The Mont Pelerin Society, which featured Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper and Milton Friedman amongst its founder members, is holding a regional meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, from Aug 21-24th. I will be attending, as will Dr Eamonn Butler and other think tank personnel, including John Blundell of the IEA, and Alex Singleton of the Globalisation Institute.

The programme features sessions on liberty, property, and the institutions which sustain it, with other sessions devoted to taxation, globalization and the environment. Valuable though the discussions are, much of the reward of such conferences comes from the informal exchanges over coffee, meals and drinks with other members from across the world. Some old friends, including Mart Laar, former Estonian PM, and Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, will be attending.

There are two newcomers at the Adam Smith Institute.

Brandon Fierro is a senior at Syracuse University, studying economics and broadcast journalism. He has spent a happy month with ASI, and he will miss it, especially Valentina.

Rahulan Chandrasekaran is a first-year mathematics student at Imperial College. He enjoys cricket, and believes that once Vaughan gets over his curious case of rickets, all will be well this summer.

On the first day of my work experience I managed to arrive late due to the fantastic train service. I had previously met Madsen and visited the office for a brief interview, but I had hardly any idea of what to expect.

The office was in summer dress code which means one can wear casual clothes, but only, I was told, football shirts from Chelsea. I hoped that the atmosphere was really as relaxed as it appeared.

I was introduced to everyone in the office on Monday morning along with the grand tour of everything.The fridge, contained only bottles of champagne. The main event of the week was the David Davis lecture, which was turned into a reception due to the London bombings. Much of my work therefore involved finding out who was coming and making name badges.

The evening itself was a good laugh; I met a few different people and got to know the guys from the office better. In all I had a great time and they were great to work with. There is always some joke going on about this or that, which included some hilarious photos from the reception. Overall this week was a really great experience, everyone was so friendly and really great to be around. But we all worked very hard, of course.

The Scottish parliament is to host the country's first festival of politics, with celebrities such as film-maker David Puttnam and activist actress Vanessa Redgrave. It's scheduled to run from August 24 to 26, but if the ten-times overshoot on the cost of the building itself is any indicator, it should still be running until September 25.

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.

Today, as Americans pay their taxes, millions are benefiting from the much needed tax relief that was championed by President Bush and Republicans in Congress. Because of the tax relief, Tax Freedom Day, the day when Americans finally have earned enough money to pay off their total tax bill for the year, is today 18 days earlier than it was in 2000 when Bill Clinton was President. Thanks to President Bush and Republicans in Congress, while many Americans prepare to file taxes today, they can celebrate Tax Freedom Day today because they are keeping more of their own money.

We can’t allow Alex Singleton to leave without thanking him and saying how excellent his contribution was to the work of the ASI. He helped the Institute move into several new areas, most famously the blog itself. It was Alex who persuaded us to launch it, and who nurtured it and tended it, helping us all to develop its house style. His own contributions were very much appreciated by our readers, so much so that we hope to lure him into writing guest blogs from time to time.

Alex wants to build up his Globalisation Institute, which is thoroughly worthwhile and vitally necessary. Given the hysteria which anti-globalization protesters generate, the voice of reason will be most welcome. I think Alex shows good timing. The tide is perhaps turning on globalization, and a strong voice now will help to mobilize opinion in favour of its manifold benefits. Goodbye Alex, and every wish for your continued success.

As linked to by a previous article, The Guardian were holding a 'your favourite weblog' poll. The Adam Smith Institue has decided to withdraw from the poll. Most of the other blogs have done so too.
The following letter was sent to The Guardian:

Dear Backbencher,

Re: Political Weblog Awards.

Could you withdraw the undersigned from the running for your Political Commentary Awards.

In the light of unusual voting patterns and your suggestion that readers "vote early and often" seemingly being taken literally, any award seems worthless to us.

Together we represent 4/5 of the nominees and the great majority of the votes.

Adam Smith Institute

Guido Fawkes' blog

Harry's Place

Political Betting

We will keep you up to date.

The ASI website has over five times as many readers now as it did just eighteen months ago, keeping it well and truly the highest-read think tank website in Britain. But the site is creaking under all the content, so it's time for it to be redesigned and reorganized. Work is still progressing, but we thought we'd give you a quick peek at the new design...

We wish all our readers a very merry Christmas. Have a great day, everyone!

The Adam Smith Institute website is about to undergo a major transformation. The site, which went live in 1995, has remained the biggest read think tank website in Britain. With the introduction of the blog in September 2003, our traffic has increased even further. Our site is read every day across the political spectrum by MPs, senior civil servants, leading journalists, and political party policy units.

The blog is great for us because it lets us put content up on the internet very quickly, and the system archives blog articles automatically. We would like to be able to update the entire adamsmith.org site just as quickly, and this means we need a website running on a 'Content Management System' (CMS). CMS will make the website provide a better 'user experience', so that we can, for example, have a list of all the education articles automatically placed on an education page - at the moment, someone highly skilled has to manually update such lists with web design software. We also want to make the site look better, with the same design across the whole of the website. The bottom line is that our website is going to be better organized and designed, with more content.

But we'd like your help with the building of the ASI's new website. The work is going to cost a eyewatering sum. So if you value the work that we do - advocating lower taxation, less regulation, smaller government and individual freedom - would you make a donation via PayPal?

UPDATE: Thanks to all those who've donated so far. Keep 'em coming! If you'd like to donate by cheque, please mail it to Adam Smith Institute, 23 Great Smith Street, London SW1P 3BL.

We have uploaded what I think will quickly become a well-used blogosphere resource. It is an online edition of the The Book of the Fallacy, made available to read and link to at www.adamsmith.org/logicalfallacies. Like Samizdata's Blogging Glossary, it is designed so that each definition can be linked to directly. It is also quite funny. Go and check it out.

We're gradually scanning in our back catalogue of publications and putting them on the web. Newly online today are the 1990 publication Does socialism mean never having to say you're sorry? by Prof. Kenneth Minogue, The Green Quadratic from 1988, and Seize the initiative from 1996.

The ASI website was moved last week onto a more powerful server... or rather, a set of servers. Thanks to our web host Gradwell, it now runs on three web servers - known as a 'cluster' - each connected by a load balancer. All this means that if one server goes down, our website stays up with the other two servers serving our readers. The gigabytes of data downloaded from adamsmith.org each month keeps going up, and it's nice to know we have the infrastructure to cope.

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.

A reader asks about our policy on moderating comments. It's pretty straightforward. We tend to filter out abuse, racism, and hostility to minority groups. We prefer those who comment to avoid gratuitous discourtesy to other writers. We don't encourage people who turn every subject toward their pet obsession, nor do we like excessive length, although this is a grey area. Foul language is not welcome. Self-promotion and thinly disguised sales pitches don’t go down well, and those who abuse us on their own sites must not expect to get posted on ours.

These are very basic and fairly obvious rules, and it is gratifying that hardly any of those who post comments transgress them.

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.

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.

Stephen Pollard, author of the ASI education report Customers not bureaucrats, now has a much easier to use blog. It's at the same address, but has been graphically and technologically overhauled. He has a good post on competition in education, and puts forward the view that vouchers improve education. Even Sweden, he points out, has adopted them.