I came across something called the New Left Project yesterday, which published a couple of articles under the title “Political Philosophy and the Left”. The first of the articles was mostly about the old issue of equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome, suggesting that equality of opportunity was not enough. This one has been argued over for as long as I can remember. Why...

In a discussion set up by a Marxist apologist, a neo-Libertarian asked, ‘How is robbing Peter to pay Paul just because Paul is paid a pittance for the useless rubber ducks he make, considered “justice”? ‘ To answer this one, it is necessary to examine the assumptions behind this question.

It is necessary only to read or read about Marx to the point that one realises that he fails even to define his terms with adequate precision or to map them to the economic process. Having identified what is wrong with his fundamental assumptions, it really is not worth wading through hundreds of pages of his turgid text.

Edmund Conway, economics editor of The Daily Telegraph, looks at Karl Marx and Communism, in an extract from his new book – “50 Economic Ideas You Really Need To Know”. “At the heart of Marx’s theories was the labour theory of value. This idea, laid out in Das Kapital (1867), states that a commodity is worth the amount of time it takes for someone to make it. So, for...

Marx was much concerned with the notion of exploitation, which he regarded as inherent to Capitalism. But the only people who can exploit other people’s labour are landowners. They can even exploit owners of capital, properly defined. (that is one of the defects of Marx, he lumps land and capital together and calls them both capital). The situation is understandable with this parable.

Marx’s analysis of capitalism is plain wrong. Marx lumps together land and capital and calls them both “land”. A disastrous confusion. Capital is produced by labour. Land is fixed in supply and is a gift of nature (or of God but there is a widepread view just now that he doesn’t exist). Both workers and the owners of capital are both at the mercy of landowners. Which is why...

Polly Toynbee is again writing in the Guardian, saying that Labour still has a chance if it changes its ways. Too late. By the time another Labour government comes to power in Britain, she will probably be too old to care anyway. Britain and the Labour Party are going to go through the toughest of times in the next few years. Labour may not even survive as a party. Nobody knows how the financial...

Who or what is to blame for the present economic crisis? How about sloppy thinking? Such as using the phrase “Capitalist System” without being precisely clear what the terms Capital and Capitalism mean. So in a sense, we have nobody to blame but ourselves. Most supporters of the movement for land value taxation – I will call it the “Single Tax movement” as shorthand...