Sam Bowman

We've reached the halfway mark and, inevitably, the conversation turns to taxation. There will always be someone with a big stick breathing down your neck, creaming off as much of your stuff as he can. The only surprise is how many people want him to take more!

There’s a contradiction at the heart of much modern classical liberalism. Since Adam Smith, successive generations of classical liberals (particularly in economics) have tried to build a systematic science of man to demonstrate the value of liberty. In contrast to Smith’s vision of economics and moral philosophy as a messy, ad hoc pursuit, modern classical liberals and libertarians have generally proposed a vision of economics and the social sciences as foundational sciences.

Tom says he's no Rick Santorum. And thank god for that. In 2006, Santorum said he was against individualism, libertarianism, and much more:

Councillor Colin Barrow, leader of Westminster Council, had a post on Conservative Home yesterday boasting about Westminster's council tax freeze:

Today Westminster’s Cabinet will confirm our intention to freeze our council tax for a record fifth year in a row, whilst at the same time responding to the concerns of our residents by putting an additional £2 million back in to street cleansing for the coming year.

Workfare — the policy of tying benefits to work programmes — has come under scrutiny this week as an unpaid position at Tesco was advertised in a workfare programme. The position was originally advertised as being permanent (which Tesco says was a human error), causing some to accuse Tesco of using "slave labour". Of course, this is silly hyperbole — real slaves didn't have a choice.

Steven Landsburg, better known as the Armchair Economist, is one of the closest things the economics world has to a rock star. His book was one of the first of the series of pop economics books like Freakonomics - and one of the best at that.

Martin Hutchinson's Bear's Lair newsletter is always worth a read, but last week's was particularly good. Just as the housing bubble of the 2000s brought down the world economy, a government bubble is now growing and approaching bursting point. Artificially cheap credit, which led to massive malinvestment in the housing sector, is allowing profligate governments to spend far beyond their means: