Sam Bowman

I’ve struggled to write something about minimum alcohol pricing today. It’s a hugely important issue, and one I care deeply about. But I can’t help but be angry at the people who've proposed it, and the government made up of supposed “conservatives” and “liberals” who plan on implementing it. It's anti-individualism at its worst.

“All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest."

“It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend”

— FA Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty. 

At the (sadly now closed) Mises Economics Blog, Art Carden has a good short primer on the Austrian business cycle theory:

Today, Madsen takes on regulation. This is a funny topic because many people assume that regulation is almost a fundamental responsibility of the state, much as most of us think policing is. But regulation creates real costs, Madsen says, which we dismiss at our peril.

Our friends at the Institute for Human Studies have sent over this blurb about their student seminars this summer, which I'm more than happy to promote. IHS seminars are absolutely superb, with top-class speakers and lecture topics, and (in my experience) some truly excellent attendees who are a pleasure to get to know. The one thing I've noticed is that far too few British students tend to go. If you have a week free this summer, I highly recommend changing that and applying.

2 Weeks to Apply: IHS Summer Seminars on Liberty

Along with insights from the Austrian economists, public choice economics is one of the cornerstones of many libertarians' economic worldviews. In today's episode of Economics is Fun, Madsen explains why public choice is so important. He equates public choice with the principal/agent issue in companies, namely that our representatives tend to grind their own axes instead of ours.

The Guardian reports today that George Osborne is "poised" to scrap the 50p tax in this Wednesday's budget:

Market failure: the justification for so many wrongheaded interventions in the market, but usually not failures at all, or caused by an absence of property rights if they are. Madsen talks about fairness and why it doesn't make sense to expect markets — amoral but efficient — to produce "fair" results. Government failure, he says, is something we should fear much more than market failure.