Another dreadful set of figures from Britain's postal monopoly, the Royal Mail, showing just how few first-class letters arrive the next day. We pay extra for a first-class stamp, in the hope and expectation that our letters will arrive next day... but they don't.

The media today are full of a national debate. Should second-class mail be scrapped? Should we pay even more for first-class mail, in return for a genuine guarantee of next-day delivery? Should Royal Mail be spending money differently? And so on.

It's exactly like the national debates we had on all those old nationalized industries - coal, steel, shipbuilding, gas, water, electricity, car-making and the rest. And equally sterile. As Douglas Mason said in his ASI report The Last Post, what we need is competition in mail delivery. Then private mail carriers would be innovating services so rapidly that we wouldn't have time for a national debate on it. Carriers would quickly discover the service levels that people wanted, and what they were prepared to pay for them, because that's how they would make their money.

There's nothing special about the business of delivering the mail? Why should we continue to run it as a protected, privileged - and poor-service - monopoly?

Britain's National Audit Office - the watchdog on public spending - says it's going to investigate the National Health Service's £6.2 billion computerization project.

Well it might. The history of public-sector IT procurement is disastrous. New systems for National Insurance, air traffic control, and child support were all disasters. Thanks to Whitehall. Civil servants seem to get enormous mind-game delight in elaborating the most intricately convoluted specs - then buy expensive custom-made IT to fit them. (Then, usually, shell out even more taxpayers' funds to get the stuff actually working.)

The NHS has been talking about IT for years. The current system aims to give us all electronic patient records - right now there are just enormous (and often, lost) paper files, if you can believe anything so Dickensian. It was supposed to be up and working by June, and the NHS says it is in some parts of the country, but they won't tell us which ones in order to spare them from 'media intrusion'. The truth is that, like most government IT projects, the whole thing is over-centralized and over-complicated. We'd have been better - and cheaper - to give every doctor and nurse a web-enabled laptop and let them evolve systems from the bottom up, rather than trust civil-servants to design a perfect system from the top down.

UK public holidays were introduced as Bank holidays in 1871, with the intention of giving the poor a day off for reading and self-improvement. The poor improved their complexions instead by sunning themselves on the beaches, and have done so since. These days, however, the August public holiday is often punctuated more by the rhythmic whir of windscreen wipers than by the distant call of seagulls.

Paul Simons, who writes the Weather Eye for the Times, pleads for the August holiday to be moved to the first Monday, as it used to be, on the grounds that the weather is better. My colleague Eamonn Butler thinks the whole concept of public holidays is outdated (see below), cramming everyone as they do onto overcrowded roads and facilities.

As one who prefers the cool scents of Autumn to either blazing heat or driving rain, I cannot pretend to be objective, but I would like to put in a case for moving the spring public holiday. We have quite a few around that time, including Easter and Whitsun. It was superfluous when the Mayday holiday was added to them to honour labour (and by a Labour government).

It always seemed significant that Europeans celebrate labour in Spring, the time of planting and promise. The US celebrates it in autumn when the harvest is in. The former takes place in hope, the latter in achievement. Mayday is a socialist holiday, full of expectation of what might be. US Labour Day seems to be a more capitalist holiday, celebrating wealth which has already been garnered. Socialism promises, capitalism performs.

If further argument were needed, I could add that Mayday in Britain is rarely warm enough for a picnic or barbecue, whereas September nearly always is.

A dilemma for some holding centre-left views is that they believe in the principle of state education for all, but feel an obligation to their children to send them to the best school possible. Some conclude that sending their children privately would not happen in an ideal world ("if only the government delivered on its promise of a first class education system") but that here and now they have to go private.

Others choose to send their children to state schools, some of them rather sanctimoniously telling anyone who will listen about how they made a sacrifice in order to stand up for their principles.

Of course, these wealthy middle-class leftists who send their children to state schools do not send them to failing schools. They send them to the very best ones. The consequence is that they take up places that would have otherwise been taken by less well off children. By refusing to go private, they make other children have a worse education. Of course, they have paid for state education through their taxes, so they have a legitimate claim to it. But all the sanctimony about promoting the greater good is a bit much.

August Bank Holiday weekend again, it's raining (predictably) and all the TV experts are forecasting enormous traffic jams on the motorways, overcrowding on the trains, and delays at the airports.

