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Written by Administrator
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Saturday, 01 December 2007 |
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Written by Administrator
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Tuesday, 27 November 2007 |
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There are still places available at our evening seminar tonight. Part of our new 'Shaping the Future' series, its theme is The Future of Regulation.
Tim Ambler of the London Business School (who co-authored our influential reports, Road Map to Reform: Deregulation and EUtopia) will be chairing the event. The guest speakers will be Stephen Littlechild, from the Judge Business School in Cambridge, and the Rt Hon. John Redwood MP, the Conservatives' regulation and economic competitiveness supremo.
The event starts at 6.30pm (doors open at 6), with plenty of time allowed for Q & A after the speeches. Drinks will be served from 7.30pm onwards. Admission is free of charge, and everyone is welcome to attend. The seminar will take place in our offices at 23 Great Smith Street, Westminster, SW1P 3BL. We hope you will be able to join us.
RSVP to
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
or 020 7222 4995.
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Written by Tim Worstall
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Saturday, 17 November 2007 |
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Allow me, for a moment or two, to take Paul Krugman's argument at full and face value :
We’re told that we mustn’t regulate subprime lending, despite the vast wave of foreclosures it has produced, because to do so would prevent minorities and other disadvantaged Americans from achieving the dream of homeownership. Yet homeownership is already back down to about what it was before the big wave of subprime lending began. All that the wonders of the financial market achieved, it seemed, was to give a lot of people a brief taste of homeownership, followed by a nasty foreclosure.
If that is indeed what has happened, was that in fact all that has happened? And if it was, does that now bolster the argument for the regulation of sub prime lending? This is where I think I stray from Krugman's line, in that we didn't actually know that it was all a bad idea before we started out on this path. I'm just about old enough to remember redlining as a serious political issue and it's certainly true that we still have people insisting that the poor should be given access to easy credit (Polly, for example ). Now we're being told that actually allowing such people access to credit gave them a brief taste of home ownership and nothing more.
So while a great deal of effort and treasure was expended trying to get from a to b, we've ended back at a again with liittle show for that effort and treasure. Except, of course, that we now know the move to b isn't in fact something that we should try again. And that's the value of what has happened. It is, in fact, the way that we want markets to work, want the whole liberal capitalism shtick to do. People try things out, people experiment, and then when they start losing money they realise that this is the universe's way of telling them they're doing something stupid.
Now agreed, it's been an expensive lesson but then that in itself actually tells us why such sub prime lending doesn't need to be regulated. Who is actually going to do it again, given the 50 billion reasons why they shouldn't?
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Written by Dr Eamonn Butler
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Friday, 16 November 2007 |
James Arbuthnot MP was our guest at a Power Lunch in Westminster this week. He began by pointing out that Britain's defence forces are something of a victim of their own success. With the Soviet threat gone, and the situation improving in Northern Ireland, British governments decided to scale back the forces and enjoy the peace dividend. But they moved a bit too quickly - and now we have other threats for which the armed forces are stretched to deal with.
A lot of the discussion focused on Gordon Brown's new policy - to concentrate on homeland security even (it appears) if this is at the expense of dealing with threats overseas. It appeals to the vote motive: people are instantly alarmed when bombs explode on London buses, or car bombs are driven into Glasgow Airport, but Iraq and Afghanistan are far away ventures for most of the UK population.
And yet, there is still plenty of inefficiency to be squeezed out of the ministry of defence, and out of defence proocurement – which seems to move slower than the technology it is procuring. Time, really, for a high-level think-tank of leaders from the public sector, the defence contractors, procurement experts and finance to get together and devise a better system that would be faster and less wasteful. |
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Written by Dr Eamonn Butler
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Monday, 08 October 2007 |
James Chau – former member of the Adam Smith Institute's Next
Generation Group and now a successful broadcaster in China - has an
ambition. He wants to be one of the torchbearers at the Beijing
Olympics.
To succeed in this, he needs the votes of the public. You can vote
online (and actually, you can vote once a day from each IP address). It
takes less than a minute (once you've worked out that the anti-cheating
code is case sensitive). Just click here .
Facebook, as you can imagine, isn't all that strong in China, but
James's old Cambridge University friends have set up a facebook site
for him here .
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Written by Dr Madsen Pirie
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Tuesday, 06 March 2007 |
My colleague Dr Eamonn Butler spoke at a reception for The Next Generation
last night. He took as his theme the three most important things said
by Adam Smith (on whom he has just completed a short book for the IEA).
Number one was that Smith exploded the notion that people could only
enrich themselves at the expense of others. Not so, said Smith. Wealth
is created by specialization and exchange.
Number two was the invisible hand, that spontaneous ordering of
society which means that when we act in our legitimate self-interest,
we often benefit countless others we shall never meet. When we buy we
unwittingly create employment and pay wages. When we sell we provide
other people with goods they value more than the money they part with.
Number three, from the Theory of Moral Sentiments, is that the
most striking characteristic of humankind is our propensity to
empathize with our fellow men and women, feeling sadness at their grief
and pleasure at their happiness. The three points, taken together,
amount to a powerful social philosophy and gave the world not only the
scientific study of economics, but an understanding of how human beings
interact with each other. Truly a powerful contribution.
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