ASI Bulletin: Going for Gold
Dr. Eamonn Butler, our Director and Co-Founder, takes you through the last few (always hectic) weeks at the Adam Smith Institute.
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Economics (Sanctions) can make the world a better place
Nobody ever leaves The Firm….
Why the easy taxes are the worst
But first...
Reeves says she needs to fill a £22bn black hole in unfunded promises. Well having just pledged £12bn in overseas aid and £10bn in public sector pay rises, maybe she should look in the mirror. As they say, A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money.
From the rather more spacious Opposition benches, former Tory leadership hopeful Suella Braverman says ‘I’ve been branded mad, bad and dangerous.’ (Presumably an example of the marketing technique of making a virtue of your weaknesses, like that beer that claimed to be ‘reassuringly expensive’.) But I’m not sure that ‘Reassuringly mad’ is really going to work. The Tories have also introduced a ‘yellow card’ system to stop the leadership candidates beating each other up. So that’s not going to be very riveting, is it?
I always said I’d eat my hat if ever ASI became establishment. Now that our General Election Night party has been mentioned in Tatler magazine, I have decided to renege on this promise (and to help me, I’ve been taking lessons from a few ex-politicians.)
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer says he's negotiating with Spain for a free-travel deal for young people. When the first young Gibraltarians turn up in Madrid, I might believe it….
Though I digress...
REPORTS
Out today: Economic Sanctions 2.0
It turns out economic sanctions can be effective- but only if they concentrate on eroding hostile state’s economic and military capacity to carry out their malign activities, rather than act as mere symbolic gestures to denote our disapproval. Expert James Gillespie shows us how we can update the UK’s sanctions strategy in a way that incentivises transferral of capital away from sanctioned states and that properly penalises sanctions evasion.
This paper is out today- do share it with your network!
A short history of bad planning
Well, that would be a miracle of compression. But we’ve made a stab, and with the incoming government promising planning reform, our new report by Sam Watling shows how those ambitions have been often aired, but always thwarted. Rather essential reading, #Angela Rayner! Read Learning Lessons: A History of Bad Planning Policy.
And watch the video below!
London’s Cost of Rent Day
London’s Cost of Rent Day, the day on which, on average, we stop paying for our rent and start keeping the money for ourselves, fell on the 16th July. Bear in mind that the average Cost of Rent day is on the 5th May- meaning that higher salaries in London are not making up for higher rental costs. Read our write-up in the Evening Standard here.
Did you know you can also calculate your own Cost of Rent Day?
Let’s re-think taxation!
What a pity the Chancellor didn’t read my new IEA book, An Introduction to Taxation (Love the cover, though the government’s slice is about twice that—Ed.) before hatching her plans to raise capital taxes. But then it’s only just come out. Let’s hope she reads it—or at least my Spectator piece—now. Then she’d know why capital taxes are the most damaging of all.
The Philosophy of Conservative
My colleague Dr Madsen Pirie released his excellent new work The Philosophy of Conservatism to much fanfare at an event at ASI HQ. Lord Frost kindly attended as our keynote speaker and had lots of nice words to say about the book- let’s just hope the Conservative Party leadership candidates have been reading it as thoroughly!
You can read Madsen’s summary for CapX here.
Scary Debt Clock
Our friends over at the Taxpayers’ Alliance have relaunched their new debt clock which reveals the full extent of the UK’s growing national debt, and which is constantly being updated. It turns out our national debt is growing at a rate of £4,410 per second, which equates to a daily increase of £381.09 million. Elliot Keck has written an explanatory blog for our website here.
EVENTS
Psychedelics at the ASI…!
‘Psychedelics’ is pretty hard to spell, especially after you’ve consumed a few. But we reckon it’s time to re-think about psychedelic (and other!) drugs. Our Enlightenment Evening with psychedelic evangelists Max Rangely, Tara Austin and Dr David Erritzoe were hugely informative. You can watch it on our Youtube channel.
Also on rock & roll, my colleague Emily Fielder spoke at the London Nightlife Roundtable at London’s City Hall—saying that all the ’24-hour city’ stuff doesn’t cut much ice if there is no public transport after 11pm and hospitality businesses are taxed and regulated out of existence. The roundtable’s recommendations are going in a report to the Mayor.
