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

On 8 May 1899, in Vienna, Friedrich Hayek was born. He would become the dominant intellectual influence of the later twentieth century and is still influential in economic and political theory today.

Note what the actual claim is though. In their analysis of whether environmental laws hold up building the government has not pointed to any academic evidence that it does so.

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

We’ve suggested before that Big Government has allowed every fool with a prejudice to impose that upon the other 75 million of us.

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.

This isn’t what Baroness Batters - formerly head of the National Farmers’ Union - means to say but it is what she does say: Batters said: “One of the long-term and growing challenges to farming is that land is often more profitable for anything else, other than producing food.”

Apparently beer may only be sold in half pint cans.

The essential starting point is that tariffs are only one part of the costs of trade. Transport’s another, being able to communicate between buyer and seller another and it’s possible to compile a list as long as a tariff schedule of further such costs.

The Princess Royal has said that the UK needs a “long-term vision” and “a coherent national programme” when it comes to building affordable rural housing.

It is unpleasant to admit it, but dear old Blighty has been a deadbeat for over a century. Our central fiscal characteristic is that we don’t pay our way.

Inflation means rising prices, which is hard to conflate with falling prices. On the other hand, if prices fall and wages don’t then real wages rise and poverty declines - which sounds like a fair enough plan to us.