Turning to Ed Miliband, specifically, he said in his speech: ‘I can’t be the only person here who feels disappointed that such a great company as Google, with such great founding principles, will be reduced to arguing that when it employs thousands of people in Britain, makes billions of pounds of revenue in Britain, it’s fair that it should pay just a fraction of one per cent of that in tax.’ As it happens, according to the BBC story above, it pays tax of nearly two per cent of turnover but that is beside the point. Ed Miliband made no mention of Google’s profits in the speech whatsoever. Companies pay national insurance contributions in respect of their employees – as well as income tax and employees’ national insurance which raises the cost of employment - and they pay VAT on the value added in turnover. They pay corporation tax only on profits.

The opening lines of the press conference presenting the IMF’s report on the UK economy did not bode well. The IMF’s deputy managing director David Lipton congratulated the government on its labour market reforms. Does the IMF actually know what is going on in the UK?

The government has taken a number of measures to increase the burden of the minimum wage. The list of other labour market regulations the government has brought in goes much further, and the British Chamber of Commerce has calculated that they would cost businesses £22bn in the four years to 2015.

Relative poverty measures are deeply flawed, but that does make absolute measures any better. Poverty is not absolute. Perceptions of what is a ‘necessity’ and what is merely a convenience change over time. Our great-grandparents would not have considered a washing machine, central heating or an indoor bathroom to be necessities. To us, they are necessities, and this is simply because we live in societies where virtually every household has these items.

A curious thing has been happening with regard to retirement patterns in developed countries: we have been living longer and retiring earlier. Between 1968 and 1999, employment amongst 60-64 year old men fell from 80 per cent to 50 per cent – although it has picked up a little since. In Italy, an incredible 80 per cent of 60-64 year olds are not in employment. This has all happened during a period when life expectation has increased dramatically. In many EU countries, a significant number of people could well spend more time in retirement than working.

Since World War II, retirement has gone from a fringe to a mass phenomenon in western countries. Many people long for the day when they don’t have to toil away and instead enjoy uninterrupted leisure. No more job stress, no more problems. Who could argue against that dream? However, it is also suggested that people need to work longer to ensure sustainable pension systems. Won’t this have the effect of reducing health among the elderly?

The Pope's reaction is typical of people who have not understood the reality of the situation in Bangladesh and other extremely poor countries. Yes, of course it is shocking to those of us who come from relatively prosperous countries - and even most countries in South America are prosperous compared to Bangladesh - to hear of people being paid so very little. It appals us. He says it is not ‘fair’. But he does not appear to have thought about why it has come about in Bangladesh, when no such low wages exist in Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, America, Germany and so on. Nor does he prescribe any solution.

The new law certainly has its detractors. But are they just worry-worts and naysayers? After all, certainly some reform was necessary, and with the individual mandate left unsullied by the Supreme Court, ostensibly more Americans than ever before will have health insurance. Opponents and critics are routinely derogated as callously heedless of the plight of the poor and uncovered. We might stop to consider, then, who is actually helped and hurt by Obamacare. The truths unveiled may surprise those who see the federal government as the benevolent guardian of the needy and of ‘the greater good’.

It may sound incredible given the current political debate, but the UK government now spends more as a percentage of GDP on childcare than all European countries except Denmark. Yet the direct costs to parents continue to rise inexorably. Nick Clegg’s opposition to the reform of adult-child ratio limits demonstrates the difficulties in reaching agreement on the contentious area of childcare and pre-school education. Once largely left to families and a small market sector, childcare is increasingly a political issue

If major roads were privately owned and freed of government regulation, the setting of speed limits would be a commercial decision. Entrepreneurs would seek to attract customers to their routes in order to maximise toll revenues, and one way of doing so would be to offer fast journey times by allowing high speeds.

Perhaps we would have been better off without a Queen’s speech at all. Parliament could go on holiday for a year. However, if we are to have government impose contingent liabilities on the next generation, how about some deferred tax cuts – for example, legislation to index all tax thresholds to the higher of RPI increases and wage increases to prevent the bracket creep that this government has used to increase its tax revenues? How about more planning reform and profit-making free schools? And how about time-limiting benefits and the imposition of work and training requirements for all those in receipt of benefits who do not have a reasonable contribution record? In addition, a really imaginative government would not be increasing state pensions and abolishing contracting out of state pensions and into private pensions (thus abolishing the most successful post-war pension privatisation in Europe with which even the extreme left of the Labour Party were content) but would be extending opportunities to promote private pension provision in place of state provision and thus reduce the fiscal burden on future generations.

