Utopia, you are standing in it!

In Part I of this series, Professor Don Boudreaux explained the folly of price controls, and Professor Antony Davies was featured in Part II.

Now let’s see some commentary from the late, great, Milton Friedman.

As Professor Friedman explained, the economics of price controls are very clear.

When politicians and bureaucrats suppress prices, you get shortages (as all students should learn in their introductory economics classes).

Sometimes that happens with price controls on specific sectors, such as rental housing in poorly governed cities.

Sometimes it happens because of economy-wide price controls, as we saw during Richard Nixon’s disastrous presidency.

In all cases, price controls are imposed by politicians who are stupid or evil. That’s blunt language, but it’s the only explanation.

Sadly, there will never be a shortage of those kinds of politicians, as can be seen from this column in the Wall Street Journal by Andy Kessler.

Anne’s reign was marked by the further development of a two-party system. In general, the Tories were supportive of the Anglican church and favoured the landed interest of the country gentry, while the Whigs were aligned with commercial interests and Protestant Dissenters.

As a committed Anglican, Anne was inclined to favour the Tories. Her first ministry was predominantly Tory, and contained such High Tories as Daniel Finch, 2nd Earl of Nottingham, and her uncle Laurence Hyde, 1st Earl of Rochester. It was headed by Lord Treasurer Lord Godolphin and Anne’s favourite the Duke of Marlborough, who were considered moderate Tories, along with the Speaker of the House of Commons, Robert Harley.

The Whigs vigorously supported the War of the Spanish Succession and became even more influential after the Duke of Marlborough won a great victory at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704. Many of the High Tories, who opposed British…

William of Orange invaded England on November 5, 1688 in an action known as the Glorious Revolution, which ultimately deposed King James II-VII of England, Scotland and Ireland. Forbidden by James to pay Mary a projected visit in the spring of 1687, Anne corresponded with her and was aware of the plans to invade.

On the advice of the Churchills, Anne refused to side with James after William landed and instead wrote to William on November 18, declaring her approval of his action. Churchill abandoned the unpopular King James on the 24th. Prince George followed suit that night, and in the evening of the following day James issued orders to place Sarah Churchill under house arrest at St James’s Palace.

Anne and Sarah fled from Whitehall by a back staircase, putting themselves under the care of Bishop Compton. They spent one night in his house, and subsequently arrived at Nottingham…

The Scottish Militia Bill 1708 (known formerly as the Scotch Militia Bill) was a bill that was passed by the House of Commons and House of Lords of the Parliament of Great Britain in early 1708.

However, on March 11, 1708, Queen Anne of Great Britain and Ireland, withheld Royal Assent on the advice of her ministers for fear that the proposed militia would be disloyal. This was due to the sudden appearance of a Franco-Jacobite invasion fleet en route to Scotland which gave ministers second thoughts, at the last minute, about allowing it to reach the statute books. It was the last occasion on which the Royal Veto was used.

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The bill’s long title was “An Act for settling the Militia of that Part of Great Britain called Scotland”. Its object was to arm the Scottish militia, which had not been recreated at the Restoration. This happened…

In March 1672 Charles II issued a document to remove harsh sanctions against religious non-conformity. But what brought about this ‘Declaration of Indulgence’ and why was a supposedly tolerant measure met with heavy criticism? History of Parliament Director Dr Paul Seaward explores…

On 15 March 1672, 350 years ago, the English government issued a document headed His Majesty’s Declaration to all his loving subjects, but which has become known as the Declaration of Indulgence. It was an astonishing statement, reversing the position of English monarchical governments since Elizabeth I towards Protestant religious dissent or nonconformity. Not only that, but in explicitly suspending a large body of parliamentary legislation which required church attendance and forbade the holding of alternative religious meetings (‘conventicles’) outside the framework of the Church of England it overrode the authority of parliament itself.

In the third volume of his “liberation trilogy,” THE GUNS AT LAST LIGHT: THE WAR IN WESTERN EUROPE, 1944-1945 Rick Atkinson has written a comprehensive history of the last year of the war in the west highlighted by incisive analysis, personality portraits, and clashes beyond the battlefield pitting remarkable characters against each other as they dominated allied and axis planning implementing wartime strategy.  Atkinson begins his narrative with a scene at the St. Paul School in west London on May 15, 1944, where allied strategists gathered to finalize plans for the cross channel invasion of France.  In this last volume of his trilogy Atkinson continues opus from Operation Overlord, through the liberation of France, the last Nazi attempt to thwart allied plans at the Battle of the Bulge, to finally entering Berlin and ending the war in Europe.  In so doing Atkinson employs…

The publication of the first official GDP data for the whole of 2021 have revived a highly politicised debate about how well the UK is doing, compared to our peers in the G7. Part of me doesn’t really care, but there are some important points here.

First, the claim that the UK was the fastest growing G7 economy in 2021 is factually correct, as is the claim that independent forecasters (including the IMF) expect the UK to repeat this performance in 2022. We can argue about the significance of these claims, but both are true.

The issues here are therefore different from those raised by other recent statements. In particular, the Prime Minister has rightly been told off by the statistics regulator for repeatedly claiming that there are more people in work than before the pandemic, which ignores the fall in the numbers of self-employed. This feels like a…

Today the House of Lords will announce the election of a new hereditary peer. Lord (Bruce) Grocott has once again put a bill before parliament to abolish the by-elections by which departing hereditary peers are replaced, following the removal of their automatic right to a seat in parliament in 1999. As David Beamish explains, the bill is unlikely to succeed despite having a great deal of support both inside and outside of the Lords. 

Following the Labour government’s reform of the House of Lords in 1999, 90 elected hereditary peers (as well as two office-holders, the Earl Marshal and Lord Great Chamberlain) remained part of the House of Lords, with – pending the promised second stage of reform – a system of by-elections to replace any who subsequently departed. The second stage did not happen and the by-elections remain as one of the strangest quirks of the UK constitution…