Reading “I, Pencil” … at the Pencil Museum!
Leonard E. Read’s 1958 classic essay, I, Pencil, is a must read for anyone interested in how markets function. In a few pages, I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E. Read (to give it it’s full title) demonstrates the truth of what appears to be an absolutely absurd...
Socialism is (still) Impossible… Reflections on debating the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s Adam Buick – 20 years on
Twenty years ago at Chiswick Town Hall in West London, on the 17th January 1992, I debated Adam Buick of the Socialist Party of Great Britain on the subject of the impossibility of socialism. (This debate is one of hundreds of SPGB debates listed on Wikipedia, here.) With the...
BBC's "Farming Today" defends tax-funded EU farm subsidies & higher food prices
Radio 4’s “Farming Today” and its defence of European Union farm subsidies (broadcast 6.30am, 20th August 2011) was surprising only in how one-sided was the presentation of the debate. Rather than the balanced, dispassionate presentation of the case for and against government subsidies to farmers – something that one might have expected from...