Why do we do it? Bank holidays were introduced decades and decades ago in order to ensure that the humblest manual workers got at least some days off. Since in those days it was a cash economy, if you closed the banks then businesses couldn't operate, and they would have to give their workers a day off. But things have changed. Many, perhaps most, shops stay open throughout bank holiday weekends, and public transport (for what it's worth) keeps on running.

Meanwhile, those of us in factories and offices use it as a good opportunity (or excuse) for an excursion to the beach, and as we all head lemming-like in the same direction at the same time, large parts of the country grind into gridlock.

Do we really need a bank holiday in August, when so many people take August holidays anyway? Do we really need two holiday weekends in May, hot on the heels of the Easter Bank Holiday weekend?

Bank holidays are an anachronism. By all means have a regulation that employers must offer their staff reasonable holiday entitlements. But let workers take those holidays as and when they and their employers decide, and spare us all that transport gridlock. Maybe the weather might improve, too.

Earlier this year, the UK government published proposals on setting up a new law on the Marine Historic Environment. True, the present law is a mess. Salvage allows anyone to break off bits of an unknown wreck and then claim the whole wreck: hardly conducive to protecting historic sites. Against that there is a Protection of Wrecks Act, another on military remains, not to mention the various powers of English Heritage.

But the government's proposals are no less confused. It shows no way of defusing this tension. At one point they call for less restrictions on diving ('access' is the buzz-word), at another they call for site designation and reporting rules that would probably deter all but the most dedicated recreational divers.

English Heritage would no doubt love to have a taxpayer-funded team of expert archaeologist-divers and drive 'amateur' recreational divers off the sites. But let's remember that 95% of the historic wrecks that have been found were discovered by those same recreational divers. And the seabed is always moving and scattering archaeological remains. By the time officialdom has donned its snorkel, the evidence would probably be lost. Sorry, but this is another case where the amateurs - ordinary people with a real enthusiasm for what they do - are better than distant, tax-funded 'experts'.

Some have wondered why Britain seems so prosperous, and supposed it is all done on record debt and over-inflated house prices. "Wait for the crash," they say. Yet Anatole Kaletsky in today's Times thinks otherwise. (non-UK readers may find the link difficult to access, so I will summarize)

After a century of relative decline, suddenly Britain has turned around. In less than a generation, Britain has overtaken Italy, France and even Germany in terms of per capita income. Britain’s unexpected good fortune was due to the confluence of three separate events, says Kaletsky.

First came the Thatcher reforms which constrained union power and gave us a flexible market economy. Second came the change in monetary policy when we stopped trying to maintain parity with other currencies. The big events were Britain's crashing out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, and the granting of independence to the Bank of England.

Third, says Kaletsky, have been changes at global level. Goods that Britain imports, such as mass manufactures, are become cheaper, whereas

The things that Britain has always had an advantage in selling to the world — financial services, scientific research, education, entertainment and so on — are rising in price. Because of this shift in relative prices, the British people have effectively enjoyed a large pay increase without having to work any harder.

The three factors identified by Kaletsky seem real enough. None by itself would have sufficed, but the three taken in unison have helped reverse a century of relative decline. Meanwhile our European friends do not share our success. They have not grasped the nettle of market reform, or given their currencies freedom of movement, nor gained from globalization to the same extent.

Of course nothing lasts, either in politics or economics. But for the present, says Kaletsky, Britain's prosperity is no illusion.

David Hume died on this day in 1776. He was, by my reckoning, the greatest philosopher of the empirical school. I chose his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding as one of my all-time greatest books. I said:

What a joy it is to watch an intelligent mind thinking. Hume asks how we know things, and starts with himself. He muses about the status of sensory inputs. What is it that happens when we think we see something? We suppose the presence of an external world as the source of the inputs to our senses, but what evidence have we other than those senses themselves?

Hume concludes that our knowledge is more tentative than we suppose. His Enquiry is thus an ultimate anti-system book, with a covert sub-text of liberalism. If knowledge is that hesitant, wherein comes the authority to insist upon systems and to impose them?

