A parting thought: Britain needs to learn to love capitalism June 19, 2014 THERE is one change, more than any other, that Britain needs to undergo if we want to fulfil our true potential. We must learn to embrace capitalism, individual liberty and the awe-inspiring wealth and job creating potential of business, and ditch our ambivalent attitude towards free markets. It is time for a cultural revolution in [...]
Britain’s economy needs lower and flatter taxes to flourish June 18, 2014 TAX and spending remain far too high in the UK, dragging down our economy. We still suffer from a bloated state, from an inefficient, low-productivity govern-ment sector, from a large budget deficit and from a tax system that is no longer fit for purpose. Resources are misallocated, incentives damaged and prosperity held back. It is [...]
Marx was wrong (cont): Corporate giants are inherently fragile June 17, 2014 ONE of Karl Marx’s big theories was that capitalism had an inherent tendency towards monopoly and would thus self-destroy. The idea remains widely held, and is one reason countries operate stringent anti-trust regulations. But it’s a little more complicated than that. First, many monopolies or quasi-monopolies are actually created by the state, rather than resulting [...]
One in three companies is loss-making – that’s far too many June 16, 2014 IT WAS Milton Friedman, the great Chicago economist, who put it best. Company bosses are employed by shareholders; and management’s responsibility is to follow investors’ wishes, namely “make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom”. Of course, [...]
Iraq chaos is a wake-up call for the world over its oil needs June 16, 2014 WE ARE not running out of oil, far from it. The International Energy Agency is predicting that supply will shoot up from 89m barrels per day (bpd) in 2012 to 101m bpd by 2035. If it is right – and it bases much of that growth on the return of Iraq to global markets, an [...]
Interest rates are going up – and mortgages will become harder to get June 12, 2014 It's official: money is about to become more expensive. Mark Carney warned yesterday that rates could rise more quickly than the markets were predicting. The implication is that the base rate could increase later this year, rather than in the second quarter of next year; this is a major shift for the Bank of England [...]
Britain’s economy has turned into a giant job-creating machine June 11, 2014 BRITAIN’S jobs market is continuing to defy gravity. The latest figures are stunningly good, with employment moving ever-closer to its all-time high as a share of the workforce and the number of jobs in the economy hitting another record. Yet there is a downside to this extraordinary, almost unbelievably positive story – once again, productivity [...]
Energy firms’ Labour-inspired price freeze is backfiring badly June 10, 2014 ENERGY companies haven’t helped themselves. Their biggest mistake over the past decade was to collude with the political establishment. Instead of putting the interest of their consumers first, they agreed to take part in the dash for green energy, safe in the knowledge that this would push up prices. They messed up in other ways, [...]
We must learn the right lessons from the Trojan horse scandal June 9, 2014 IT is nothing short of scandalous that five state schools in Birmingham have had to be placed in special measures after being infiltrated by extremists. It is shocking that it took the inspectors so long to finally identify and document the problem. The question is whether this is still happening in other parts of the [...]
Artificial intelligence is on the rise – and humans must adapt June 9, 2014 FOR the first time ever, a computer programme has managed to dupe experts into thinking that it was a 13-year old boy. This is a major milestone in the progress of artificial intelligence, and thus a hugely important development for labour markets, for the global economy and for all of us. The Russian computer programme [...]