Sam Bowman

If you’re frustrated by how vicious and pointless politics is, a brief Kindle single by Arnold Kling may offer some insight. “The Three Languages of Politics” (£1.34, US link) dissects one of the main problems with politics: that progressives, conservatives and libertarians are all speaking different languages that rarely overlap and cause us to misunderstand and vilify our opponents.

The Adam Smith Institute is looking for a bright, enthusiastic student on their gap year between school and university to come and work for us. The role would be a mixture of administrative work around the office and helping the ASI team with their research and policy work on an ad hoc basis.

"Most of the Irish establishment is sadly mistaken in thinking that our problems are rooted in rogue banking behaviour or lax political oversight. The real problem was systematically mispriced credit resulting from our EMU membership." So says Cormac Lucey at Liberal Ireland, who argues that the factors in Ireland's ruin all seem to have one point of origin — the euro. Here's a graph of Dublin property prices, before and after entry to the euro:

In yesterday's City AM I responded to Vince Cable's condemnation of the boyband One Direction's £25m earnings. The point that Cable missed, I argued, was that income is a reflection of value created for other people: 

There's a lot to like about the Reason Foundation's new report, "The Argument for Equal Marriage". Its basic argument is:

Immigration is good for us.

It’s not saying much, but this was George Osborne’s best budget yet. These tax cuts are long overdue, though they are not significant enough to solve Britain’s growth problem. Cutting taxes for businesses will stimulate investment and job creation, and reducing the tax burden for low- and middle-income earners will make life easier for them.

Bryan Caplan lists a few reasons to be sceptical about the Card & Krueger study that purportedly shows no unemployment effect from minimum wages. His overall point is that, beyond traditional labour economics, there is quite a lot of empirical evidence to show that minimum wages create unemployment. My favourite point:

The daffodils are out and the annual uproar at bankers' bonuses is upon us. The EU’s bonus cap is a well-timed, predictably silly play to the gallery, but we shouldn't assume that our own banking rules are much more sensible.

Any rules about what private firms pay their employees are, of course, absurd. Aside from the base illiberalism of interfering in people’s privacy, there is the practical problem that a cap on pay would drive bankers abroad. Imagine if there was a cap on footballers’ pay – within a year, the Swiss Premier League would be world class.