ASI Bulletin: You recess if you want to, the ASI's not for recessing
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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In this bulletin:
The Adam Smith 300th Birthday Prize: Could be yours. Read on.
We pay how much to the government? Discover the shocking truth below.
Youth work: Creating intellectual multipliers and gathering Westminster do-ers.
But first...
Sorry if you spent the summer dodging heatwaves and forest fires in the Med or Hawaii or somewhere. I sensibly withdrew to a wet Scottish island where wildfires are as rare as the government-run ferries.
Other news has been entertaining, though, like NatWest ex-boss Alison Rose getting a £2.4m payout after trashing the brand of a bank that’s now called NatWest only because her predecessor Fred Goodwin trashed that brand too. (At this rate they’ll have to revive some untarnished name like National Provincial.)
Talk about losing your marbles: the British Museum could also use some new branding, after ignoring a Danish antiquities dealer who pointed out hundreds of treasures from their vaults were for sale on eBay.
Meanwhile, North Sea energy producers say the windfall tax has killed investment; reports reveal that company debt has skyrocketed and that the stealth taxes in the last Budget have left each household £1,000 worse off; and the Bank of England (another crumbling pillar of the Establishment) is cheerfully rate-rising us into recession. All in all, a pretty normal summer in Once-Great Britain.
But I digress…
Adam Smith 300 Prize
Our special essay contest to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the birth of Adam Smith (you know the guy — great Scottish thinker and economist, Division of Labour, Invisible Hand, all that stuff) — is underway, and you’d better get your entry in PDQ. In fact, applications close on 4th September.
All you have to do, though, is to send a 1,500 word essay to maxwell@adamsmith.org on the subject ‘What would Adam Smith write about now?’ Which I would say gives you plenty of scope.
This competition isn’t just for students- absolutely anyone can enter.
Dr Samuel Johnson (who didn’t much like Adam Smith, and vice versa) once said that no-one but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money. So here’s the bait. First prize is £3,000, second prize is £2,000 and third prize is £1,000. Worth a shot, then, isn’t it? And those prizes come with a number of other perks too. So stop reading this, and get writing — or tell your friends, relations and students to do just that.
Cost of Government Day
Tax Freedom Day fell in June this year, meaning that the average person in the UK now spends almost half the year working to pay taxes rather than feed, clothe and house themselves. But we don’t let politicians off that easily. We know how they like to keep taxes down by borrowing instead, and passing on the cost of their profligacy to future generations, some yet unborn and none with a vote in the matter.
So we also calculate Cost of Government Day — that day in the year when downtrodden Brits we have finally paid off the full costs of our politicians’ scheming. And this year, it fell on 15th August. Yes, the reality is we spend more than half the year working to keep out politicians in socks and pay for our (over-large) government.
Freedom Week
Our annual student boot camp for promising pro-freedom students saw twenty-five of them (hand picked from hundreds of applicants) assembling in the halls of Cambridge University for a week of talks, discussions and punting. Speakers included The Spectator's James Heale, Tory thinker Daniel, Lord Hannan, Professor Victoria Bateman, and a host of other prominent academics, think-tankers and policy experts.
It’s remarkable how our Freedom Week alumni stick together after this educational and team-building event, reinforcing each other as they move through life. And as they go into education or public policy or the media and elsewhere, armed with the facts and arguments we’ve given them, they become multipliers — who then influence others.
That, by the way, is why we need your help to keep Freedom Week — and our many other educational programmes for young people — running, and broaden the minds of future generations. You know what to do. Here’s a button to help you do it.
Events
Our under-35s movers-and-shakers-in-waiting meet again for merriment and diversion on Tuesday 5th September, when our special guest is the Spectator's Cindy Yu. RVSP at events@adamsmith.org.
Party Conference season is almost upon us, and our staff will be busy hob-nobbing with Westminster’s most influential denziens, and trying to inject sound ideas into the political discussion. If any of our readers are there, do come and say hello!
ASI at Labour Conference
We’ll be hosting our own panel, entitled So You’re Going to Win? We’ll be joined by policy experts and journalists to suggest how bold a Labour Party on the cusp of power could be. That will be in the Lounge on the 8th October at 4pm.
ASI at Conservative Party Conference
You’ll be able to find our Director of Research Maxwell Marlow talking at the Conservative Environment Network’s event on whether Biomass is the answer to our energy and climate problems (Tuesday 3rd October, 11am, Central Rooms 3-4, Manchester Central Convention Complex).
He’ll also be speaking in the Great Immigration Debate in the ThinkTent at 17:45 on Monday 2nd October.
New Reports
Social ‘value’
Have you noticed how public-sector procurement don't look for people who could actually do the job at a good price, but demands that suppliers instead tick the right boxes? Well, that’s now the legal requirement, says the ASI’s Maxwell Marlow in his new report The Price of Everything, the Social Value of Nothing.
Maxwell reveals that public procurement is now constrained by 40 regulations and 30 pages of ‘social value’ criteria that suppliers have to conform to, regardless of their size or what they are supplying. Like showing they actively tackle economic inequality, work to improve the environment, ‘deliver social welfare and wellbeing’ and — well, I could go on. The result? Civil servants feel good, politicians can claim to be high-minded, smaller, innovative firms get squeezed out and taxpayers get stuck with larger bills for a benefit that’s about as hard-nosed as a tray of blancmange.
