If I had but one life to give for my country, it would be difficult to know which politician to choose.

I was delighted to see that one of the best-attended sessions at the Heritage Foundation Resource Bank meeting here in Miami was that on "New Media: The Power of the Blogs". Introduced by TechCentralStation editor Nick Shulz, the first speaker was Paul Mirengoff of PowerLine, which led the exposure of Dan Rather over the fake Bush service report. He surprised me by predicting that in just a few years, more people will be reading their newspapers online than on paper, but he's probably right.

And of course more information is getting to people through blogs and other media. What role remained for mainstream media (MSM) now, he asked?

His answer: probably they need to concentrate on what they are supposed to do - unbiased news - and let the bloggers get on with opinions. But Cliff May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies pointed out that in many parts of the world - Iraq and Lebanon, for instance - where it is hard for Western journos to penetrate, local bloggers can reflect reality with much more precision than the MSM, who can only work through official sources.

Tom Bevan of RealClearPolitics observed that the rise of the blogosphere had produced a big loss of heft on the left. MSM articles are no longer taken at face value, so their left-wing bias (he was talking about the US media: in Britain we don't have any of that, of course) (ha ha) is less effective. And a cheering point for the right: the older generation may still be reading their news on paper, but it is younger folk who are online. In the war of ideas, in other words, the right has the winning troops, and they are fitter for the long fight.

Discussion of genetically modified crops should give pause to those who think it sufficient to be reasonable and to be right. While the NGO-led debate in the West has frightened the ignorant with talk of Frankenstein foods, scientific research has moved on elsewhere. A paper in the new issue of Science by Huang et al [subscription] is reported by Mark Henderson in the Times. It examines the record of two GM modified rice strains in field trials.

A team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the US National Science Foundation examined two varieties of rice, Xianyou 63 and Youming 86, each of which has been genetically engineered to resist insects. Xianyou 63 carries a gene for producing Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), a natural pesticide commonly used by organic farmers, while Youming 86 has an insect-resistance gene from the cowpea plant.

Instead of following rigid guidelines, farmers were left to spray their crops, as they do, according to perceived need. The GM rice required far lower use of pesticides (once per year compared with 3.7 times per year for unmodified crops).

None of the GM farmers reported any pesticide-induced illnesses, such as headaches, skin irritation or nausea, while 7.7 per cent of the conventional farmers suffered these in 2002 and 11 per cent suffered them in 2003. Yields of the Xianyou 63 variety were 9 per cent higher than conventional rice, while those of Youming 86 were comparable to the non-GM equivalent.

You might suppose that lower use of pesticides, fewer illnesses in farmers, plus increased yields, might convince opponents of their errors. Wrong. They will attempt to undermine the findings on ideological rather than scientific grounds. None of this will impress the Chinese, who are likely to roll out use of the GM modified strains on a national scale, benefiting the prosperity and the health of their farmers, together with those of their consumers.

The holding bay area, already occupied by the coming ice age, catastrophic over-population, and depletion of scarce resources, might still have enough room to accommodate the mortal danger of genetically modified crops. Meanwhile Europe has been deprived of a lead and a role in one of the important technologies of the future.

Laszlo Kovacs, the European commissioner for taxation, has described the flat tax as "absolutely legitimate" (reports Stephen Castle in the Independent). The single flat rate tax, already in use by four EU members and planned or under consideration by many more, has been attacked by the French and others as "social dumping," even though it has actually raised more revenue.

Mr Kovacs, a former Hungarian foreign minister, brings a further fresh breath of Eastern air to the enlarged EU by pointing out that "the EU does not tackle the issue of income and corporate tax rates." This is true, but it must have made Brussels shudder because tax harmonization is among their ambitions.

Flat tax threatens those ambitions. It has spread across the former Socialist economies not because it is only suited to developing countries but because it is politically easier to introduce in transitional economies. The interest groups which benefit from the status quo were less entrenched there. Fortunately the competitive pressure from their success makes it easier to take on those groups in advanced countries.

Flat tax improves things because it lowers tax rates, and because it is simpler, and easier to understand and administer. It also brings the chance to sweep away all of the quirks and complexities which have disfigured tax codes over the years. Now that is "absolutely legitimate."

I'm in Miami for the annual Fisher Prize presentation, organized by the Atlas Foundation, a family of free-market policy institutes in many countries and continents. They give several prizes each year for effective contributions to the public debate, but the one which caught my eye was for the book The Not So Wild, Wild West from PERC, the Property and Environment Research Center.