You can read On the Rocks, our own Next Generation Centre report into London’s nightlife below.
Bye, bye, Mimi
We are sad to lose our Events & Ops Director, Imogen ‘Mimi' Yates, who is moving on to do her journalism master’s and a broadcast internship at the Spectator magazine. In her time at ASI she revolutionised our events programme, pulled in some amazing and knowledgeable speakers, and became a very popular member of the team. We’re now recruiting for someone to replace her—if that’s even possible. Best wishes in your new career, Mimi!
But then nobody ever leaves The Firm...
The sun almost shone on our garden party for ASI alumni—all the excellent young people who have worked at the Institute over our forty-something-year history, Some of them, I have to say, aren’t exactly young any more, but it’s amazing how much loyalty ASI still has from its past employees and supporters. (A camaraderie from all those years huddled together round a candle flame eating cold gruel?—Ed.) Many thanks to James Lawson and Carolina Toczycka for organising the event. Same next year?
Freedom Week
We’re off to Cambridge soon for our annual Freedom Week event. It’s an intellectual spree for 30 of the brightest young students we can find, and we're telling them all they need to know about free markets and free people, so they become multipliers who take the message out to others. This year’s facilitators include the IEA’s Stephen Davies, philosopher at the University of Oxford and author of our Privatise the Moon paper Rebecca Lowe, economist Victoria Bateman, and our very own James Price.
ELECTRIC INTERWEB
I’m a TikTok influencer!
Yes, bro, I ate that, no cappin’. TBH I did it for the plot but our tech guy Seb says it slaps--real Gucci, OK, Boomer, I’m telling all the trash probs with Universal Basic Income. I left no crumbs. No FOMO-crack a can of Cherry-Lime Sprite Chill and watch it below. (Are you sure you’ve quite got this patois?—Ed.)
Interns on the blog
Some of our summer interns have been writing interesting blogs- including on lab-grown meat, Revolut’s banking licence, and Labour’s New Deal for Working People.
GAP YEAR INTERNSHIP
We are looking for two gap year students to join the ASI team. It’s not like interning anywhere else. You will be a full member of the ASI team, writing things for publication (see my Blog section above!), organising events with important people (and bossing them around). Forget those ideas of working in the jungles of Brazil when you could be working in the real jungle of Westminster. Be quick, though: applications close on 20th August. Details below.
MEDIA
With Labour announcing that they’re planning to stick 20% VAT on independent school fees from January 2025, our paper on why this is a bad idea is unsurprisingly still being continuously cited in the national media- here it is in the Sunday Telegraph, The I paper, and in The I again here.
Our other reports have been in the media too- our Chairman James Lawson wrote about London’s Cost of Rent Day for the Telegraph, Mimi Yates bemoaned our bureaucrats’ refusal to let us cheer on our football team in CityAm, the Telegraph re-upped our research on the state pension, and Sam Bidwell was up on GBNews to talk about it.
And as usual, we’ve been commenting on a wide range of topics. We were in the Times and the Independent on how the Conservatives can win back the youth vote, in the Sunday Express on Reeves’ fiscal hole, in Guido Fawkes on the King’s Speech, in the Daily Mail on the smoking ban, and in Politico, the Guardian, the Telegraph and Guido on Labour’s housing announcements. Plus, senior Fellow Charles White-Thomson wrote for the Mail’s money section about why Britain needs to start thinking like a business.
ENLIGHTENMENT ESSAY COMPETITION
Don’t forget to enter our Enlightenment Essay Competition, with prizes of £8,000 (first place), £4,000 (second) and £2,000 (third).
We’ll be looking further afield in our search for excellent essays. We are asking students, from undergraduate to post-doctoral, to answer the question: “How can the ideas of the Enlightenment become embedded in the Arab World?”
The deadline is 30th August. To apply, you have to be an undergraduate, postgraduate or doctoral and post-doctoral student. We are asking for up to 5,000 words including any footnotes, Chicago citation, British English. Submissions to maxwell@adamsmith.org.
Good luck!
And I quote…
It’s would be the late Milton Friedman’s 112th birthday this week, and with taxes in the news, here is his verdict on them:
I am in favour of reducing taxes under any circumstances, for any excuse, with any reason whatsoever because that's the only way you're ever going to get effective control over government spending.
Bye,
e
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