Onion Economics
There is something about onions which brings out the worst in bureaucrats. Orlando Figes’ A People’s Tragedy chronicles the early years of the Russian revolution. Under war communism, the Bolsheviks attempted to exert state control over the entire economy. A long list of vegetables was drawn up, specifying the prices at which they could be […]
Have Bankers Been Practising Socialism? The Debate About the Top 1 Per Cent
Boris Johnson has got into trouble for his statement that it is “surely relevant to a conversation about equality” that just 2 per cent of “our species” has an IQ over 130. Over the past couple of years, the Occupy movement has made headlines by attacking the top 1 per cent. The summer 2013 edition […]
Is the ‘rent-seeker’ dying out?
The concept of the “rent seeker” is one of the most valuable in the whole of economics. The activity of rent-seeking involves obtaining money by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activity takes place, instead of getting paid for creating new wealth. It is a part of public choice theory, for which […]
Entrepreneurship and the filthy rich
Peter Mandelson famously said that he was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’. As was the case with many aspects of New Labour, he was working firmly in the Leninist intellectual tradition. Some 20 years earlier, the then leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Deng Xiaoping, stated that ‘to get rich is glorious’. The […]
Tax cuts, public spending and morality
Kier Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, has vowed to ‘ramp up’ prosecutions against individuals for tax evasion five-fold in two years. He has made clear his plan to target middle-class earners, citing as examples ‘lawyers, tax consultants and plumbers’, an intriguing perspective on the British class system, or perhaps we are all middle-class now. […]
A stitch in time. We need smarter government, but less of it
What is the connection between the content of Boris Johnson’s speech this week to the CBI, tax avoidance and evasion, executive pay, petty crime and plagiarism by students? This is yet another one where economics can help us with the solution. Economists have long used the example of a factory which imposes costs on other […]
Corporation tax: fostering the illusions of the electorate that someone else will pay
Corporation tax is very much in the news. Starbucks is merely the latest to be in the spotlight, having paid no corporation tax on more than £1billion of sales in the past three years. This became noteworthy when the Prime Minister himself declared he was unhappy with the level of tax avoidance by big corporations working […]
Limits to taxation? The UK General Election 2010
The May 2010 election saw a substantial swing against the incumbent Labour government, though the Conservatives were denied an outright victory. In a fair number of marginal seats which they would have expected to win on the national trend, the swing to the Conservatives away from Labour was distinctly low. There are obviously many possible […]