Adam Smith, remembering him in a letter to William Strachan, delivered a famous epitaph:

Thus died our most excellent, and never to be forgotten friend; concerning whose philosophical opinions men will, no doubt, judge variously...but concerning whose character and conduct there can scarce be a difference of opinion... Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.

In an attempt not to make any child feel like a failure, proponents of progressive education attacked competitive sports. Their ideas are more than adequately described by this quotation from Lewis Carrol's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:

There was no 'One, two, three, and away,' but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out 'The race is over!' and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, 'But who has won?'

This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, 'EVERYBODY has won, and all must have prizes.'

Fortunately, it is reported that competitive sports are now going to be encouraged within state schools.

The increase in competitive sports will not only promote the desire to win and relegate the term 'second' into being a fancy word for 'loser' but will also promote a healthier lifestyle, hopefully reducing childhood obesity.

In addition if we do end up hosting the 2012 Olympics we may have encouraged talented young athletes into competing rather than just taking part.

The Times recently published an article in which it claims that:

Since the abolition of 192 services almost a year ago, calls to directory inquiries have fallen by three million a week and confusion about the different prices of the 118 numbers has worsened.

The article also suggests that many people are now paying more for directory inquiries than with the old 192. In time prices will likely decrease, but what has gone wrong in the short term?

The regulator, OFTEL, attempted to increase competition in directory inquiries by a major shake-up. When the telecoms sector was more generally liberalized in the 1980s, competition was introduced in a more evolutionary way. Customers who did nothing remained with British Telecom (BT). Cable and Wireless's Mercury subsidiary was granted a license to compete with BT, and gradually new companies joined the market. BT, keen to keep its customers, reduced prices steadily over the following two decades. Thus, both customers who changed supplier, and also those who did not, benefited from competition.

Had 192 been allowed to continue, consumers would have been able stick with the service they knew and trusted, only switching to an alternative company if they understood it served a better price or service. It would have led to lower prices from the start and made more sense to consumers. Of course, leaving 192 in place would have given BT the benefit of inertia, but some inertia here might have helped directory inquiry competition work better.

In the Society section of today’s Guardian is a discussion of whether NHS treatment should be withheld from those who deliberately pursue unhealthy lifestyles. It mentions the footballer George Best who carried on drinking after a liver transplant, and asks if heavy smokers merit heart treatment. It says:

In some circumstances people can have duties to do things that are in their own interests, even if they may not be aware that they are and, where this is the case, they may be done by others on their behalf without their consent.

The other is the idea that we ought to avoid burdening other people unnecessarily with the costs of our care.

I am quoted in the article basically saying that the principle could lead on from smoking and drinking to other health-risk habits such as eating fatty foods and refined sugar. Furthermore, we are forced to pay for the NHS and are, including George Best, entitled to get what we paid for.

For reasons of space they did not quote me saying that it is not acceptable to take away people’s freedom by forcing them into the NHS, and then use that fact to take away more of their freedom.

One of the weekend papers reported that the government is contemplating a rise in inheritance tax, to 50% of all assets over £808,000. This, we're told, would 'raise £147m a year' and allow inheritance tax on smaller estates to be cut, meaning 9 in 10 people will pay less.

Rubbish. Rising house prices - and rising wealth generally - mean that more and more people will be caught in the top band.

And the tax won't raise anything. Indeed, death taxes have probably produced a negative return for all of their 100-year history (calculates Dr Barry Bracewell-Milnes in his ASI reports, Will to Succeed and Free Wills). Why? Because they induce people to consume their capital, spending it on things like foreign holidays, rather than maintaining it in productive assets that the government will grab 40% of. Or they devise elaborate tax shelters in which their capital is safer, but less productive. Or they just go abroad. Either way, it's the UK economy that loses out.

'The rich can afford it,' we're told. Maybe. But most folk with £808,000+ have earned it themselves, through hard work, having paid 40% income tax, plus national insurance, plus company taxes, and taxes on each employee. If they give money away, it's taxed. If they spend their riches on a larger home or car, they pay higher taxes on those too.

They might well conclude they've paid enough, and leave the country - just as many famous names (and others too) did in the 1970s, when tax rates were sky high. It took a long period of rate-cutting by Mrs Thatcher to get them, their brains, and their capital back to Britain.

