| What’s the ideal number of public servants for Australia? If your answer is “more than the population of South Australia” or “nearly four times the population of Tasmania”, then you probably think Australia is on the right track: |
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| Those figures are from this excellent post at the Catallaxy Files yesterday. As the author notes, they don’t include government-outsourced workers and consultants! One way to reduce the number of public servants is to cut red tape – the Trump administration’s policy of deregulation has saved taxpayers $1.3 billion this year, according to the American Action Forum. That’s double the administration’s goal for the year because, in a shock to all involved, the Obama administration had grossly underestimated the cost of regulation to Americans. “Can free markets end global poverty?” was the topic of this magnificent 1 hour 27 minute discussion between Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and William Easterly last week hosted by Reason (Spoiler alert: Yes). Also this week, a new McKinsey Global Institute report found that the best performing emerging economies are those with more competition. And Cato’s Marian Tupy wrote in CapX that the market is the real driver of better working conditions (sorry unions). These two stories pretty much sum up Europe today. Firstly, the EU is one step closer to banning memes. Secondly, the Spanish health minister was forced to step down this week over claims she plagiarised her masters thesis in – wait for it – interdisciplinary gender studies. I can’t believe Britain voted to Leave. As we told you in March, China’s social credit system is absolutely terrifying. A victim and a beneficiary (for now) of the totalitarian state’s vast network of 200 million CCTV cameras were interviewed for this chilling piece by Matthew Carney on ABC News on Tuesday. Are you a liberal cosmopolitan “Inner”, as described in Matthew Lesh’s new book Democracy in a Divided Australia? Or a suburban, traditionalist “Outer”? Take the quiz here (I’m a “Betweener”). Buy the book, published by Connor Court, here. The Brisbane launch with Senator Amanda Stoker is on 27 September, and the Melbourne launch with Senator James Paterson is on 5 October. |
Featuring Nigel Farage, Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian, and Gideon Rozner, IPA
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Article of the week:Vaclav Benda is little known in the West but the Czech dissident’s writings put him in the same league as Solzhenitsyn and Havel according to David J. Mahoney in the City Journal last week. Mahoney reviews F. Flagg Taylor IV and Barbara Day’s new volume of Benda’s works in English and says Benda “played a major role” in Communism’s collapse behind the Iron Curtain. |
IPA Staff Pick:Each week an IPA staff member shares what they have enjoyed recently. Today: James Bolt Talk about an all-star lineup! Two of the shows that Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris and Douglas Murray did on their recent tour of the UK have been released on YouTube. Click here for their show in Dublin and here for their show in London. And make sure you see this highlight clip of Jordan Peterson throwing his elbows around that’s going off on Twitter. The interview Douglas Murray gave to me and Peter for The Young IPA Podcast has over 40,000 views, watch here. |
Here’s what else the IPA said this week:
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