The book puts America's frontier history in a new light, showing how people created institutions that facilitated cooperation rather than conflict. You won't understand it from the movies (well, maybe High Noon), but it shows how ordinary people helped carve out legal institutions that tamed the West.

Ownership and property rights, and rules of transfer, evolved spontaneously among this colourful collection of Indians, fur trappers, buffalo hunters, cattle drovers, homesteaders, and miners. The book concludes that we could learn something from them today - but instead, governments are trying to write the rules - and messing it up! Worth a look.

I'm beginning to understand why local-government taxes are so high. Our town clerk got three quotes for building a new fountain. The Manchester builder set a price of £3000. "That's £1000 for the materials, £1000 for labour, and £1000 for me," he explained. The Leeds builder set a price of £6000. "That's £2000 for materials, £2000 for labour, and £2000 for me," he explained. The Sheffield builder quoted £9000. "That's £3000 for you, £3000 for me, and we give the job to the bloke from Manchester."

In most countries the TV programme Yes, Minister is considered humour, but in Britain it is regarded as biting social realism. Here's an example.

Recently, Downing Street established a Panel for Regulatory Accountability. Its purpose: to consider the cost-benefit calculations on proposed new regulations, and judge which should stay and which should be thrown out. It was heralded as a great boon to over-burdened business.

One of our regulation experts, Francis Chittenden, innocently enquired what exact bits of red tape had in fact been scrutinized by the Panel. The (eventual) answer from the civil service: "Sorry, we can't tell you because this information falls under the exemption in Section 35 of the Freedom of Information Act."

"So," as the London Evening Standard reported, "there you have it: a regulation that prevents ministers from disclosing which regulations are under review. Sir Humphrey would be proud."

"The Tax Code is a monstrosity and there's only one thing to do with it. Scrap it, kill it, drive a stake through its heart, bury it and hope it never rises again to terrorize the people." – Steve Forbes

Professor Tim Brighouse has spent a life in state education. He's London Schools Commissioner, a top adviser to government. No rabid right-winger he. And yet, just recently, he has been reported as arguing that parents of children who do badly at primary school should get a £500 voucher to spend on private tuition.

England and Wales already spends £2bn of its £24bn schools budget trying to tackle the educational needs of poor families. Professor Brighouse wants this to be increased: but of the extra cash he proposes, £500 would go direct to parents to spend privately, a deliberate move to encourage them to take a real interest in their child's education. (And less obviously, perhaps, an admission that the state system is unable to deal with these problems.) As he put it:

The involvement of the hardest-to-reach parents and carers in the form of an 'education extra' voucher would surely help to support the aims of the school and society as a whole not to allow the cycle of deprivation to repeat itself.

That is indeed the problem of state education. But now, it seems, the voucher principle is being accepted at the very top of this crumbling edifice. Sure, £500 to spend as parents choose is not much out of the cost of state education. But it's a start. Now we've all accepted the principle, let's begin talking about how extensive the voucher ought to be.

Commentators including Peter Oborne have pointed to the similarity of Labour and Tory policies. Those of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party are very different. (Non-UK readers should know that the OMRLP are amiable eccentrics who liven up boring elections.) Sadly now deprived of the top-hatted Screaming Lord Sutch, they have unveiled an avowedly populist tax policy.

Our team of experts has decided that Income Tax has not proved popular with the public and will therefore be abolished. It was started in order to finance the Napoleonic war in 1799 and we now believe that the time is right to announce the cessation of hostilities with Napoleon. Some of the money left in the coffers will be used to fill in our part of the Channel Tunnel in case no one has mentioned it to the French. Any remaining money will be strategically placed on a horse at the 3-30 at Haydock Park at odds of at least 12/1 in order to see us through until the next election.

They also plan to issue a 99p coin to save on change, and "to tax rich people to pay for the printing of money, as they use most of it."

Prime Minister Tony Blair, Chancellor Gordon Brown, and party spin-doctor Alastair Campbell were on a campaign trip this week, heading to the North of England by train, with all the press pack. But suddenly the train came to a complete stop. Blair thought he had better find out what was happening, so went up to the front to speak to the driver.