Death taxes come at the worst time for families - bereavement. They cut across the fundamental human instinct to protect and provide for our offspring, family and friends. They are envy taxes which raise nothing. Indeed, they destroy capital. They should be scrapped.

Missed appointments with GPs cost the NHS more than £162m a year. So it is not surprising that a new survey indicates that almost two thirds of GPs favour fines for those who miss appointments. In today's Daily Express, I argue that a fee to see a GP would solve the problem of the 9m missed GP appointments, encouraging people to value their GP's time rather more, and also make for a better GP-patient relationship. Read the full article here.

One of the more implausible arguments used against school choice is that it would increase inequality. Greater choice probably won't do much to improve a really top-notch school like Dulwich College. Where its real effect will be is to push up the quality of education provided to those currently getting a poor education. It will enable parents to group together and take their children away from failing schools and set up a new ones. It will make failing schools improve or go out of business. The current education system - even if you take out the private sector - is unequal. Even if you just look at state comprehensive schools, there's a huge deal of inequality. If you care about equality, you should support school choice.

Socialism is a fraud. It claims to be about promoting equality, but it instead delivers inequality, misery and failure. To echo Milton Friedman, an education system that puts equality before choice will end up with neither. But a system that puts choice before equality will end up with a good measure of both.

"I'm from the Department of Education and Skills and I'm here to help," is the mentality of the staff across the road from the Adam Smith Institute in the DFES building. Their intention - of making Britain's education system work better - is a noble one. Unfortunately, they are the root problem of our education system.

I was on the BBC recently debating a spokesman from the Socialist Workers' Party who was also a teacher. He argued that workers should stand up for themselves by striking more. He said that teachers could not be expected to simply change jobs by moving to another school because all schools have the same bureaucratic structures, the same annoyances, and the same red tape. I suggested that maybe some of that was down to having a system of education centrally controlled by officials in London.

The fact is that choice in education will not only help those pupils currently dumped into sink schools, it will also be good for teachers. By taking decisions currently made by the DFES (and Local Education Authorities), and putting them instead in the hands of headteachers, there will be greater diversity in how schools work. This will give teachers more options when choosing which sort of school to work in. Ending the Department of Education and Skills is in the interests of teachers and pupils alike.

The black economy of tax fiddles and illegal working should be encouraged in deprived areas, a government-commissioned report is to claim.

The story, in London's Evening Standard of 19th Aug, says the report was commissioned by Britain's Deputy PM from academics at Leicester and Middlesex Universities.

The authors suggest that:

For deprived areas aspects of informal economic activity constitute a major resource

though it warns there are "negative aspects."

The Adam Smith Institute has often made the case that in some deprived areas it is the levels of taxation and regulation which squeeze out economic activity, or at least drive it underground. From Enterprise Zones onwards, we have suggested that some deprived areas should be given favoured treatment to allow enterprise to take root, unencumbered by the usual burdens.

A reduction in tax and regulation for small or start-up businesses could help people to take part in legitimate economic activity and become independent of state support. It's not very helpful to tax people on low incomes if all it does is keep them poor or turn them into criminals.

"Never give a bureaucrat a chance to say no."

- Morton Blackwell, The Laws of the Public Policy Process.

Bruce Bartlett explains how insourced jobs to the USA pay 16% more than the average domestic job. While some companies are coming under criticism for moving jobs abroad in reality they are simply freeing up workers who can be more gainfully employed in white collar jobs while simple manufacturing tasks are outsourced to countries such as China.

Machine diggers took the jobs of workmen with spades. At the time, there were people who objected. But on that basis, should we create jobs by replacing each man with a spade with 50 men using teaspoons? Despite specific jobs being lost, the total number of jobs has increased. On the same vein outsourcing jobs to other countries frees up labour that can then be more productively employed.

One country's outsourcing is another country's insourcing. Advantages like those apparent with international trade occur, it makes sense that if a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it off them. This is no less true with labour. According to the McKinsey Global Institute for every $1 outsourced the United States gains between $1.12-$1.14. The less developed country insourcing the jobs also experiences rising wage rates and lesser unemployment. Thus the standard of living increases in both countries.

I've just been speaking at the Mont Pelerin Society here in Salt Lake City, on the subject of immigration and diversity and how free societies should handle them.

