National Review says:

I note that poor Polly also refers to the UK's veto-wielding position on the UN Security council as "unearned." Now, it's quite possible to argue (I wouldn't, but it's at least possible) that the UK should no longer have that role, but to call it "unearned" seems a little hard on the Brits, at least to anyone who recalls what happened between 1939 and 1945. Something, about a war, I think.

(Thanks to National Review Online for pointing out this story.)

In the UK’s The Business (not on line) Eric Culp reports that Sweden’s very high tax rates coincide with a black market estimated at 18.7% of GDP. Germany has 16.8%, France 14.8%, and the UK 12.3%. (The figures are from Friedrich Schneider of Austria’s Linz University).

Sweden’s Systembolaget has a state monopoly on beer, wine and liquor. Despite a steady rise in alcohol consumption (10% up this year alone), Systembolaget has seen sales plummet 5.2% in 2003. Its contribution to state coffers last year was SKr138m, down two-thirds in five years.

The state monopoly does not take credit cards, and customers have to take a number and wait in line to be served. That reminds me of something. Meanwhile the cross-border traffic from Denmark and Germany is brisk and vigorous, albeit illegal.

A similar effect is visible in many countries, including the UK. Raised alcohol taxes produce more smuggling and diminished revenues. Adam Smith knew that; I know that, and you know that. Why don’t governments know it?

The government says that identity cards will:

help protect people from identity theft - it can take the average victim 300 hours to put their records straight.

It is a real pain for people when criminals go through their rubbish and find out personal information - which helps them take control of bank accounts etc. But if you want to stop this from happening, there's a low-cost option: buy a shredder. On the high street, you can buy a shredder for £5.99. That's a hell of a lot cheaper - and rather more convenient - than the government ID scheme.

Why do people recycle newsprint when the practice is so bad for the environment? The collection and transportation of the stuff uses fossil fuels and causes atmospheric pollution. The treatment of the pulp leaches both bleach and chemical pollutants into the environment, and uses energy. Even at the end the resultant recycled paper is of lower quality.

Some people seem to suppose that by recycling paper they are saving trees, but the opposite is often true. Paper is mostly made from trees planted for the purpose, and it is young trees that soak up most of the carbon dioxide. If those trees are not planted, that carbon is not soaked up. Nor is it if they are not harvested and replaced.

Recycling paper may make people feel good, but gesture politics can be environmentally unfriendly. Should the planet as a whole pay so that a few can enjoy feeling good? Or should those who enjoy the gesture pay for the consequences of their actions?

No doubt some would argue for a paper recycling charge. A dollar a ton could be levied on those who recycle paper, and used to plant more young trees to undo the damage caused. (Maybe not.)