"The engine’s broken," he reported back to the press pack. "So I’ve set up an inclusive task force to examine the problem." Nothing happens. So Brown goes up to the front, and reports back: "The engine’s still broken, so I’m providing £5b of new spending that will fix engines up and down the country." Still the train doesn’t move. Whereupon Campbell pulls down the window blinds and tells the press: "There. The train’s moving."

Immigration has brought economic and cultural benefits to Britain - as the Conservative leader and immigrant's son Michael Howard cheerfully admits. So why is it such a big issue in the election?

One reason is competence - whether the recent surge in asylum-seekers has been well managed. But another reason is that surge itself. And this reflects the actions of governments than the natural movement of free people. Many of those wanting in are the victims of despotism in Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and elsewhere. Others are liberated to come precisely because the despotic regimes of Central and Eastern Europe have fallen to bits.

Immigrants are usually young, and an ageing and shrinking population, we perhaps need more young people. There is strong demand for all those cleaners, carers, nannies, builders, plumbers and so on. And the better skilled they are, the more welcome a country is likely to make them. But with 150,000 settling here annually, it is the numbers that scare people.

If governments did not exist, it is quite possible that fewer people would choose to migrate, even though they would be more free to do so. And migration would be gradual and spread out - quite different from the surges we see today - and thus easier for people to accept and absorb. The ideal may be free migration, it is clear why even liberal politicians want to reduce the tensions and control it. But then it is the world's politicians that have sparked the mass migrations that raise the tensions in the first place.

No sooner has Alex Singleton left the Adam Smith Institute to start his own excellent outfit, the Globalisation Institute, but the Archbishop of Canterbury starts reading his reports. As the Primate says:

We have recently seen the publication of a very interesting report from the Globalisation Institute which is highly critical of the language of 'fair trade', arguing powerfully for free trade as the real engine of prosperity.

To get the full story, visit the Globalisation Institute blog.

The next Independent Seminar on the Open Society takes place 10am-5pm on Friday 6th May 2005 here in Westminster. ISOS - now in its 27th year - aims to expose school students to some current debates in economics, government, and politics. With some success - students who attended ISOS in the past are now MPs, TV and radio producers, and successful policy specialists in business.

The programme meshes in with the A2 exam syllabus, and this year's theme is Government, the economy, and the individual. And among the prominent speakers are Paul Ormerod (Economist and Author), Lord Taverne (Liberal Democrat Peer), Alex Singleton (Globalisation Institute), James Stanfield (University of Newcastle Upon Tyne), Andrew Haldenby (head of the think-tank Reform), Chris Woodhead (controversial former schools inspector), Lord Ahmed (the first Muslim to become a life peer) and Tony Gilland (of the ex-Marxist Institute of Ideas).

The event is free of charge but places are limited, so you need to get an application in right away if you want to be there. Email isos@adamsmith.org for information and invitations.

Two academics in a nudist colony:
First Prof: "Have you read Marx?"
Second Prof: "Yes, I think it’s these wicker chairs."

On this day in 1759, Adam Smith published The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It is argubly his greatest book.

It was not the later Wealth of Nations, but this work on ethics and human nature, which made Adam Smith's career. The sensation of its age, it sold out in weeks. The prominent politician Charles Townshend was "so taken with the performance" (says David Hume) that he hired Smith as tutor to his stepson, the Duke of Buccleuch, luring Smith away from his professorship at Glasgow with the princely offer of £300 a year for life.

What is the basis on which we approve some actions and condemn others? The accepted wisdom was that our rulers should decide. But there was a growing view that moral principles could be worked out rationally, like the theorems of mathematics. Smith, however, took a completely new direction, holding that people are born with a moral sense, just as they have inborn ideas of beauty or harmony. Our conscience tells us what is right and wrong: and that is something innate, not something given us by kings or rationalists. And we also have a natural fellow-feeling, which Smith calls "sympathy". Between them, these natural senses ensure that human beings can and do live together in orderly and beneficial social orders.

So our morality is the product of our nature, not our reason. And Smith would go on to argue that the same 'invisible hand' created beneficial social patterns out of our economic actions too. The Theory of Moral Sentiments established a new liberalism, in which social organization is seen as the outcome of human action but not necessarily of human design – a point which socialists forget, to their cost.

Another prominent politician of the age, James Oswald, reported that he did not know whether he had "reaped more instruction or entertainment" from The Theory of Moral Sentiments. So open it up. You might well be instructed... but immerse yourself into Smith's elegant prose and you will certainly be entertained.