Many people, of course, see large-scale immigration as a problem. But don't let's forget what causes so much immigration - governments. Governments over-taxing, oppressing, or brutally treating their own people. If we want to solve the 'problems' of immigration, let's spread freedom, democracy, and the wealth that they generate to the whole planet, then people wouldn't be forced to migrate.

The trouble is, people who believe in freedom don't want to be accused of imposing it on others. But frankly, unless they stand up for the values of freedom, the free society won't last long. There are too many people in the world - not just in other countries but groups within free societies themselves - who think that free choice is pure evil. Sure, we believe in free speech, but if you allow people to put up bounties and issue death threats for anyone who disagrees with some extremist views, you pretty soon won't have any free speech left anyway.

If minority groups want multiple marriage (this is Salt Lake City) or something, that's up to them. If they want to force their young girls into arranged marriages, I think we need to stand up to this coercion. And we definitely need to stand up against people, at home and abroad, who want to destroy the whole fabric of freedom.

Freedom-minded people need to stand up for freedom. If that's being culturally imperialist, well, so be it.

One of the arguments often made against greater patient and parental choice is that people are not capable of making choices on these issues. People are too stupid or too ignorant to make such choices. Or they don't care. As a result, we should leave it to others to make these choices for us.

Of course, there are those who can't be expected to make choices - someone suffering from a mental disability isn't necessarily able to decide on their treatment. The parent who will never care about their children might not care where their children go to school. But the point about choice in public services is that everyone benefits - even if not everyone is thinking about the choices on offer. Even though a parent might not care how well their children get educated (and let's face it, this is really a very small minority), because others do care, the bad schools will have to improve standards - or go bust.

Now let's take the charge that people are too ignorant to make choices. No one is suggesting that people should have to make choices in a vacuum. When you go and see your GP, they already make recommendations which treatments are available. Newspapers would publish guides to where is best to get treatment. There would be a range of measures and guides produced by organisations to help people make decisions.

The current attempts to improve public services through increased spending have delivered disappointing results. Greater choice has been tried and worked in many European countries, so why does the Left keep on opposing it here?

The Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis looks at the Economic Freedom of the World index, which measures economic freedom through 38 different components. The NCPA authors, James Gwartney & Robert Lawson, compare the performance of freer countries with the others. They conclude that for the free economies:

1. Growth is higher. Real GDP from 1993-2002 grew by 2.4% in the freer economies, but declined by 0.5% in the least free.

2. Investment and foreign direct investment per worker was 45 times greater in the free economies than the unfree.

3. Productivity of investment is 70% higher in the free economies.

4. For the poorest decile in the least free countries, per capita income was $823, against $6,877 for the poorest tenth in the free ones.

5. Income share of the poorest 10% is nearly 20% higher in the freest countries than in the least free.

6. Average life expectancy at birth is 76 years in the free countries, 54 years in the least free ones.

7. Infant mortality in 9 times lower in the freest fifth of countries than in the least free.

8. The freer countries do better in health, education, living standards and other measures.

9. The free ones have less corruption in business & government.

10. There is a correlation between economic freedom and political rights and civil liberties.

Some of these points might be somewhat chicken-and-egg, in that countries score low because they are poor, rather than because they are unfree. But that difference might not be accidental.

I'm indebted to Prof Parth Shah from New Delhi, for explaining to me that I'm a Terracotta.

If you're a green, you believe in wildlife (without humans) and wilderness, you want to change attitudes, you believe in communal ownership.

If you're a Teracotta - a material which comes from the earth, but only through the medium of human agency, you believe that humans are part of the world ecology, that you want to see wise use of environmental resources rather than mere wilderness, that you want to change incentives (rather than the minds of politicians) and that private ownership and property rights are probably the best way to protect scarce things, like the environment. Makes sense to me.

The government's Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, has spoken out against government's attitude to information collection. According to today's Times of London, he is particularly worried about the identity card scheme, a separate Office for National Statistics population register and a database of every child.

"My anxiety is that we don't sleepwalk into a surveillance society where much more information is collected about people, accessible to far more people shared across many more boundaries than British society would comfortable."

According to The Times, Mr Thomas highlights his concerns by pointing to the former communist regimes in Eastern Europe and Franco's Spain.

"I don't want to start talking paranoia language, but data protection has a strong continental flavour," he says. "Some of my counterparts in Eastern Europe, in Spain, have experience in the last century what can happen when government gets too powerful and has too much information."

I wonder if the government is regretting Mr Thomas's appointment.

To appreciate the beauty of the Isle of Arran, you have to leave it. Rio, Hong Kong and Sydney may have greater scale, but the northern light on those craggy peaks and the Victorian gothic castle peeking over the forests sweeping down to the silver sea of Brodick Bay are truly romantic.

Twenty-four hours of travel later and I'm in Salt Lake City, about as far from that as you can be. I'm here for the Mont Pelerin Society, founded by the liberal (in the European sense) scholar F A Hayek in 1947. I'm speaking on the theme of how liberal societies should deal with immigration, benefit tourism, and groups who oppose - indeed, want to destroy - liberalism itself.

I'm beginning to think that we need to be more robust in defending liberalism from those who want to destroy it. A liberal order is supposed to welcome diversity. But can it really coexist with those who oppose everything it stands for, who want to kill its leaders, and re-impose autocracy back on the planet? A liberal is also supposed to believe in limited government, and to reject arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. At the same time, how far can we give the customary rights of the accused to those who wouldn't give them to others, were they in charge, and who are quite happy to use our tolerant system to bounce back and overthrow it?

These are difficult issues for a liberal. Thoughts are welcome before I have to speak on these subjects!

Our blog of the week goes to The Fly Bottle, written by PhD candidate Will Wilkinson. The blog has recently been enjoying a renaissance, with some very good posts. My favourite is this one on the delusions of happiness economics. A proponent of happiness economics says that rich people would be happier if they were taxed more. Quite rightly Will points out the problems with this argument. An interesting point Will makes is that there is a difference between having limited choices and having those choices stripped away from you. Reason's Julian Sanchez also attacks this view.

This week's Computing newspaper reports that the government is to replace whiteboards in UK classrooms with interactive, computer-powered whiteboards.

The government has a new initiative where, once again, they are dictating to all schools across the country how increases in education spending must be used. If schools themselves could choose how to spend the money, they might make other choices. They might install such whiteboards in classrooms used for certain subjects but not in others. They might spend the money instead on repairs to school buildings or on new teachers.

Although this new spending on state education may seem a good idea, the government once again assumes it knows better than headteachers. Why do we bother employing headteachers if the Department for Education and Skills can't be trusted to let them do their jobs?

The healthcare research group, Dr Foster, reports today in the British Medical Journal that one in every ten patients admitted to NHS hospitals in Britain will suffer at the hands of medical errors. Such errors contribute to the deaths of 72,000 people a year, and are directly blamed for the deaths of 40,000 people.

Medical errors in the NHS now constitute the fourth largest cause of death in Britain. The charity Action Against Medical Accidents states that the figures under-estimate total errors by not including those which take place at the primary care level of family doctors, and are based only on reported errors. The figures do not include hospital-acquired infections.

Two months working for ASI while in London have resulted in a memorable summer. Here is a list of what I have enjoyed the most about my stay. I have not listed them in any specific order.

1. Working at ASI - without a doubt the coolest group of people I have ever worked with. The genius work of the Adam Smith Institute has them well on their way to world domination.

2. Lunches with Madsen Pirie - the only man I know that will soon be rocketing through the earth's atmosphere on his way to outer space, and who scoffed at a mint condition Bentley Mulsanne S. Very inspirational!

3. We Will Rock You - the Queen musical is the most ridiculous spectacle I have ever witnessed, thus making it incredibly entertaining.

4. White Lightning – unbeatable value, this white cider contains 8.7% alcohol content. £2.87 for a plastic 3 litre bottle resulted in many interesting nights.

5. Sports Cafe - the American embassy for college students abroad. Tuesday nights offer £1 pints, making it a safe bet for a good time.

6. London's proximity to Edinburgh - only a short train ride away from London, and the park adjacent to Waverley Bridge offers free accommodations if you are willing to hop the fence.

