Many readers will be familiar with the concept of the Bootleggers and Baptists, in which self-interested businesses find common cause with moral busybodies in rigging the market against consumers. The ...

This article was first published on the Institute of Economic Affairs Substack. Official figures recently published by HMRC indicate a huge rise in illicit tobacco sales in the UK since 2021. The ...

Given the high economic costs of fraud, the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 aims to address the well-known deficiencies of the common law’s approach to corporate criminal liability ...

Each year, the Government publishes international energy price comparisons. The data is sourced from the IEA and covers industrial and domestic gas and electricity prices. The latest data for 2023 was ...

Karl Marx’s influence among intellectual elites underwent a massive rebound in recent years. In 2018, mainstream publications including the New York Times, the Economist, and the Financial Times ran ...

Until very recently, Britain’s National Health Service used to be beyond argument. The reverence for the health service often precluded anything resembling a rational discussion around it: the social ...

Reforming the National Health Service into a social health insurance (SHI) system could boost UK health outcomes to European levels. There has been a huge shift in public opinion, with Britons now ...

The overview highlights the academic consensus on harmful consequences. Most studies (56 out of 65) find that rent controls succeed in lowering rents for controlled units, as intended. However, 14 out ...

https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Shadow-Expenses-Uncosted-Regulatory-Burdens-in-Election-Manifestos-Matthew-Lesh.pdf Britain’s prosperity depends on ...

Colonialism and the slave trade were, at best, minor factors in Britain’s prosperity and may have been net lossmakers. An increasingly prominent anti-capitalist narrative claims that empire and ...

Last Tuesday, the Guardian published an article entitled “The end of landlords: the surprisingly simple solution to the UK housing crisis” by Nick Bano. It is another exercise in supply-side denial, ...

“This is a deeply cynical cash grab from the Chancellor. Forget sin taxes, this is a saint tax. Vapers did what the government wanted and gave up smoking. They are now being punished for it. “This is ...