The introduction of "heroin clinics" in Switzerland and the Netherlands during the 1990s significantly reduced drug-related crime and other social problems. Now Britain too is considering giving long-term addicts injectable heroin – again.

Back in the 1970s, Britain controlled its heroin problem by registering addicts and allowing doctors to prescribe the drug. But some doctors started prescribing it for cash to unregistered users, and the practice was stopped. The preferred route then became oral methadone, which has its own problems and often does not work.

Meanwhile illicit heroin use grew hugely: Britain had about 400 registered addicts in the 1970s, getting the drug in controlled circumstances: today it has 56,000 registered addicts, on various attempts at treatment (only half a percent are prescribed the drug itself). Meanwhile the total number of users may be 200,000, and of those, many lead chaotic lives, the cost of their habit fuelled by crime.

Today there are fewer than 100 doctors who hold the special Home Office licence required to prescribe heroin. Of these, there are 20 each in the South-East, London and the North-West but only a handful in other regions. Two cheers, then, for the fact that Britain is now to create pilot projects elsewhere – accepting the evidence of Switzerland and the Netherlands, and acknowledging that, while there will always be some bent doctors, driving heroin users to crime just makes matters worse.

A good friend of the Adam Smith Institute, Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard, has set up a new blog. Compiled together with professors Nicolai Foss (economics) and Jesper Lau Hansen (law), political theorists Dr. Mikael Jalving and Mikael Bonde Nielsen, and a couple of his graduate students, the new collective free-market weblog, is called Punditokraterne (The Punditocrats).

The blog is dedicated to research, news and opinions about the free society and free markets. You may not understand the language, but it's good to know that not everying is entirely rotten in the state of Denmark...

You can tell when politicians are lying. Their lips move.

The London-based think-tank Civitas has produced a series of detailed voter briefings asking whether things like additional NHS spending, or the current policies on crime and welfare-to-work are actually working.

They are pretty well balanced: on welfare-to-work, for example, the conclusion is yes, it has worked a bit, but the tax needed to fund it has reduced work incentives for those already in a job. They are also very detailed, with lots of useful facts and figures. Worth a look.

You can tell the economy is in a bad way. Even the hot cakes have stopped selling.

I see from the daily digest sent out by the Globalisation Institute that Europe’s infatuation with farm subsidies might be catching – and in the very places they are already helping to ruin. According to The Standard newspaper in Kenya:

In the last year, the [Kenyan] Government has been dabbling with price subsidies that paid farmers a guaranteed minimum price that had nothing to do with either market forces or farming productivity.

Kenya's problem is that low rainfall makes agriculture difficult, leading to frequent shortages. So the government is looking to intervene.

We Europeans are teaching the world bad lessons. But there is at least some common sense around. The Standard heads its editorial "How poor farming policies fuel inflation" and says of the price-subsidy idea:

While in the short term this will make farmers happy, it will not make them efficient producers. This could signal trouble for the economy in the future.

Politician at the election: "Last year, the country stood on the edge of a precipice. This year, we have made a great leap forward."

The Bastiat Prize for Journalism encourages and rewards writers whose published works promote the institutions of a free
society - limited government, the rule of law, property rights, free markets, and free speech. Past winners include Amity Shlaes of the Financial Times, Brian Carney of the Wall Street Journal Europe, and Robert Guest of The Economist.

Last year the contest attracted 150 submissions from over 40 countries, and now the International Policy Network, which organizes it, is inviting submissions for the 2005 Prize, which is a useful $10,000. Get a move on, though, because entries close on 30 June.

Entries may be submitted via email, post, or through the website submission form, and there is more information about the rules here.

"The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is, not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended" – Frederic Bastiat

British government politicians may deny it, but 79 percent of those interviewed in a YouGov poll for the Daily Telegraph today say they agreed that yes, the UK "does have a pension crisis". Not surprising, since the Chancellor has contrived to extract an extra £5bn-£6bn a year out of people's pension funds for the last eight years.

And as a Heritage Foundation blog records, people in the United States have twigged that there is a problem, too – even young people, who you do not normally expect to be remotely interested in saving for retirement. A recent poll of US college students, it says, shows that

A full 70 percent are worried that Social Security will not be able to provide benefits to their generation; 63 percent doubt it will be able to provide full benefits to their parents’ generation. And despite three full months of negative posturing by groups like Rock the Vote that oppose Social Security reform, over half support personal investment within Social Security.