7. London's proximity to Paris - wonderful architecture and beautiful scenery. I recommend staying at Hotel De Fendome.

8. Romantic - London is a great place to spend a week with your lovely girlfriend.

9. Pub Food - I thoroughly enjoyed experiencing steak and ale pie while avoiding fish and chips.

10. The language - I have learned countless new words to incorporate into my everyday vocabulary and some interesting pronunciations to apply to the words I already use.

There is one sole aspect of being in London that has disappointed me. $1.80 of my hard earned money bought me just £1. As a result of this experience I have vowed that the next time I come to London, I will have generated enough income so that I will not have to resort to sleeping in parks or buying cheap booze. A valuable lesson learned, thanks to the great city of London. Thanks to ASI for the opportunity.

Nick Richards is an undergraduate at Marymount University in Virginia, USA.

Many of the people who oppose the use of British troops overseas claim that it is unfair for government to commit our land forces because it put our soldiers' lives at risk, especially the reserves.

This may be the case, but it is a risk they are willing to take. I know some serving soldiers of the Territorial Army, and I find that almost all of them are willing if not eager to go to war. They joined in the full knowledge that they would, at some time or other have to put their lives at risk, and this was emphasised by the training staff. They are trained to go to war from the first day, and it is for this purpose that they joined the army.

For many of these reserves, action means more pay and also excitement and an opportunity to travel. It also means they can do in practice what they have been trained to do, and what they volunteered to do. Whenever we are told that our young men and women should be spared from some conflict or other, we should remember that they were not conscripted. This is what they chose to do.

In the last UK general election, less than 60% of the electorate turned out and a Mori poll published recently by its Electoral Commission showed only 51% of those questioned saying that they were certain to vote at the next election. Political parties may change but the quality of state health and education remains substandard.

However, every day we vote in the market place with our pounds. It makes more impact on our lives, so more of us do it. If we dislike a certain company or product we take our votes elsewhere. In this respect every economic agent makes numerous votes every day that actually affect the quality of the services they receive. At the same time their vote does not impact directly on anyone else's decisions. If I buy Heinz baked beans I am not stopping anyone from buying Tesco value beans, even though I am sending a powerful message to both Heinz and Tesco. If the government were in charge of providing them we would no doubt get low quality beans and they would be more expensive.

If we apply this back to health and education and have the money following the pupil or patient, instead of being assigned from the centre, then surely the system would improve. A voucher system could be used to enable the consumer to vote their demand between competing service providers. Democracy works better in the marketplace than in the political realm. Maybe we should make more of our decisions in the former, and less in the latter.

In classical chess players fought to occupy the centre. They advanced King’s or Queen’s pawns, knights and bishops. He who had gained the centre could attack from there. Hypermodern chess, pioneered by Nimzowitsch, Alekhine and Reti, sought not to occupy the centre at once, but to control it from afar. It was often characterized by fianchettoed bishops controlling the long diagonals across the centre from the knight's second square.

The new Socialism echoes this approach. It no longer nationalizes industries into state ownership, but seeks to control them through new regulatory bodies which have great powers to circumscribe their activities. It does not need government itself to raise spending into a recession if it can manipulate its private citizens to do so by stimulating them to borrow and spend.

It can use bodies which it controls to stipulate in minute detail the activities of business. It can determine the hours, conditions and sometimes even the pay of its workers. It can stipulate not only the targets to be attained, but the technology used in the process. Like a hypermodern chess master it controls from afar, without actually occupying the central territory of business.

A problem is that capitalism depends on the enterprising mind and the innovative thinker, and on the freedom to try out the new. This is the source of new products and processes. This is how new ideas on efficiency and cost saving are incorporated. If government has the Socialist mindset that political brains should direct the economy, then it will stifle the very dynamism which makes capitalism so beneficial. It will do so whether the approach is one of direct central command, or of control from afar in the hypermodern style.

The western island of Scotland have a mild (if wet) climate and many of them support quite large palm trees. Taking shade under one of these from the searing heat (if you can believe that) the other day, I saw the ferry ply its way into the harbour and started to reflect on the market in ferries.

There isn't one. A single company, Caledonian MacBrayne, plies to 43 Scottish island, with the help of state subsidies, much as it has done for decades. The service isn't bad, but it doesn't have the sparkle that real competition would bring.

