Tonight, we’ll find out whether Americans have voted to give Barack Obama four more years in the White House or to give Mitt Romney a go. All signs point to Obama, though apparently a surprise Romney win isn’t impossible. If I’m completely honest, I doubt if it would make a difference either way.

Today is the start of 'Living Wage Week', the promotional week run by the Living Wage Foundation to plug their campaign to get firms to pay staff no less than £7.20/hour (£8.30/hour in London). I'm broadly supportive of this sort of thing -- consumer pressure is a much better way to get things done than government fiat, and I respect the fact that the Living Wage Foundation has largely avoided lobbying government and calling for a mandatory Living Wage.

The Nobel prize is sufficient to fund the EU agricultural policy's destruction of food markets and third world countries for 14 minutes.

— Johan Norberg (@johanknorberg) October 12, 2012

David Boaz recently mentioned a pretty extraordinary anecdote about Lord Keynes, mentioned in the Wall Street Journal in 2009:

...here is one of my favourite poems by Ogden Nash, which is as appropriate now as it was when he wrote it in the midst of the US government's measures to prevent 'overproduction' during the Great Depression.

One From One Leaves Two

Higgledy piggledy, my black hen,
She lays eggs for gentlemen.
Gentlemen come every day
To count what my black hen doth lay.
If perchance she lays too many,
They fine my hen a pretty penny;
If perchance she fails to lay,
The gentlemen a bonus pay.

James Croft, author of our superb report on profit-making free schools, is now head honcho of the Centre for Market Reform of Education, and has today released a paper that raises serious questions about the government's plans to replace GCSEs. The recommendations are refreshingly innovative, harnessing the innovative properties of the market to try to solve some of the problems that the government's plans are aimed at addressing: