Although the pandemic response is much too late to fix the medieval plagues used to justify it, it remains of great relevance to Pharma investors who see unbeatable advantage in converting taxation dollars into rising share valuations. Governments supporting the CEPI 100-day vaccine initiative are giving public money to support the research and maintain manufacturing readiness of private companies who will then sell their products back to the very same taxpayers, ideally mandated by those governments. This will occur in response to disease surveillance that the same hapless taxpayers are funding. A whole army of global health bureaucrats is positioning to run this – these officials only need a theoretical risk to recommend lockdowns. The 100-day mRNA vaccines will return freedom. The business case here is simply irresistible.
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January 24th, 2026 | 15 comments
 Away from the perma-misery of politics, wars, regulatory nonsense and so on, I came across this article on the Substack of the Rational Optimist Society (with a name like that, it is not a place to go for the doom-scrollers): “Housing is arguably the most broken industry in the world, with tough competition from healthcare and education. It’s a gigantic market that affects us all,” writes Stephen McBride. He argues that firms such as Cuby Technologies are doing for housing what shipping containers did for transportation and global trade, with massively positive effects. Cuby’s product is the Mobile Micro-Factory (MMFTM). It’s a standardized, portable factory that turns homebuilding into a predictable manufacturing process. I can see that acronym MMF, in this context, getting the same visibility as SMR for “small modular reactors”, and tapping into the same idea of using economies of scale, mass customisation and fiendishly clever computer tech to produce lots of useful, not eye-wateringly expensive things for our homes, power generators, whatever. And I can see, in time, how this fits with still-developing tech such as 3-D printing (which has been around a while). It will of course give some folk the vapours, such as those in the construction trades, much as happened with other disruptive changes. But if, for example, ageing and other forces squeeze labour market supply of people in such trades, then business models such as the MMF one, able to churn out homes, will have a lot of appeal. Plus new jobs can be created around design and all the associated, value-add opportunities that can arise. One aspect of all this is that if it lives up to the billing, the precision with which homes are built will be very high. Also, there is an appeal, is there not, for the likes of Elon Musk in figuring out how to efficiently produce things for spacefaring and the settlement of Mars. I can bet he is following all this closely. Final thought – for places that have suffered a devastating loss of housing (such as Southern California exactly a year ago because of the fires), being able to produce attractive homes at scale for people seems to have a lot of appeal. And, er, that’s where the horrible politics comes in. To date, only a fraction of the number of houses lost have been replaced. That is a shameful state of affairs, and one for which the local politicians deserve to pay a high price.
January 18th, 2026 | 24 comments
I saw this on Fraser Nelson’s Substack (it seems everyone has a Substack these days). The British journalist has been to Thailand with his wife, and noted this positive healthcare outcome in Thailand:
I had the same frustrating experience in dealing with my own ankle/knee pain issues about six years ago, but unlike Nelson, I did not fly thousands of miles to get treated (which clearly has to be factored in for the health tourist equation to work. But then Fraser Nelson was in the country anyway on holiday.) I have private medical cover, but did not use it on this occasion, and got sorted with specially made insoles, and did physio and various exercises – including barbell lifts such as the deadlift – to strengthen my knees, and so forth. I am a lot better and feel fitter than when I was a decade younger. Whatever the specifics, the example given from Thailand shows that the UK’s free-at-the-point-of-use system has major faults, because there’s less of a price incentive to focus on what people are looking for, and therefore fresh sources of supply aren’t drawn in. Prices are information carriers, and like a clogged artery, a healthcare system run on socialist lines can produce the national equivalent of a stroke. (This in some ways describes the economy of the UK.) Healthcare needs a sharp dose of capitalism along with green veggies and a daily walk. Think of how under free market healthcare, technologies such as 3-D printing/processing scale up production, in a customised way, of items such as hip replacement parts, knee replacement parts, insoles, and other things. This tech already is being used, but under a more market-based UK system, this will accelerate. The toolkit that is promised by AI could really drive change in a positive way (and I am not as starry eyed about AI as some might be). Healthcare needs its Jobs, Dyson and Rockefeller. Anyway , thoughts about health and wellbeing often crop up in the cold, post-Christmas days of January, so it is time for me to hit the weights. Wishing everyone here a happy 2026. January 4th, 2026 | 11 comments
This is a real tweet from the European Commission:
This is an excerpt from a scholarly article about the history of Islam:
– Joseph Schacht, quoted by Wael B. Hallaq in Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed? If you think that the ability of the European Commission to recognise when something has reached a point where no improvement is possible is good enough to allow it to safely close the door of ijtihad on charger cable design, consider the evident fact that none of the multiple people in the Berlaymont building over whose desks the draft of that tweet must have passed knew enough history to veto that title. December 26th, 2025 | 18 comments
For a couple of decades now I’ve been insisting that China is the most free market economy on the planet. In some senses of course this is laughably untrue. In others, or in at least one, remarkably close to the bone. December 18th, 2025 | 8 comments
