A tax system should be simple enough for ordinary citizens to understand. But Britain's is so vast that even experts struggle to navigate it. The British tax code is now about twenty times longer than the Bible! This is not a mark of precision; it is evidence of a state that has steadily expanded its reach into every corner of economic life. Over the past century, UK tax legislation has grown from a relatively compact body of rules into a vast, convoluted mass of primary law, secondary legislation and guidance that runs to millions of words. This expansion has several predictable effects. First, it creates enormous compliance costs. Businesses and individuals must spend significant time and money on accountants, lawyers and tax software simply to understand and meet their obligations. These costs fall disproportionately on smaller firms and ordinary taxpayers who cannot afford specialist advice. Second, complexity is rarely neutral. Lengthy and opaque rules create opportunities for well-connected interests to secure favourable treatment through lobbying and special exemptions. What looks like technical detail is often the result of political bargaining. The more complicated the code becomes, the easier it is for powerful groups to shape it in their favour while ordinary citizens struggle to navigate it. Third, complexity concentrates power in the hands of the state and its bureaucracy. When rules are so intricate that only experts can interpret them, officials gain wide discretion in enforcement. This undermines the rule of law and makes arbitrary or selective application of the tax system more likely. A simpler, flatter tax code would be more transparent, cheaper to administer, and harder to manipulate. The current system’s extraordinary length is not an accident of bad drafting. It is the natural result of a government that has chosen to micro-manage economic activity through an ever-growing web of rules, incentives and penalties.

In 1825, a rich Welsh industrialist bought an entire American town to prove that socialism could work. He had the money, the buildings, the theory, and hundreds of eager followers waiting to move in. Two years later, it was over. 🧵

Water and energy are already state controlled. They are just not state actioned. Every aspect of both is controlled by Government, including spending and billing. This idea that nationalisation will reduce bills is fantasy.

A tax system should be simple enough for ordinary citizens to understand. But Britain's is so vast that even experts struggle to navigate it. The British tax code is now about twenty times longer than the Bible! This is not a mark of precision; it is evidence of a state that has steadily expanded its reach into every corner of economic life. Over the past century, UK tax legislation has grown from a relatively compact body of rules into a vast, convoluted mass of primary law, secondary legislation and guidance that runs to millions of words. This expansion has several predictable effects. First, it creates enormous compliance costs. Businesses and individuals must spend significant time and money on accountants, lawyers and tax software simply to understand and meet their obligations. These costs fall disproportionately on smaller firms and ordinary taxpayers who cannot afford specialist advice. Second, complexity is rarely neutral. Lengthy and opaque rules create opportunities for well-connected interests to secure favourable treatment through lobbying and special exemptions. What looks like technical detail is often the result of political bargaining. The more complicated the code becomes, the easier it is for powerful groups to shape it in their favour while ordinary citizens struggle to navigate it. Third, complexity concentrates power in the hands of the state and its bureaucracy. When rules are so intricate that only experts can interpret them, officials gain wide discretion in enforcement. This undermines the rule of law and makes arbitrary or selective application of the tax system more likely. A simpler, flatter tax code would be more transparent, cheaper to administer, and harder to manipulate. The current system’s extraordinary length is not an accident of bad drafting. It is the natural result of a government that has chosen to micro-manage economic activity through an ever-growing web of rules, incentives and penalties.

The government is looking for another £15bn/year for defense. We know they can't cut anything, so it means higher taxes. Meanwhile, we borrowed £23.3bn and spent £11.7bn on debt interest- in May! The whole thing is a charade. Rearranging the deck chairs on the on the Titanic.

