Sam Bowman

Following his landslide win in the Florida primary election last night, it now seems certain that Mitt Romney will be the Republican party's presidential nominee. Romney will be the first presidential candidate to have spent most of his career in the financial sector, specifically private equity, a sector many view with suspicion and fear. Romney's opponents have made much of the fact that he succeeded at his job by "firing people". Although I'm not much of a Romney fan, this is a slur caused mainly by the confusion surrounding private equity.

Over at the Telegraph, the ASI's JP Floru has an excellent article in defence of gay marriage. He makes the point that what we think of as the "tradition of marriage" — the state- and church-endorsed institution that is currently reserved for heterosexual relationships — is in fact a relatively new phenomenon rooted in modern codifications of common law practices.

"In many respects a single international currency is not better but worse than a national currency if it is not better run. It would leave a country with a financially more sophisticated public not even the chance of escaping from the consequences of the crude prejudices governing the decisions of the others. The advantage of an international authority should be mainly to protect a member state from the harmful measures of others, not to force it to join in their follies."

The political battle over the welfare bill has led some people to propose rent controls as a solution to rising rents in Britain’s cities (especially London). Rent control, though, is probably the most unambiguously awful policy ever to be tried in modern western democracy. In theory and practice it is a disaster, choking off the supply of new rentable homes and grinding the quality of existing rented accommodation.

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Every year the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Programme at the University of Pennsylvania compiles its "Global Go To Think Tanks Report", which ranks the leading public policy research organizations in the world. For another year, the Adam Smith Institute has performed exceptionally well:

Top Think Tanks – Worldwide (US and Non-US)
No. 20

At The Browser's excellent FiveBooks page, Austrian school economist Peter Boettke recommends five books to read to understand the Austrian school of economics:

1) Human Action — Ludwig von Mises

2) Individualism and Economic Order — FA Hayek

3) Calculation and Coordination — Peter Boettke

4) The Invisible Hook — Peter Leeson

5) After War — Chris Coyne

Marking Martin Luther King day in the US yesterday, Russell Simmons and Dylan Ratigan have an article on the Huffington Post on the new government persecution of blacks – the War on Drugs. I’m not entirely convinced by the article’s thesis about business support for the Drug War, but the statistics it gives are startling:

I don’t usually bother with New Year’s Resolutions, but waiting until after the Christmas orgy of eating was over seemed like a good idea to start watching what I eat. Discipline has been surprisingly easy, but what’s been hard is to actually decide what to eat. As anybody who’s ever looked into eating healthily will know, there are more diets than there are religions. Low-fat or low-carb? Paleo or South Beach?

Sam Bowman, Head of Research: