The Adam Smith Institute’s latest policy briefing, written by Maxwell Marlow and Sofia Risino, suggests various childcare reforms aimed at cutting costs, boosting quality and increasing parental choice.
Our courts our slow, outdated, and costly. Adam Thierer shows how people in the US have abandoned them for private arbitration: and how the state and federal courts have had to accommodate this change. A model for modernising the court service in the United Kingdom and elsewhere?
Read it here.
A complete guide through the theory, strategy, and record of rolling back the state in the UK - privatization, internal markets in health education, making executive agencies more independent, and the Citizen's Charter.
Read the whole paper here.
Dr Barry Bracewell-Milnes writes on UK tax prejudice against trading abroad and the problem of surplus ACT and its solution.
The environmental challenges which we face do not require a wholesale realignment of our economies. Rather, they require an extension of the legal principles of capitalism. Property rights can be extended to presently unowned resources. Where this solution is impractical, market-mimicking policy rules (eg, effluent charges or marketable pollution permits) may be used to force polluters to take into account the social costs of their production processes. In short, the market can and should be extended to areas where it is presently absent.
Despite widespread belief to the contrary, a market economy and a clean environment are not mutually exclusive. This report, by offering market solution to market failures, will attempt to dispel this misconception and provide a sound theoretical and policy basis for market environmentalism.
Read the full paper here.
It is customary for those in public life who set out their ideas to sensationalize their work with overblown claims about its urgency. Thus we are usually told that "Britain stands at the crossroads," and that critical choices have to be made which will determine the entire future of the nation. Such claims serve to underline the dire warnings of the writer, to alarm people that we face some sort of "crisis," and to suggest that only prompt action based on those selfsame insights can avert the impending catastrophe. I make no such claims. Britain stands at no crossroads except in the trivial sense that every present is a crossroads where the past meets the future. I do not believe that this nation is in crisis or that only the immediate adoption of urgent remedies can save it. On the contrary, I believe that Britain is well on course, and is in the process of making a seamless transition from the policies which succeeded in the 180s to those which will succeed in the 1990s.
Thus my purpose is not an attempt to sound the alert to some impending emergency, however much interest such drama would add to my words. It is rather to show how the principles which enabled us to solve many of the problems of the last decade can develop the policies we need to tackle the different priorities which the current decade presents.
In this paper Dr. Madsen Pirie discusses the differences between public and private sector ownership, and the overarching benefits of private ownership for the consumer.
This report covers the theme of Privatization and Economic Revival, which was discussed by a number of leading privatization experts at the Fourth London Conference on Privatization held in Westminster. The London Conference has now become a principal event in the internation privatization calendar, and at the Fourth Conference we welcomed over 250 top-ranking delegates from 50 different countries and different territories.
The practical and world-wide experience of our contributors prompted us to concentrate this report onto the special features of privatization in developing countries. this resulting report provides policymaker in the developing world with a manual of a great insight, which should help them press ahead towards the important political and economic benefits which privatization can bring.
Read the the first part of the report here and the second part here.
At the centre of the problem for the Police Service is the fact that while the crime rate appears to rise inexorably, local authorities and central government have to operate within an economic framework of financial restraint. Resource allocation to the police therefore not only implies difficult decisions, but is further complicated because the business of evaluating the success of the police is an imprecise and highly subjective matter.
The Police Service with its monopolistic, un–competitive structure, operates all too easily in an environment where there is little or no yardstick for comparison against alternatives. This report looks at the different ways that crime is combatted. It also argues that a return to local policing is the way forward to fight the rising levels of crime with the major restructuring of the police service giving rise to greater service evaluation, improved efficiency and a more flexible response to the increasing market demand for choice.
In Empowerment Dr Madsen Pirie, Graham Mather, David Freeman, John Willman and Christopher Monckton talks about how privatization was the key theme of the 1980's and how if successfully engineered empowerment as a policy innovation could become the key theme of the 1990's.
In this essay, Professor Kenneth Minogue puts in context the claim that events in Eastern Europe leave the genuine blueprint of socialism quite untorn. He argues that it represents just one more example of a familiar human frailty, the sad but common unwillingness of human beings to give up their most cherished beliefs and prejudices.