British rail services are often held up as an example of how privatisation doesn’t work. In fact, it proves the exact opposite: the parts of the railway that were genuinely exposed to market incentives have performed much better than the parts that remained under detailed government control. British rail provides something as rare as an independent variable experiment in economics: in the early 1990s, two comparable sectors exited full state ownership but followed very different models. The "privatisation" of the British passenger rail industry was never actual privatisation. It was a transfer of legal ownership, but not of control or of full economic interest, to the private sector. Private Train Operating Companies (TOCs) were awarded heavily regulated, fixed-term franchises which gave them monopolies over their specific routes. The state continued to dictate operations and investment obligations, assume revenue risks, specify timetables and set fares, while private entities extracted strictly regulated profits. Contrast that with the rail freight sector, which was structured to be an open and competitive private market with operators taking full financial risk. Freight operates under pure open access model where any licensed private company can buy track space from the infrastructure provider and compete on any route. This lack of franchise protection has paved the way for many new private entrants over the decades. Unlike the much criticized passenger rail sector, the privatisation of rail freight has been an unmitigated success. It spurred massive private capital investment in rolling stock and reversed a decades-long decline in freight volumes. Costs have dropped as productivity has improved significantly, with rail freight now carrying 70% more goods but with 30% fewer train paths than under state control. The British rail sector tells a story of private success versus the mess of the hybrid passenger model that never was actual privatisation, but government granted monopolies to heavily regulated and subsidised franchises. Actual privatisation means not only transfer of ownership, but of control and full financial risk to the private sector. The British rail freight sector shows what can actually be achieved by proper exposure to the dynamic forces of free market incentives.

Presidents, prime ministers, even the Pope still use X. But Labour ministers seek to stigmatise it, presumably as a prelude to prohibition. Our government is terrified of a medium that destroys the MSM monopoly on information, and puts it - often messily - into the hands of all.

Civilisations rarely collapse because they are conquered. They collapse because they lose the will to defend themselves. That was James Burnham's warning in Suicide of the West. In his 1964 book, Burnham argued that the West was not primarily threatened by external enemies or economic failure. It was being destroyed from within by its own dominant ideology - what he called liberalism. In Burnham’s usage, liberalism was not simply support for free markets or limited government. It was a broader worldview characterised by universalism, egalitarianism and a deep reluctance to assert power or defend Western civilisation as superior to others. According to Burnham, this ideology had produced a profound loss of confidence. Western elites increasingly viewed their own civilisation through a lens of guilt and criticism, while treating non-Western cultures with a mixture of romanticism and moral deference. At the same time, the West’s managerial elite had become more concerned with administering decline than with preserving the cultural and political foundations that made Western success possible. Burnham was particularly scathing about the liberal tendency to dissolve hard distinctions - between truth and opinion, between civilisation and barbarism, and between friend and enemy. Without the willingness to make such distinctions and act upon them, he believed, no civilisation can long endure. What makes the book striking is its pessimism. Burnham did not believe the process was easily reversible. Once a civilisation loses the will to defend itself and begins to treat its own inheritance as a source of shame, recovery becomes extremely difficult. Suicide of the West reads like a warning that was largely ignored.

The greatest risk posed by AI may not be artificial intelligence itself; it is much more likely to be that we give politicians the power to decide who is allowed to build it, use it and benefit from it. That's the argument Marc Andreessen makes in The Techno-Optimist Manifesto - and history gives us good reason to take it seriously. Andreessen argues that technology is the primary driver of human progress and that AI represents one of the most important advances in history. Rather than treating it as an existential threat that requires state control, he sees it as a powerful tool that will expand human capability, raise living standards and solve problems that currently seem intractable. The case for heavy regulation usually rests on two claims: that AI is uniquely dangerous, and that governments are capable of guiding its development responsibly. Both are questionable. Past technologies - from electricity and automobiles to the internet and biotechnology - were also accompanied by dire warnings and calls for strict oversight. In most cases, premature regulation would have slowed or distorted progress without meaningfully reducing risk. Governments face the same knowledge problem with AI that they face with every complex, fast-moving technology. Regulators lack the information, incentives and agility to make good decisions about what should be allowed, restricted or banned. More often, regulatory systems are captured by incumbents who want to slow down competitors, or by ideological activists who are hostile to technological progress itself. The better approach is to allow innovation to proceed while holding individuals and companies accountable for actual harm under the law. Precautionary regulation based on speculative future risks tends to favour the powerful and the risk-averse at the expense of progress that benefits everyone. Andreessen’s core message is simple: the greatest danger is not that AI will advance too quickly, but that fear and political control will prevent it from advancing at all.