I left this comment on another place and thought I’d share it here. I was responding to an American pal – whom I normally agree with – who said the the UK’s vote for independence outside the EU was a disaster. I have jazzed it up a bit and added links. Well, it is Christmas! The EU has become an increasingly regulated, bureaucratic entity, and while the UK tried to pull it in a different direction, the sclerosis of the continent got worse. The Single Market and “freedom of movement” aspect had their positives – up to a point. The Customs Union (external tariff wall, in other words) was a clear negative, however. The structure of the EU is hostile to classical liberal economics in the medium term, not a plus. The bureaucratic mission creep of the European Commission, unhampered by a largely toothless E. Parliament (it cannot initiate or repeal directives), meant the EU economy decelerated, imperceptibly at first. Its share of global GDP has shrunk and not just because other, non-European countries such as China and India have grown over the past few decades. While some of the reasons for Brexit were grounded in nationalism, which I dislike, some reasons were more classically liberal. Those reasons should not be discounted. Another point: for far too many, the ideas of free enterprise and freedom of trade became entwined, in a poisonous way, with the creation of transnational, bureaucratic structures distant from ordinary people. To that extent, the EU is part of the problem for those making the case for capitalism and open markets. When you say those words, far too many think of men and women in suits in Brussels regulating this and that, not entrepreneurship, trade and human interaction. That’s a problem. For Americans reading this, remember that when the original 13 colonies broke free from the UK in the 1770s, they did so in part for reasons around representative government and the powers to tax with legitimate power. The EU increasingly came to the point where member states were reduced to regions of a centralising state. Ross Clark’s Far From EUtopia is a marvellous read about Brexit, what went wrong, and more. December 15th, 2025 | 14 comments
There is strategic competition with economic rivals, notably China, especially around advanced technology, supply-chain dominance, and industrial sovereignty. But tariffs raise costs for domestic firms that rely on imported components, in some cases hurting US manufacturers rather than helping them. Indeed, recent data show US manufacturing has contracted, with some firms citing tariffs as a reason for layoffs or relocation. Retaliation from trade partners can offset gains via higher tariffs abroad, disrupted supply chains, and increased uncertainty. The welfare benefits of rising domestic output are modest under many models because gains might be outweighed by efficiency losses, higher consumer prices, and reduced variety. And the government risks politicizing trade decisions, which may lead to cronyism or poorly targeted protection by helping politically connected sectors rather than broadly boosting national economic health December 10th, 2025 | 52 comments
That is not how wealth works of course. The people who have piles of money do not in fact have piles of money they’ve got piles of paper signifying ownership of companies and businesses. Which leads to the third problem with the idea. Which is that taxing these billionaires on their stacks of ownership of assets does not, in fact, free up money into the economy. It doesn’t reverse hoarding that is – just changes who hoards. December 5th, 2025 | 18 comments
“The great heroes of capitalism are the entrepreneurs who can feel the future in their bones and will do anything to bring it into being — fanatics who are compelled to build castles in the air, as Joseph Schumpeter put it. The biggest beneficiaries of these innovations are consumers who are showered with products and services beyond the dreams of previous generations. Capitalism may have made accommodations with some horrible regimes and vile practices in the past, as Beckert shows in detail. But as a system it thrives best in conditions of freedom, where government power is limited, property rights secure and businesspeople left alone to pursue their dreams and subject them to the stern test of the market.” – Adrian Wooldridge, Bloomberg ($), in one of his best recent columns IMHO, gently taking apart a new book by Sven Beckert that purports to show how we have become rich primarily through violence and enslavement, not mutual exchange. The book is apparently more than 1,300 pages long, and the largest ever published by Penguin. To write a book that long, and miss the key elements of why free enterprise is as great as it is, seems a lot of work for scant reward. Alas, I suspect Beckert’s book will be treated as reverently on parts of the Left as Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster, which turned out to be built on proverbial sand. A recent Nobel prizewinner in economics, Joel Mokyr, has written a book that I think rather more accurately identifies why, for instance, the UK became as wealthy as it did during the Industrial Revolution, and plays far more attention to the role of ideas. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes is also a good study, in my view. Anything by Deidre McCloskey is also good. November 29th, 2025 | 26 comments
Cash savings are not dead money – they’re the deposits that finance the banks’ loan books. Tossery built upon ignorance. Richard Murphy – that Sage of Ely – is one of the few people in the country able to proffer up budget ideas even worse than the ones we’re going to get from Rachel this week. November 24th, 2025 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Green Party are calling the scarcity of resources into play as an argument against the efficient use of resources. They’re mad. QED. November 4th, 2025 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Now, zoom out to the regulatory burden, a beast fed by both parties. The Tories kicked it off with gusto. In 2015, George Osborne slashed mortgage interest relief, fully phasing it out by 2020, landlords could no longer deduct full interest from taxable income, effectively hiking taxes by up to 20% for higher-rate payers. Add the 2016 3% stamp duty land tax (SDLT) surcharge on buy-to-lets, which cooled purchases by 10-15% per industry estimates. EPC rules tightened too: from 2018, rentals needed at least an E rating, with fines for non-compliance; by 2025, proposals aimed for C by 2030, costing landlords £8,000-£15,000 per property in upgrades. Right to Rent, introduced in 2014 and expanded, mandated immigration checks with £3,000 fines per illegal tenant. The 2019 promise to scrap Section 21 evictions lingered unresolved until Labour grabbed the baton, but it fuelled uncertainty, prompting a landlord sell-off wave. Labour, far from easing the pain, has doubled down. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025, royal assent in October, bans Section 21 outright (implementation mid-2026), mandates periodic tenancies, and limits rent hikes to once yearly at market rates—with challenges via tribunals. Pets can’t be unreasonably refused, and bidding wars are outlawed. Selective licensing proliferates: councils like Southwark charge £600-£750 per property for five years, with paperwork galore. Fines for breaches? Up to £30,000, as Reeves learned. Right to Rent enforcement has “rocketed” under Labour, with penalties hitting £4.2m recently versus £596k pre-election, a 600%+ spike, per Home Office data. No wonder a 2025 Landlord Today survey cited “political pressure” as a top exit reason for 40% of landlords. Impacts? Catastrophic for small players. October 31st, 2025 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
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