There are a number of theories about why government spending in developed countries has such a persistent upward tendency, only coming to a halt once the public has been so thoroughly milked that for most types of taxes, the peak of the Laffer curve comes within sight. But the most plausible ‘Occam’s razor’ style explanation is the fiscal illusion effect: the benefits of Big Government are tangible and concentrated; the costs are obscure and dispersed.

In the wake of Mrs. Thatcher’s death, there has been much discussion about her economic record and her political achievements. However, one of the more annoying points that people try to score against Mrs. Thatcher relates to her famous ‘there is no such thing as society’ quote. Perhaps it is fair enough for other politicians to use this quotation to try to score political points. It may be cheap, and it may retard rather than advance political debate, but the cut and thrust of political discourse is not always entirely fair. However, the statement is frequently used against her by religious clergy, intellectual journalists and academics in a way which is deeply unfair and uncharitable and which reflects badly on Mrs. Thatcher’s critics.

Nobody quite remembers when and why this law originally came to pass, but at some point in the distant past, the government of Analogistan introduced a nationwide statutory limit on the amount of bread that could be baked per year. For a long time, nobody really noticed. Annual bread production never came too close to the limit anyway, so the constraint remained largely theoretical. About three decades ago, however, a combination of population growth and a change in dietary habits led to a surge in bread demand. Since then, bread prices have exploded, turning bread into a luxury good. Views about what should be done about it remain divided. Our correspondent reports.

In 2008 the United Kingdom's Treasury department, writing about the potential 'benefits' of Solvency II, said: "Solvency II is based on a three-pillar approach used in the Basel II banking accord." This was at the height of the banking crisis and came without any apparent recognition of the failure of regulation in that crisis. This is hardly the best recommendation for Solvency II.

Universal credit will help those who are able and willing to work, but who are currently trapped in the net of the welfare bureaucracy. Yet other flaws remain unresolved, or are even worsened. Work incentives at the margin will remain feeble, for instance. The combination of income tax, national insurance and the withdrawal of universal credit will create an implicit marginal tax rate of 76 per cent – well above the top marginal income tax rate. The groups with the weakest attachment to the labour market will continue to face the weakest work incentives.

In Scotland, unlike England, there was no officially chartered bank with public responsibility for the currency and a possible lender of last resort role. Instead you had free banking where the circulating medium consisted mainly of paper notes issued by private banks. One bank, the Bank of Scotland, had held a monopoly on note issue from its chartering in 1695 but this lapsed with its charter in 1716.  Initially there were just two banks, the Bank of Scotland and Royal Bank of Scotland but the number grew rapidly. By 1750 there were 14 firms, the number rose to 23 by 1765 and 32 in 1769.  Not all of these issued notes but a large number did. The notes were exchanged between banks through a clearing system and were convertible on demand (although until 1765 there was the additional option of fixed term delayed conversion with interest). In the entire history of the system there were only two failures due to overissuing of notes or credit – in marked contrast to the fragility of the English country banking system of the same period. There was also sustained competition and innovation with a move after 1810 to an extensive branching system (again unlike England).

Of course, more regulation is just what the British economy needs. In particular, we need more regulation of those very small businesses that are struggling to get access to finance. Those routes to finance that they do have need restricting. At least that is what Vince Cable seems to think. Hot on the heels of last week’s announcement of stricter inspections for nurseries, publicans are next in the government’s firing line.

Deficit financing, on the other hand, creates money to spend without first bothering to produce the goods and services the money is supposed to represent. Since this fake money is identical to the real thing, its existence first dilutes the value of money. And then, secondly, because this money is always spent by governments in the first instance, the pattern of production is changed from what the market prefers to what the government prefers, which inevitably lowers the productivity of the economy. Debt, deficits and slow growth are therefore inevitable.

The current gambling bogeyman is the ‘fixed-odds betting terminal' (FOBT), a device that offers virtual casino games in licensed betting shops. These machines are routinely dubbed ‘the crack cocaine of gambling’ and it is claimed that players can lose £18,000 in an hour. They are blamed for a rise in problem gambling and it is said that Britons spend £42 billion on the machines every year. It is also claimed that betting shops have proliferated as they scramble to cash in on the popularity of the machines.

Today the Treasury has released a report on the potential currency arrangements for an independent Scotland. Here, I will leave aside the issues of who ‘owns’ the Bank of England and who owns the ‘rights’ to produce the pound sterling. I will also assume that existing currency arrangements will continue in relation to banking regulation, the functions of the central bank and so on. However, for the record, I fail to see why Scotland could vote to be independent of the UK and then choose to take with it ‘its share’ of the Bank of England (though some readers might feel that Scotland is welcome to all of this institution founded, in fact, by a Scot).