Instead, we recommend scrapping the whole rotten thing, focusing on a fair shout for smaller and challenger suppliers, and delivering better value for those of us who have to work until August 15th to pay for all this guff.
The solution(s) to everything
Well, not quite, but the ASI’s Madsen Pirie has provided some solutions to a few of the UK's most significant policy problems in his discussion paper Innovative Answers for Britain’s Barriers. Such as healthcare (a Health Guarantee card, which you can take to the private sector if your treatment is delayed), homelessness (using Finland’s ‘Housing First’ model), and the student loan crisis (go with the Australian system instead). Plus childcare, energy, immigration, money and more.
Several of Madsen’s solutions have been written up on the news website CapX, and you can read the whole lot below.
Media
Westminster may have quietened down over the recess period, but our team have been as busy as ever getting our message out in the papers and on the airwaves…
Director of Research Maxwell Marlow has been commenting on a range of policy areas. Here is he in the Telegraph on the increase in visa fees, and on the state pension, on BBC Radio 2 and GBNews about public sector pay rises, and again on public health interventions, in CityAm and the Daily Mail on windfall taxes, in the I paper on the new Tata giga factory (a comment which was mentioned in the House of Commons), bemoaning the nanny-statist sugar tax on Times Radio, on TalkTV on Beer and Alcohol Duty changes, in the Sunday Express on our out-of-work sickness problem and on where we can lower taxes. And breathe…
He’s also been busy writing opinion pieces for the Times on why we shouldn’t abolish Private Schools, and analysing the Chancellor’s Mansion House speech for CapX.
Our Executive Director Duncan Simpson was in the Telegraph Politics newsletter on Inheritance Tax, the Daily Express to chastise the Bank of England’s terrible management of the economy, in BBC Business and LBC on executive pay, and in the Sunday Express on where we should be looking to make tax cuts.
Director of Government Relations James Price was in the Telegraph and on GBNews praising Health Secretary Steve Barclay for reducing the civil servants in his Department, and on 5News on executive pay.
I appeared in the I’s front page story on rising interest rates, whilst our Director of Communications Emily Fielder was in Politics Home giving her take on Michael Gove’s recent housing announcements.
Our patrons have been helping to spread the good word- here’s Brandon Lewis’ piece in the Daily Mail on why the ‘tourist tax’ is disadvantaging London compared to our neighbours. Elsewhere, Nadhim Zahawi has been continuing to lead the call in the Telegraph to abolish Inheritance Tax. In the 1990s, we wrote a paper arguing that Inheritance Tax should be abolished on account of its distortionary economic effects and the huge burden it places on those paying the tax. The arguments still ring true today!
Elsewhere, Cost of Government Day, the sister campaign of Tax Freedom Day, was picked up by CityAm, CapX, Guido Fawkes and the Politico newsletter. Our President, Madsen Pirie, also appeared on GBNews to discuss it.
Madsen was also in CapX summarising some of the key recommendations from his new paper, Innovative Answers for Britain’s Barriers, including what we can learn from Australia’s Healthcare system, why the Bank of England has been failing to manage the economy properly, and why we should follow Finland’s example in reducing homelessness.
Maxwell’s new paper, The Price of Everything, the Social Value of Nothing, got a long write-up in the Telegraph and the Express, whilst Maxwell was interviewed for the Supply Management Magazine. Maxwell and James summarised the main findings of the reports in comment pieces for the Express and the Telegraph respectively.
On our superblog
Tim Worstall on why the argument for less government is the government we have.
Madsen Pirie on what the UK’s immigration policy should look like.
Steve Bain ruminates on whether a new cryptocurrency—specifically one backed by gold—might steal a march on the almighty US dollar.
Seen elsewhere
Bob Hetzel, a retired Federal Bank economist and senior academic, has written an insightful essay entitled The Contributions of Adam Smith to the Enlightenment and their Relevance for Today. You can read that here.
The Cobden Centre’s new documentary, in which I appeared, Ex Nihilo: The Truth about Money, is now available on YouTube. The documentary is part of the Honest Money Initiative, a campaign to stop inflation by mending the monetary system of the UK and reforming the Bank of England.
Make a (very) old man happy
It’s Adam Smith’s 300th birthday year. Help us continue his legacy of economic enlightenment by supporting our activities to engage with and educate the coming generation.
We have big ambitions for 2023 and beyond with a fresh team, but we need your support.
That’s why we’ve launched the 300 Pledge.
Thanks to the generosity of one supporter, for the first £300,000 we raise, they will match every pound you put in. So there has never been a better time to support our work.
Make the Pledge here:
You’ll enable a step-change in our efforts and support entire new campaigns to be fought in the battle of ideas.
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And I quote…
Ronald Reagan (1981):
“Government’s first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.”
Remember that when the defence budget is being chipped away and you are no longer allowed to own an oil boiler (and about 150,000 other things).
Bye,
e
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