June 4 marked the 37th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. It has been a long time since the China of reform and opening-up gave way to one of the strangest regimes of our age: a country with the political freedoms of the Soviet Union but economic power approaching that of the United States, capable […]
When the Labour Government gained power in 2024, Matthew Syed proposed in his Times column the creation of a ‘Department for Long-Term Thinking’: a department that would take government out of the fog of the 24/7 news cycle and encourage policymakers to focus on the bigger picture. Although translating that idea into practice would probably […]
When I went to Manchester last year, there was one place I particularly wanted to visit: the Free Trade Hall. The building was constructed in the middle of the 19th century to commemorate the repeal of the Corn Laws. Manchester was then the heart of manufacturing, the Industrial Revolution and, most importantly, the struggle against […]
We are living through a Tocquevillian moment: ‘The evils which are endured with patience so long as they seem inevitable become intolerable as soon as a hope can be entertained of escaping from them.’ The two-party system appears to be collapsing. The rightward turn seen in the United States may well be repeated in the […]
One of my favorite Soviet-era jokes is the story of a farmer and a Soviet official. The official asks the farmer: if you had two farms, would you give one to the state? ‘Of course,’ the farmer replies. If you had two tractors, would you give one to the state? ‘Yes,’ he says again. ‘And […]
George Orwell wrote his famous essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ a year after the end of the Second World War. He showed how the ‘debasement of language’ corrupts thought and, in the process, corrupts our politics. The standard view is that economic and political causes drive the decline of language. But the reality, as […]
Kristian Niemietz of the Institute of Economic Affairs recently wrote, ‘How do commies sustain the illusion that they’re edgy rebels when everyone celebrates them and cheers them on?’ He was referring to Hasan Piker’s appearance at the Vanity Fair Oscars Party red carpet – a man who has said ‘America deserved 9/11, dude’, and is […]
For years, Iran’s Islamic Republic tried to sell a picture to the world, as George Orwell once put it, by ‘giving an appearance of solidity to pure wind’. Its negotiating technique was never complicated; it was simple stonewalling. Yet it is striking how different administrations interpreted that posture. Barack Obama saw them as complicated, sophisticated […]
A couple of years ago, the Free Market Road Show was touring European capitals, with prominent classical liberal economists making the case for free enterprise. Deirdre McCloskey was one of them. In Vienna, after a speech on the role of the entrepreneur, an enthusiastic journalist told her: ‘I loved your talks, and love the idea […]
Few macroeconomists have been as influential over the past half century as Robert Lucas. He won the Nobel Prize in economics, and his famous Lucas critique reshaped macroeconomic thinking. In his Presidential Address to the American Economic Association, he declared that the ‘central problem of depression prevention has been solved’. Five years later, the 2008 […]
Greta Thunberg is not sailing her eco-friendly boat across the Caspian Sea to stand with Iranian protesters. Nor are Javier Bardem, Angelina Jolie or Mark Ruffalo using their platforms to amplify Iranian voices. You do not hear chants of ‘Death to the IRGC’ at concerts. There are no celebrity hunger strikes, no emergency motions passed […]
Zohran Mamdani and Zack Polanski have brought back the politics of ‘hope’. Many of their voters do not even know the policies involved or their unintended consequences; they vote based on vibe. The vibe of something new, something different, something that promises change. But this politics of hope is not new – and it is […]
‘This is not my party’, George Will said when he left the Republican Party in 2016. Commentators often emphasise that Donald Trump destroyed the Democratic Party; as Niall Ferguson put it, ‘he destroyed the Democratic Party as we know it’. But the price of that destruction was the essence of American conservatism. Figures like Elon […]
More than 100 years ago, when progressives in America first pushed for minimum wage laws, they understood perfectly well how they would function. And no, these laws were not intended to improve the lives of vulnerable workers. In fact, the opposite was true, and that was precisely the point. In 1913, progressive journalist Paul Kellogg […]
The Treasury changed hands four times in the five years from 1958 to 1963. It started when, in January 1958, Chancellor Peter Thorneycroft objected to any spending increase and resigned, with Enoch Powell and Nigel Birch resigning alongside him. The new Chancellor, D. Heathcoat Amory, raised expenditure by £155 million in his budget. Then in […]
On Friday, in a back-and-forth tweet with Daniel Finkelstein, Zack Polanski wrote: When you interviewed me – you asked me repeatedly and I told you repeatedly GDP is a terrible way to measure health & well-being. As a Tory peer who also is a radio host – you seemed confused by that. It’s also a […]
Ha-Joon Chang recently wrote an article in the Financial Times criticising the state of economic education, which drew considerable attention. What went almost unnoticed, however, was a letter published in response. Surprisingly, one of the most prominent Austrian economists, Mario Rizzo, agreed with Chang. He wrote: Recently, I had a chance to look at some […]
TS Eliot once wrote that ‘the middle way is no middle thing at all, but the highest and the hardest thing to reach.’ That also seems to be the view of Kemi Badenoch, who is trying to reunite the fractious Conservative Party around the seeming contradiction of ‘responsible radicalism’. It may seem paradoxical for a […]
‘The Coming Crash’, ‘Broke Britain’ and ‘Weimar Britain.’ These have all been Spectator cover stories in just the past three months. In fact, more than 30% of that magazine’s recent covers have focused on an impending economic collapse. This reflects the alarming state of the public finances: government spending continues to grow to cover pensions, […]
My favorite line from Ludwig von Mises is not about economics, but about ideas. In ‘Liberalism’, he wrote: ‘Repression by brute force is always a confession of the inability to make use of the better weapons of the intellect’. Violence, in other words, is the last refuge of bankrupt ideas. Those who cannot prevail in […]