So that's my question. Car ferries are big and expensive. But the demand for them is thin, especially in the winter. Nevertheless, island communities depend on them, not just for travel, but for essential supplies. How can we introduce competition? Politically, you can't just say that for the islanders it's tough, they just have to pay the market price (probably unaffordable) or move out. They also make the point that the government pays for roads to distant mainland villages, so why should it not pay for ferry travel to their island ones?

I'd welcome ideas.

The communists in the Soviet Union murdered 62 million people. China killed more than 38 million people. If we include the regimes of Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh the number increase by another 3 million. Left-wing ideologues in the West nevertheless praised communism when it was in force. Critic of the free-market J K Galbraith famously said that standing on the Berlin Wall: "Looking in either direction it really makes no great difference". Has John Kenneth Galbraith recanted? No.

Now, many who supported communism in the past claim that the economic system in the USSR et al was not in fact communism. They implausibly argue that it was merely 'state capitalism'. Nevertheless, many ordinary people see communism as something that just cannot work in an imperfect world - even though it has good at its centre.

They are mistaken. There is nothing moral about communism. At its centre is the idea that it is legitimate to force people how to live and where to work - turning citizens into mere pawns. Communism's failure in practice derives from its rotten centre.

Economists have wondered if it is worthwhile for people to increase their incomes, bearing in mind what they lose by working harder for longer hours.

Happiness economists use surveys to measure people's happiness, and conclude that people act irrationally to increase their monetary incomes, even if this decreases their overall happiness. This assumes that people can measure intangibles such as the effects of pollution or the stress of longer journeys on their happiness level.

These analysts suggest that the increased prosperity brought by economic growth since the Middle Ages, for example, has not increased people's overall happiness, and that a peasant working the fields in a mediaeval farm might have been far happier than a wealthy business man of today. This is because the peasant didn't experience the stress which riches bring.

This has several problems. Since happiness is necessarily subjective, people are answering questions about how they feel, as opposed to how things are.

It could also be argued that people will generally moan and be unhappy, regardless of economic circumstances. If this is the case, an increase in money can surely still remove some of the unnecessary sources of unhappiness, such as disease and famine. A rich person today may be unhappy because of their physical appearance, personal relationships, or because of their stressful job, but at least they might no longer have to worry about their family starving or dying from conquerable diseases. Some accept this, but say that we are now at a level of income where we do not need to earn more. Yet further increases in wealth will enable us, for example, to have better healthcare, improve the environment and live longer.

Happiness economics looks very much like another attempt to impose a seemingly idyllic world view in which people's choice and freedom are to be restricted, so they are forced to live their lives in a way that someone else thinks will make them happier.

We are taking advantage of August, the quietest time of the year for the Institute and Westminster generally, to refit part of our offices. The refit will create a much-needed space for evening seminars, and allow us to hold many more events on site. A big delivery of seminar chairs will be arriving in about a week.

Next week, we have builders coming in to gut and replace our kitchen. For the first time we will have a dishwasher which will give great relief to ASI staff who clean up after our many lunches, receptions and other events.

Our autumn programme is gradually appearing on our Forward Diary as events are finalised. Check back at the beginning of September for a more complete list.

The 1980s were a decade in which Margaret Thatcher pursued privatization and supply-side reform. The UK experienced high levels of growth in the decade (30.1% growth compared with 21.2% for 1970s), as well as low levels of inflation (compared with the bitter experience of the 70s). The resulting increases in incomes, consumption and prosperity meant the 80s earned a reputation as the 'decade of greed', in which we are meant to conclude that people were unusually selfish.

This analysis is unfair. The 80s might have been a decade of 'enlightened self-interest' but it was not really a 'decade of greed'. Annual charitable giving in the UK doubled in real terms. As people became richer themselves, they increased the amount they spent on international charities. Labelling the 1980s as a 'decade of greed' is a good smear, but it flies in the face of reality.

Last week's business stories told us how much work we have to do. Record profits were announced from several major companies including HSBC and Barclays and were promptly denounced. Company chairmen had to 'defend' the high profits, and the range of adjectives was deployed, usually starting with 'obscene.'

It seems the British are quite prepared to see Wayne Rooney make millions, and are happy to see Blue and Busted rake the stuff in. We pay to see Brad Pitt's movies and help him become rich. In these cases we can see their value. They entertain us.

For corporations and their high paid executives, w