Most people would agree on the Twentieth Century’s most evil leaders with relative ease. The benign ones are harder to agree upon.

It seems that the political cycle has changed. It used to be thought that after left-leaning governments had broken the economy by reckless spending, the UK public would elect right-leaning ones to fix it.

The ASI published ‘Flat Tax - the British Case’ by Andrei Grecu in 2004. It aroused much debate at the time and now, with the prospect of a radical incoming government, it is perhaps time the case was made again.

An incoming UK government that aims to reduce the nanny state of excessive government intervention in personal choices might pursue reforms in several key areas to roll it back.

There are strong arguments to suggest that the UK Treasury is too focused on maximizing tax revenues at the expense of broader goals such as economic growth, living standards, and fairness.

There is a strong case for proposing that those living on the basic UK State Pension or the National Minimum Wage should be exempt from income tax and National Insurance contributions (NICs).

Taxation is collected under the threat of punishment such as fines, asset seizure, or imprisonment, making it non-consensual.

My colleague, Dr Eamonn Butler, will not like this proposal at all because he has expressed the view that Bank holidays are an anachronism that should be abolished, although he did once grudgingly tell the ASI staff that they could take Christmas morning off.

One idea to improve UK national healthcare has been the proposal to give everyone an NHS debit card they could use to access private treatment if the NHS delay in treating them were deemed unacceptably long.

The recent mauling the Conservative Party candidates took in the local elections has been attributed by different commentators to different things.

It is not coincidence that progress in science, the free market, social progress and evolution itself are all linked by a selective death rate.

There is a case for saying that there has been progress in such areas as science, medicine and engineering because we know what their aims are, but that there has been no ‘progress’ in art because it has no goal.