As odd as it may seem, Alexis Tsipras may well be the eurozone's best hope at the moment. As Greece heads towards new elections and a clear majority of the electorate is seemingly inclined to once again vote against the ‘troika’, a Greek exit from the eurozone looks an increasingly likely scenario.

In my last blog post I looked at the complexities of the UK tax system. Unfortunately, in order to make it remotely comprehensible, it was greatly simplified. There are four further potential elements to add to the picture: employers’ National Insurance contributions, indirect taxes, student loan repayments and Council Tax Benefit and Housing Benefit.

If one were to set out to design a malfunctional tax and benefits system from scratch you would probably end up with what we have in the UK. As such, the Taxpayers’ Alliance new publication “The Single Income Tax” is extremely useful.

The UK was the first European country to liberalise its electricity market. Will Britain now be the first European country to roll back the market and effectively renationalise the sector?

Adrian Beecroft’s suggestions to lift some of the burden which employment regulation places on business deserve a fuller consideration than they appear to be getting from the government. The proposals are serious, are practical rather than ideological, and have clearly benefited from expert advice.

Michael Sandel is in town at the moment to promote his book How Markets Crowd Out Morals. His article on the subject in the Boston Review is a clever piece that makes some interesting points. But, ‘what is the policy conclusion?’ one is left wondering. Perhaps that is explained in the book. 

The rate for travel insurance depends critically on where we go and what we do there. A hiking tour through the Amazon rainforest comes at a higher premium than a stay at a health spa at Lake Geneva. This is not because insurance companies dislike adventure travellers, nor do they want to dictate where or how we spend our holidays. The difference in premiums simply reflects the difference in risk. The likelihood of contracting a tropical disease, being bitten by a strange bug, or requiring helicopter transport differs between the two destinations, and consequently, so do the premiums. 

It is not austerity but the threat of insolvency that is killing peripheral economies such as Spain. Since it has become clear that the European Union is not willing to completely mutualise risks and that, as a consequence, some countries may prefer to abandon the euro rather than restructuring their private and public debt, no capital seems to be safe inside any of the candidates to default and depreciate their currencies.

 

It is heartening to know that the huge outcry concerning George Osborne’s proposal to reduce tax-relief on charitable giving has been followed by a few brave (and valid) counter-arguments.

Working out who exactly owes what to whom in the eurozone is an increasingly difficult job. Money is pouring out of Greece and now, it would appear, Spain at a rapid rate. €700m apparently left Greek banks on Monday. This seems to have taken people by surprise but, for several years, this has, in fact, been one of the most predictable parts of the euro crisis.

It might be thought that a succession of ‘tax cutting’ governments from 1979 and a government pledged to reduce inequality from 1997 would have led to a huge increase in the personal tax allowance so that we could keep more of our income without paying tax. If there was one thing on which you would expect Margaret Thatcher and the dour ‘son of the manse’ Gordon Brown to be agreed it is that the working poor should have their tax burden reduced

Surveying the political field following the local elections - where Labour made gains at the expense of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats  - Ed West confesses gloomily that ‘Being a pessimist by nature, I’m not sure it’s simply a matter of the Conservatives becoming more conservative’. Apparently the brand is not what it used to be.

There are lots of good arguments against positive discrimination, be it through female quotas for company boards, quota systems in political institutions, affirmative action or otherwise. For a start, it is difficult to find any institution that exactly replicates the demographic composition of society, and we don’t always know the exact reason why a particular group is underrepresented. 

In my last blog post, I looked at Archbishop Williams’ use of legal organ sales as an example of the degeneracy of the market economy. The fact that organ sales are not legal is a detail that seems to have escaped his attention. But, this was not the only problem in his recent article in Prospect. A number of further statements struck me as being particularly absurd.

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s latest foray into the world of political economy does him even less credit than his previous attempts. He is an intelligent man, but capable of arguments that are laden with the highest degree of sophistry. This comes not from any deliberate desire to deceive, but, I suspect, from a desire not to re-examine certain prejudices about the world of business and economics – in other words what, for most of his flock, is the practical world in which we have to live.

The ‘best endeavours’ of virtually every country in the world have conspicuously failed to control the drug supply. Instead, both the consumption and the trading of narcotics have become vastly more dangerous. As I outline below, a better course of action is available to us.

I am looking forward to the Olympics as I’m sure you are. But I’m also sure I’m not alone in wondering quite why we have needed to spend £9.3 billion (the Public Accounts Committee says over £11 billion) of public money, to use 13,500 military personnel and a selection of anti-missile weaponry to lock down London for several weeks, and to produce massive inconvenience to the general public and businesses in the capital. Most of us will be watching on TV anyway, and the experience in our living rooms will surely be little different from watching the Olympics in Beijing.

 

The ‘prevailing orthodoxy’ (or ‘the zeitgeist’) is much like a rainbow: wherever you happen to stand, it always seems to be somewhere else. The term would never be used in sentences like: ‘My own views are fully in accordance with the prevailing orthodoxy’, which sounds just as unlikely as ‘that rainbow here right next to me’.

It’s election time again in the UK, where the local elections – in particular the high-profile contest for Mayor of London – are a laboratory example of all the shortcomings of political decision-making.

House of Lords reform has become a hot button issue that risks widening divisions within the coalition. On one side we have the Liberal Democrats, who historically have considered it their raison d’etre to enact constitutional reform to democratise the British political system. On the other side are many Conservatives, who argue that democratising the Lords will lead to a weakening of the chamber’s ability to review and revise legislation.