Can those in charge of the West's bankrupt state pension systems really resist reform any longer?

The nation is reported to be prosperous as a whole; but how much prosperity is there in a hole?

In 1751, at the age of 28, Adam Smith was elected Professor of Logic at the University of Glasgow. And a year later, on this day, 22 April, he was chosen as Professor of Moral Philosophy, and he would remember the period of 13 years in which he held this post as the most useful and happy of his life.

Apart from some quite detailed student notes, little more survives of his lectures than was distilled into The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. But we know that he divided his course into Natural Theology, Ethics, Justice (and Jurisprudence), and Politics.

It was this last element, Politics, that would take his thoughts into the political institutions relating to commerce that would build into The Wealth of Nations; while the Ethics section became the foundation of the book that made his name, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

On the subject of Justice, Smith aimed to write a system of natural jurisprudence, a "theory of the general principles which ought to run through and be the foundation of the laws of all nations". But too soon, he would be headhunted as private tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch and whisked off on the Grand Tour of Europe, which in turn led to him getting absorbed in the vast treatise on economics that dominated the rest of his intellectual life.

The loss of Smith's system of jurisprudence has been a costly one. For there are far too many political leaders around today, even in supposedly democratic countries, who believe that they can (and should) re-cast their laws and constitutions to suit their own particular view of justice. The cost of such conceit has sometimes been a huge increase in human misery and a huge reduction in human freedom. How different the world might be, had we been given that powerful volume by Smith, telling us in his own resonant words what justice really is.

"Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it. They may be distressed in the midst of all their power; but they will never look to anything but power for their relief." – Edmund Burke

Despite the Treasury's massive shuffling around, tax credits and huge increases in complexity, increases in Council Tax have more than wiped out any modest benefits received by the average voter. Analysis by the Institute of Fiscal Studies puts the extra cost of Council Tax at £5.8 billion a year, more than canceling out the modest boost of £2.2 billion from other changes to the tax and benefits system.

Reporting the figures, Gary Duncan suggests in the Times that:

The evidence of the severity of the blow to the country's pockets from council tax will inflame election debate on the issue. It comes after average increases in council tax in England and Wales of 4.1 per cent, on top of inflation, during Labour's first term, and a swingeing 5.2 per cent during the present Parliament.

It is difficult for people to feel better off if tiny sums put into one pocket are outweighed by larger sums taken out of another. Government is not particularly good at redistribution, either, taking far more from one group than it hands to another, with much of the difference going into bureaucracy and simple wastage. Patience Wheatcroft points out that

much of the cash that has been taken from the better-off has not found its way directly to those who are worse off. The huge increase in public expenditure has meant that even those who have gained the most from the reforms, the second poorest tenth of the population, have seen incomes grow by an average of £27.53 a week. They do, though, have a battery of outreach workers, smoking-cessation advisers and bureaucrats to whom they might confer the wish that they might simply be handed the cash rather than be confronted with more bureaucrats.

Local politicians, like national ones, are quite ready to spend other people's money on what they regard as good causes, without any sense of gaining value, or of whether the money might have been better spent elsewhere. People tend to be much more cautious when they spend their money themselves.

Noah must have taken two taxes into the ark, because they survived and they're multiplying.

Rock stars are great at promoting worthy causes. It's good that they are focusing world attention on Africa's development problems, for example. But in prescribing solutions, their economics can be a bit shaky. Franklin Cudjoe, who runs the Centre for Humane Education in Accra, gave this example in an article in Monday’s Daily Telegraph:

Coldplay frontman Chris Martin [pictured] has said that Ghana's rice, tomato and poultry farmers need to be protected from cheap imports. Yet the problems of Ghana's farmers lie elsewhere: they and other entrepreneurs are stifled by punitive tax regimes and the high cost of capital, not to mention our disarrayed land tenure systems which lead to low crop production.

The real solution to Africa's ills, he says, will not come from media-savvy but economically flaky campaigns; it will come by harnessing the entrepreneurial spirit that exists everywhere. Then:

As our economies grow and develop, people will be able to afford better technologies, clean water, superior energy sources, better healthcare, and insurance. But one is unlikely to hear such ideas from rock stars...While these high-profile campaigns continue to blame western countries for our poverty, they simply give our own politicians more excuses to delay badly needed institutional reforms. Poor Africans would be far better off without rock-star economics.